1941 - Bruno Zanella

November 19, 1941

Dingcunji, Henan

Bruno Zanella.

Bruno Zanella, who has also been named in mission accounts as Bruno Zanelli or Tawny Zanella, was born on August 27, 1909 at Vicenza, Italy. The Zanella family faced great hardship during World War I, and had to relocate on several occasions. In March 1919 Zanella’s father died from war wounds. In 1923, when he was 14, Zanella came into contact with a Catholic missionary society, and he joined the local seminary as one of its first students. Because his school attendance had been spasmodic during the war years, Zanella struggled at the seminary. God helped him over the years to such an extent that he became the best theology student in the school, and in 1933 he took up a position at the seminary as an assistant teacher.

On September 21, 1935, Bruno Zanella was ordained a priest at Milan. The following year he joined the Pontifical Institute for Foreign Missions (PIME) and travelled to Kaifeng in Henan Province, China. His long boat journey took him via Egypt and other ports in the Middle East, India, and Ceylon (now Sri Lanka). He wrote detailed reports of each place and the innocence at which he marvelled at the sights and sounds revealed a young man with a zest for life. Zanella’s first experience of China is a humorous one. When his boat docked at Shanghai,

“The customs official, worried about drugs entering the country, searched every foreigner, and discovered suspicious envelopes in Zanella’s luggage. He insisted on tasting the contents. When he did so, however, he found that it was simply the powdered laxative which he always carried with him.”[1]

In Kaifeng, Zanella spent the first year studying Chinese along with other new missionaries. He often expressed his frustration at his lack of progress in letters to his mother. To him, the Chinese language seemed an insurmountable mountain and he dreaded the possibility that he may never speak it fluently enough to share the gospel with people. In time, however, he experienced a breakthrough. In 1938 Zanella was stationed at Zhongmou, a town about 37 miles (60 km) southwest of Kaifeng. The tension between the local Chinese and the Japanese was overwhelming at the time, so the mission thought it better to send Zanella to Yejigang, a small town near the border with Shandong Province.

Over the years Bruno Zanella preached the gospel and served everyone in need, including Japanese soldiers. This link between him and the hated Japanese was to later bring him much pain. He also travelled widely to different Catholic communities, encouraging and teaching the believers. One of those communities was the village of Dingcunji. On November 19, 1941, Zanella was one of three priests arrested by a group of 16 hostile soldiers. Bishop Barosi and Zanella were tied up. Eyewitnesses later testified that “Zanella was forced to drink boiling oil and water poured out from large containers. He may have died then, or afterward when his body was thrown into a well. No witnesses saw what happened to the other three.”[2]