Alfredo Cremonesi (15 May 1902 – 7 February 1953) was an Italian Roman Catholic priest of the Pontifical Institute for Foreign Missions.
He pledged that he would never return to the Italian mainland and spent the remainder of his life working with the Burmese people in mountain villages despite the great difficulties he faced.
[4] The Burmese independence reached in 1948 prompted guerrilla conflict which caused great unrest and destruction to the point that Cremonesi and other missionaries were forced into exile so as to remain safe.
His brother Ernesto was also a devoted Christian whom the Nazis arrested and jailed in a concentration camp where he would die in 1945 before the European Theatre conflict ended.
[1] His frail health since childhood led to people concluding that he would never be able to enter the missions since it would be improbable that he would be cured of his persistent ailments.
[1] But he defied the odds (and the expectation of doctors who thought he would die in a few months) and overcame his disease with Cremonesi attributing his healing to Thérèse of Lisieux.
bishop Giovanni Menicatti in the San Francesco Saverio church) and then in June 1925 learned that his dream to enter the missions was to take place for he would be sent to the then-Burma.
But before being sent to the missions he was put in charge of teaching the Italian language in the Seminario Minore di San Ilario in Nervi in Genoa.
Cremonesi celebrated his last Mass before leaving in Crema in the Santuario della Madonna delle Grazie on 4 October 1925.
The outbreak of World War II saw the British-run Burma enter the conflict to the detriment of Italian missionaries who soon found themselves as enemies due to Benito Mussolini declaring his alliance with the Axis powers.
[5] Cremonesi wrote of the trials he endured during the war in a letter dated on 20 February 1946; he refers to his lack of food and clothing (limited to what he had on) and noting that villages were devoid of people with marketplaces being abandoned.
In the final month of the war a Japanese officer took him and tied him up for the night before allowing him to leave in the morning where he took refuge in the woods.
But Burmese independence from the British Empire in 1948 prompted conflict once the Karen people rebelled and started to resort to use guerilla tactics against the new government.
In August 1950 the rebels attacked the village prompting both Cremonesi and the inhabitants to flee into the forest before he took refuge close o the mission in Taungngu.
His death was announced in Crema in the diocesan paper "Il nuovo Torrazzo" on 14 February 1953 in a piece entitled "Abbiamo un martire".