Barbara Hoster
Translated by Anna Clart
In the first half of the 20th century, Franz Xaver Biallas was an important figure in the Society of the Divine Word’s China mission. By founding the Chinese studies journal Monumenta Serica, which celebrated its 90th anniversary in 2025, he made a lasting contribution to research into Chinese culture. This article gives an outline of Fr. Biallas’s life and follows the traces he left behind in the histories of both the S.V.D. and Sinology itself.
This well-known portrait photograph of Biallas was taken in Peking, around 1933. By then, Biallas was already in his mid-fifties and teaching as a professor at Fu Jen Catholic University. His clothing – a traditional Chinese robe (changpao 長袍) combined with a Roman collar – shows him as both a scholar and a priest. With a ballpoint or fountain pen clipped to the diagonally cut edge of his robe and a briefcase tucked under his arm, Father Biallas presents himself as a self-assured, energetic man in his prime. His look is a little sceptical, giving the camera only the hint of a smile. The shot shows him in his life’s most fruitful phase, judged both personally and academically – yet the path there had been a long and difficult one.
Franz Xaver Biallas was born on 15 November 1878 in the Silesian village of Schwirz (today’s Świerczów) in the diocese of Breslau. He was the tenth of twelve children in a Catholic farming family. Silesia was then a province of the German Empire, its population a mix of Polish- and German-speakers. Biallas’s family spoke German, and little Franz learned Polish out in his village. This bilingualism doubtlessly proved a good foundation for his later fluent grasp of various foreign languages. Franz grew up in poor circumstances, and his pious parents raised him in the Catholic faith. At the Catholic primary school in Schwirz that he attended for eight years, Franz came into contact with Catholic journals filled with popular depictions of the adventurous lives of missionaries in faraway lands. This was firmly in line with the Zeitgeist: a great enthusiasm for spreading Christianity among the so-called heathens had swept 19th-century Europe and the USA. Over the course of this missionary movement, numerous orders and missionary societies were founded. Among them was the Society of the Divine Word (Societas Verbi Divini, S.V.D. for short), called to life in 1875, three years before Franz Xaver Biallas’s birth, in the Dutch village of Steyl by the diocesan priest Arnold Janssen. In honour of the Society’s founding location, its members are also called “Steyl missionaries” in German-speaking countries. The printed word played a large role in their missionary work, through the publication of missionary journals like Steyler Missionsbote and Kleiner Herz-Jesu-Bote.
[more…]
