Treated as criminal even after death

COMMUNIST police have disinterred the body of Mgr. Cyril Rudolph Jarre, Archbishop of Tsinan, who died in China recently, and have stripped it of its vest ments in order to rebury him as a "criminal."
The full story of the scenes after the Archbishop's death in Tsinan on March 8 has just reached Hong Kong and has been told by the Sunday Examiner, the Colony's Catholic weekly.
Mgr. Jarre. who was 76 and had been in China since 1905, died a month after he was removed to hospital from a Communist gaol where he had been held for eight months.
A Requiem Mass on the Sunday following his death attracted such large crowds that the Communist police had to disperse them by force " But the crowds would not leave after the Mass," said the paper. "They filed past the body, snipping off pieces of the Archbishop's beard for momentos, kissing his hands and feet and laying rosaries and pious objects on his body."
Then the police insisted on burying the body immediately, instead of waiting until the following Tuesday night, as had been planned. The burial was completed that same night. Almost at once, orders arrived to disinter the body. Police then stripped the body and tried to reclothe it in prisoner's uniform.
But violent protests from local Catholics forced them to abandon this plan. Finally, the Archbishop's body was clothed in white vestments and the police also agreed to permit its re-interment at a full funeral service on the following Tuesday. Catholics came from far and wide to attend the service.
Mgr. Jane, who was a native of Ahrweiler, Germany, had been in prison charged with opposition to the church "independence" movement which the Communists have tried to sponsor among Catholics.