FALSE REPORTS EXPLAINED

Wrong Views on Church in China
FR. Harold Rigney, S.V.D., the Rector of Fu Jen Catholic University of Peking until imprisoned in 1951, told me this week how deeply he felt the false reports about the abatement of persecution in China which have become so current and how dangerous these are.
Er. Rigney, who is a Divine
Word Missionary, was himself expelled from China in 1955 and he now lives in Liverpool.
"There is no persecution of the Church in China," "Catholic priests have been arrested in China, but they were guilty, having broken the laws of China "—Such statements, Fr. Rigney told me, are made by Westerners who have made short visits of only a few weeks to Communist China with all their expenses paid. IL is little wonder that many of them, especially those who did not know any Chinese, gather a superficial and often incorrect view of certain aspects of life in China and are ready to publish them.
In Prison
Recently there has appeared in the public press, he said, extracts from a book Mr. R. J. Minney wrote after he along with Mr. Lennox Robinson, the Irish playwright, had been invited to China to take part in the celebrations of the centenary of the birth of Bernard Shaw.
"I spent about 10 years in China," Fr. Rigney said: "Of these, about seven years were spent behind the Iron Curtain under the rule of the Red Chinese Govern ment. During this time I spew four years and two months in the Communist prisons of Peking.
"After Chinese Communists conquered Continental China and started persecuting the Church on a national scale, Catholic schools, hospitals and orphanages were taken over one by one.
Government
"Foreign missionaries were imprisoned, expelled or obliged in one way or another to leave China. Around the end of 1950 and the beginning of '51 when the programme of the Reds—the taking over of all the eduational and charitable institutes of the Church —was nearly completed they attempted to take over the government of the Church "In pursuing this policy," added Fr. Rigney, " so-called Church Reform Committees were set up by the Chinese Communists in all the arch-dioceses, dioceses and missions of Red China.
"The Church Reform Committee of Peking was set up before I was arrested. It consisted of cardcarrying Communists, fallen-away, excommunicated Catholics and one or the other Chinese priests forced to sit On the Committee to give it the false appearance of genuineness.
"This Committee was not under the control of the Catholic Church in arty sense of the word, but completely under the Communist Party of China. It closed churches in Peking that refused to come under its control. It imprisoned leading Catholic priests and laymen who refused to submit to it.
" I have known several Westerners who attended Mass in the Pei Tang and came out of China reporting that they had attended Mass in the Catholic Cathedral and saw no evidence of the persecution of the Catholic Church. Such people may well be deceived, but in fact they are simply not reporting the actual conditions of the Church in China."
Three months
It is important that Catholics should know these facts so as to be able to answer the increasing number of false reports, often put out in good faith, Er. Rigney concluded.
It is the opinion of Fr. Rigney shared by many Westerners, that Westerners should not visit China with a view of reporting their observations unless they spend at least three months and are free to go where they want.