China's religious purge

BY A SPECIAL CORRESPONDENT MISSIONARY work in China has been outlawed now for almost 20 years.
Since Communism took over in 1949 more than 5,000 foreign missionaries have been expelled. Only 10 per cent were American. The 1947 missionary ranks of 5,496 fell to 723 by 1952 and 86 by 1954. Three years later only 23 were left. Bishop Walsh was the last. Five Chinese bishops died in prison and nine others were still alive in prisons in 1964. More than 1,300 native Chinese clergy have disappeared into prisons, labour camps and general dispersion away from the people they once served — some 3300,000 Catholic Chinese in 1949, when the national population was about 461 million. It is now estimated at 790 million.
A few churches remain open for show in Peking and Shanghai, like museum pieces, but a British diplomat and China veteran who passed through in 1968 observed: "Only the last vestiges of religious life still exist." The Red Guard rampages of 1966, the so-called "cultural revolution" that made constant headlines outside of China, included religions generally — Moslem and Confuscian as well as Christian — as objects for terrorisation.
Bishop Walsh was among the last major Church figures removed from any influence and authority in China, when he was sentenced and imprisoned in 1960.
Triple autonomy
programme Ten years earlier a "Triple Autonomy" programme was started by the Communists, urging upon Chinese Catholics the "three independences" of self-rule detachment from Rome, self-support, and self-continuity without missionaries. The 1950 programme was followed by the expulsion in 1951 of the Apostolic Internuncio, Archbishop Antonio Riberi.
The Peking Government in July 1957 started a "Patriotic Association of Chinese Catholics," which few priests and laity joined and which was subsequently condemned by both Pope Pius and Pope John, along with the unrecognised elec
tions of at least 51 bishops to a schismatic Chinese Catholicism, The country's first known contact with Christianity was in the year 635, when a Nestorian monk from the Middle East settled there.
A marble slab put up in 781 at Sianfu recorded the event with this inscription: "Monument commemorating the introduction and propagation of the noble law of Ta Ts'in in the Middle Kingdom." It listed 70 Western missionaries and told the main points of Church doctrine in 1,878 Chinese characters.
Even before Marco Polo made his famous journeys to the Orient (1275-1292), Pope Innocent IV sent a Franciscan in 1245 as his legate to the Mongol Khan. The great Kublai Khan sent a letter westward in 1269 asking for 100 missionaries. Historians have concluded, however, that few native Chinese were converted up to the 14th century. The real thrust of Christian missionary activity began in the 16th century, when Jesuits began learning Chinese language, culture customs and mentality and gained the respect of Chinese intellectuals Franciscan and Dominicans flourished there in mission work in the 17th century. More than 400 years before Pope John's 1962-65 Vatican Council opened the way to an updated liturgy using vernacular language, Pope Paul V gave permission in 1615 for priests in China to wear the native "chi-chin" headpiece at the altar and to say Mass in Chinese. Little could be done, however, because no Chinese translations of the Bible and sacred texts were available — and when later they were, the Vatican Congregation for Propagation of the Faith refused permission. Well into the 20th century, the Congregation concluded that veneration of Confucius, ceremonies honouring dead ancestors and other practices were civic and social customs that Catholics in China could follow. The number of Chinese priests reached 400 in 1900 and their ranks grew to 1,369 by 1929. Pope Pius XI consecrated six Chinese bishops in 1926. The late Cardinal Thomas Tien kensin became the first Chinese cardinal in 1946.