China's state church adopts new liturgy

CHINA'S own state approved version of the Catholic church may be on the way to liturgical reform, according to reports from an American nun recently returned from a tour of dioceses in the country.
Speaking last week to UCA News, an Asian church news agency based in Hong Kong, Sr Janet Carroll claimed that a bishop in centra2 China was taking part in an "informal" review of the form and language of the church's service being conducted by the hierarchy. Until now the church, which shuns the authority of the Pope and is controlled by the Catholic Patriotic Association, an organ of t,,e communist party, has made no concessions to the liturgical changes enacted by the second Vatican Council.
Sr Janet, the executive director of the US Catholic China Bureau, said that the bishop concerned had told her three ideas for change were being considered. The present pre-Vatican II rites could be maintained as they were, liturgical models from other parts of south-east Asia could be adopted or the existing form could be modified to make it "authentically indigenous" to China, she said.
No decision had been made as to when any changes to the liturgy might be discussed by Chinese Catholic Bishops' College, which represents the state approved church, Sr Janet stressed. But the need for an updated liturgy was widely felt by the official church in China, and had &ready led to a new Chinese language translation of the Tridentine mass being circulated to the bishops of southern China for consultation.
The new translation attempted to convert the tenor of the Tridentine rite into proper Chinese, a church worker who asked not to be identified remarked. The older translation had, he added, succeeded only in creating an artificial mass — the result of injecting the sound of Latin into Chinese.
But whilst the church of the Catholic Patriotic Association treads tentatively towards a remodelling of its liturgy, China's unofficial Catholic church, which looks to the Pope as its head, still suffers from a campaign of persecution launched against it by a Chinese government fearful of dissent.
Only this week Amnesty International, the organisation monitoring human rights abuse, released a report listing 41 Catholic bishops, priests and lay people belonging to the unofficial church believed imprisoned for "the peaceful exercise of their right to freedom of religion".
Amnesty. claims that 26 of those named in the document were arrested in recent months as part of "an apparent new crackdown on Catholics of the 'underground' church who remain loyal to the Vatican and carry out religious activities independently of the government-recognised. church".
The organisation urges the communist government in Beijing to make the whereabouts of the clerics known, and release those not charged with "recognisably criminal offences" as a matter of urgency. But it also cities an official of the Chinese Religious Affairs Bureau as saying it is illegal for the priests concerned to express loyalty to the Vatican and that they "should abide by state laws".