1953 - Joseph Seng

January 10, 1953

Prison, Shanghai

Joseph Seng.

Joseph Seng was a well-known personality in Shanghai at the time of the Communist takeover. He came from a Chinese family that had been devout Catholics for several generations, but he had come to be nicknamed the Irish Chinaman because he had been trained by Irish Columban priests in the Hanyang Diocese. After working alongside Bishop Walsh and others for many years, and after twice visiting Ireland, Joseph Seng acquired a broad Irish accent, much to the amusement of foreigners who met him. Seng was described as “a jolly priest who had studied in Rome and Dublin and spoke English with a rich Irish brogue. He pronounced his own name ‘Sin’ and one of his favourite jokes was to introduce himself as ‘Father Mortal Sin’.[1]

Joseph Seng was ordained at Rome in 1942, after completing a degree in canon law and theology. After returning to China, he assumed the leadership of the Catholic Action organization, and was the editor of the Chinese Ecclesiastical Review, a periodical published by the Central Catholic Bureau in Shanghai. He was also second in charge of the Legion of Mary—the most fervent and evangelistic-minded of all Catholic organizations in China at the time, and consequently, the most hated and brutally persecuted by the Communists.

The police made an unexpected raid on the Catholic Bureau on September 7, 1951, arresting Seng and four foreign missionaries (Bishop Quint, Prevost, Legrand and MacGrath) and a Chinese priest name Chen. The extent of the inhumane treatment suffered by these men will only be revealed in heaven, but at the time of his arrest, Joseph Seng was “in perfect health, but after 16 months imprisonment, he was reduced to a skeleton, and had contracted the severe pleurisy which was eventually to cause his death.”[2] The once “jolly priest” had been “thrust into a cell where the floor was constantly flooded with running water.”[3]

A missionary named Billot briefly saw Joseph Seng in prison and tried to offer the dying priest some words of encouragement. Seng replied, “There are six of us here: all martyrs in the cause of Christ.” A short time later in terrible agony, he “extended his arms in the shape of a cross, and expired. It was January 10, 1953.”[4]

1. Kerrison, Bishop Walsh of Maryknoll, 22.
2. Monsterleet, Martyrs in China, 65.
3. Kerrison, Bishop Walsh of Maryknoll, 22.
4. Monsterleet, Martyrs in China, 65-66.