1974 - Valeriano Fraccaro

September 28, 1974

Shaanxi

Valeriano Fraccaro.

Hong Kong was a place living under great tension during the early 1970s. The Cultural Revolution was raging throughout China, and hundreds of thousands of people sought refuge in Hong Kong. The British regiments whose job it was to protect the borders of Hong Kong found their job almost impossible to achieve due to the long and porous nature of the land border, and the thousands of square miles of the South China Sea surrounding the colony. Many people believed China would invade Hong Kong to take back what they believed to be rightfully theirs. For years this uneasy tension existed for the inhabitants of the British Crown Colony.

Valeriano Fraccaro was born in Italy on March 15, 1913. When he was 24, he arrived in Hanzhong, Shaanxi Province, to commence his missionary career with the Pontifical Institute for Foreign Missions (PIME). All of Fraccaro’s luggage was detained by the Chinese customs. Due to the onset of the war, it was held for eight years until he was finally able to get it out in 1945. The always-humorous Italian lamented, “And by then, of course, I didn’t need it.”[1]

When the Japanese army arrived in Hanzhong, Fraccaro was arrested and detained in a concentration camp. By 1949 the Japanese had left, but the Communists came to power and arrested the missionary, condemning him to prison. A kind judge commuted the sentence to house arrest. In 1951 the Italian was branded a ‘counter-revolutionary’ and expelled from China. Instead of fleeing back to Italy he made his way to Hong Kong in the hope of one day returning to China.

Fraccaro was a much-loved extrovert. His mission covered a total of 37 villages. Whenever his jovial figure swinging his large umbrella entered a village gate the children would run to meet him. He never owned a car in his life, and never learned to drive. He travelled widely throughout Hong Kong, encouraging believers and preaching the gospel to the unsaved. An old Chinese woman recalled when she first saw the priest:

“That day I saw a short, pudgy man who, as soon as he got off the boat, opened his umbrella against the sun, and started with sure steps, almost running, toward the village. In a moment, he saw me at the door of my house. ‘Grandma,’ he called out to me, ‘I’m the new priest!’ I liked the way he called me grandma (from that time on, it was the only way he addressed me), and his smile gave me confidence. I offered him tea and two fresh eggs, which he drank and ate immediately without ceremony.”[2]

A young teacher later provided the following recollection of Fraccaro:

“He was always smiling. He was funny looking, with his old-fashioned glasses always sliding down his nose. The one thing that immediately attracted me to him was his beautiful smile. At the beginning, he seemed like a naïve child, unaware of any problems; but living close to him I began to see his deep awareness of reality, and his ability to discuss things and get to the root of the matter. One indisputable fact is that he was loved by all: old people, children, teenagers.”[3]

In the 1970s, Hong Kong experienced economic hardship due to the large number of refugees entering the colony each year. Unemployment and crime were rampant. Teenage gangs attacked villages, looting and murdering. Even the little outlying fishing village of Cairn, where Fraccaro was based, suffered. On September 28, 1974, a murderer entered the missionary’s house through the kitchen door. Francesco Frontini, a young 27-year-old missionary who had arrived in Hong Kong a few months earlier, recounted what happened:

“Whenever Fr. Fraccaro is at the house there are always people coming and going: Christians, atheists, even Maoists. He was truly a friend of all. That evening, too, he had many visitors, up until ten or eleven o’clock. I came back at midnight and found him in his room. He was stripped, lying on the floor in a pool of blood, with a towel draped over his face. He had been killed with a small axe, the type that is present in all Chinese kitchens to cut meat.”[4]

The Hong Kong authorities were never able to find the killer.

1. Zambon, Crimson Seeds, 113.
2. Zambon, Crimson Seeds, 115.
3. Zambon, Crimson Seeds, 116.
4. Zambon, Crimson Seeds, 112-113.