(Death, Heaven, Purgatory, Hell)
Rite of Christian Initiation for Adults
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Catholics in China: Back to the Underground
Patrick E. Tyler
Reprint from the New York Times - January 26, 1997 Front Page
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YUJIA, China - It was
the day before Easter 1995, and they came by bicycle and horse cart and on foot,
thousands of Roman Catholics from the underground church, and they climbed up
into the pine forest on what is called Yujia Mountain, though it is scarcely a
hill.
There, they chased away
several troops who had never intruded in their place of worship before and who
insisted that they were conducting training exercises essential to the national
defense.
Then, the Catholics,
more than 10,000 of them, began to pray. They filled the pine forest here with
their song. The leaders set up a platform from which they read out the
Scriptures, and the people danced and reveled in their community all the way up
to the potent spiritual moment of the Easter sunrise.
Today, the leaders are
in jail, charged with interfering with the military training exercise. Others
are on the run. And a visit to this onetime hotbed of religious fervor is a
somber thing.
Over the last two
years, Yujia and dozens of other centers of underground religious activity in
China have been the target of a crackdown by the Communist Party authorities,
who see religion as a vehicle for political organization, dissent or outright
opposition to the party's rule.
The harsh treatment of
Catholics in China dates to the 1950's, when Mao Zedong's Communists expelled
the last papal representative and set up the Catholic Patriotic Association, an
official church under Communist control that was more a tool of persecution than
propagation. Driven underground, the underground, the unofficial Catholic Church
received a broad mandate from the Vatican to persevere as best it could by
ordaining its own bishops and adapting the liturgy to local conditions. When
China emerged from the Maoist period, some churches reopened and religious
toleration expanded during the 1980's with Beijing seeking to lure more
religious believers into the Government-supervised religious organizations. But
without a reconciliation with the Vatican, millions of Catholics remain
underground, where some local governments have tolerated them. Still, they are
subject to periodic assaults ordered by central authorities.
The first clues that
repression hangs as heavy as the winter haze over this remote village in Jiangxi
province, in southern China, are the wall slogans that the police have painted
in recent weeks:
"Catholics
are not allowed to engage in illegal propagation activities."
"Catholics
are not allowed to go to other areas and establish networks."
"Get
rid of all illegal religious gatherings and activities."
To enter this village
as a stranger is to set off alarm bells. The villagers know that strangers have
been sent to live here as spies against their neighbors, and to report to the
Public Security police station a mile away any violation of the harsh rules that
have been laid down.
"The Government is
afraid that if we practice our religion, that this will be harmful to security,"
Zou Chunxiang, 56, said as her neighbors and a few stray chickens crowded around
her on the dirt floor of her unheated house. "The Government is afraid we will
conspire with foreign countries and overthrow the state."
Some of her neighbors
giggle at such a prospect, but Ms Zou is silent because all of the men in her
family are either in jail or on the run for practicing their faith.
The new wave of
religious repression in China seems in largest measure the product of President
Jiang Zemin's policy to shore up the "socialist spiritual civilization" of a
population that pays as little attention as it can to central authority.
Beginning in 1994, Mr.
Jiang began to preach to the party faithful that "social stability" is of
paramount importance to the party's survival and therefore must be preserved at
all costs, even if that means slowing the pace of Deng Xiaoping's economic
reforms, re-imposing price controls when they are needed and crushing political
and religious groups whose activities could serve a vehicle to challenge the
Government's legitimacy.
To bend religion to the
interests of the state, Communist Party strategists have devised plans to ban
house churches, arrest religious leaders, register church members, and use
military means if necessary to block their unregistered gathering places.
The most recent phase
of the crackdown began here in November, when the police started arresting
underground organizers to prevent them from holding a Christmas celebration on
this modest mountain, which is at the end of a 20-mile dirt road from Chongren,
the nearest county seat. Up until 1995, Catholics from all parts of Jiangxi
traveled here four times a year to pray.
The Cardinal Kung
Foundation in Stamford, Conn, an advocacy group named for the Chinese prelate
Ignatius Cardinal Kung, whose Chinese name is Gong Pinmei and who spent 32 years
in prison before his release in 1988, estimates that 80 people were detained in
this area.
A copy of an action
plan to "destroy the organization of the Catholic underground forces" around
Yujia was obtained by local Catholics and smuggled out of China. It was
published by the foundation this month.
Local Catholics said
recently that many of their number were still in detention and that those
released had been forced to pay stiff fines to the police, equal to half a
year's income.
"Every Sunday in the
village, we used to gather in one house to pray, but now we can's even do that,"
said the 26-year-old farmer in Yujia. He has built an altar of tile and brick in
his home and adorned it with renderings of the Last Supper, the Crucifixion and
the Ascension.
The great religious
revival that began sweeping china two decades ago is coming under greater
assault as a new generation of Communist Party leaders in Beijing fear the
growth of its moral and spiritual power as the official creed of
Marxism-Leninism declines.
"Nobody believes in
Communism as a transcendent, quasi-religious ideology anymore," said Richard
Madsen, a sociologist at the University of California at San Diego who has
completed a study of the underground Catholic Church in China.
"In the past," he said,
"many people did believe, and it motivated them to hard work and sometimes great
self-sacrifice that gave a kind of moral legitimacy to the Communist state
because it was a moral project to build the state - a religious project
ultimately."
Now, he added, there is
a "loss of meaning" and a "spiritual vacuum" for millions of Chinese who are
turning to religion.
"In the past," he said,
"many people did believe, and it motivated them to hard work and sometimes great
self-sacrifice that gave a kind of moral legitimacy to the Communist state
because it was a moral project to build the state - a religious project
ultimately." ."
By some estimates, more
people have joined Christian groups in recent years than have joined the
Communist Party. Today, there are about 53 million party members, but a February
1996 internal Communist party document estimated that there were perhaps 70
million religious believers in China.
When the Communists
took power in 1949, there were only one million Protestants in the country.
Today there are an estimated 20 million, though the publicly acknowledged figure
remains at 6.5 million.
Government statistics
say there are four million Catholics in China, but church organizations and
Western academics say 8 million to 10 million is a more reliable estimate.
Whatever the number, it
is growing, as is the threat that Communist Party leaders perceive.
"I think there is a
paranoia about the role the church played in Eastern Europe," said Mickey
Spiegel, a research associate at Human Rights Watch in New York, referring to
the support that the Catholic Church gave to the collapse of Communism in Poland
and elsewhere.
Last spring, thousands
of paramilitary police supported by armored car units and helicopters swept into
the tiny enclave of Donglu in Hebei Province and destroyed a Marian shrine to
which more that 100,000 underground Catholics had made pilgrimages the previous
year.
The soldiers destroyed
the shrine, they confiscated the statue of the Blessed Virgin Mary, and they
arrested two bishops," said Joseph Kung, president of the Kung Foundation and a
nephew of the Cardinal.
Among those arrested
was Bishop Su Zhimin, of Baoding, who joins Bishops Thomas Zeng Jingmu, 75,
Bishop Joannes Han Dingsiang and the Rev. Charles Guo in jail or labor camps.
The Chinese authorities
have tried to keep foreign journalists from covering the current crackdown. A
correspondent for The Washington Post was detained in 1995 from traveling to
Donglu to witness an outdoor Mass for 10,000. He was later released.
This month the local
police briefly detained this correspondent during a visit to Yujia, and
confiscated all notes of interviews and a roll of film.
The crackdown on
religion, particularly the underground Catholic Church, comes at a time when
Beijing is locked in a contest with Taiwan to win the Vatican's diplomatic
recognition.
Beijing's success last
year in persuading South Africa to drop its recognition of Taiwan has made the
Vatican prize all the more important in Beijing's campaign to isolate Taiwan
internationally.
Pope John Paul II has
said he would like to visit China, but a debate reportedly rages in the Vatican
between those who want the Pope to stand firm until the repression ends in China
and those who believe he could make a more compelling case for the plight of
Catholics by making a visit.
John T. Kamn, an
American who has combined a business consultancy in China with human rights
advocacy, has warned the Chinese, that reconciliation with the Vatican, on which
Beijing is said to be keen, will be "very, very difficult" if the "bishops and
priests and laity of one community are continually subjected to beatings, to
arbitrary detention" and "if their places of worship, their holy shrines are
destroyed and their celebrations banned."
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