Time out for some surprising good news from China - this time Beijing has blown hot... But there was a spanner in the works. Too bad - because otherwise, it might have been a great anniversary gift to Benedict XVI
Vatican and Beijing agreed
on this episcopal ordination -
China's first in 2012
by GERALD O'CONNELL
April 20, 2012
Left, the ordination of Mons. Gong; top right, Mons. Gong; bottom right, excommunicated bishop Lei Shi-yin.
Six bishops, including one who is excommunicated, ordained Joseph Chen Gong’ao on the morning of April 19 as the new bishop of Nanchong diocese, in Sichuan province, south-western China.
This is the first ordination of a bishop for the Catholic Church in mainland China in 2012. It was done with the approval of both Rome and Beijing, as was the last such ordination in November 2011, and is being widely interpreted as a positive development in Sino-Vatican relations at a particularly delicate moment in the history of the world’s most populous country.
Bishop Peter Fang Jianping of Tangshan presided over the ceremony in the Sacred Heart of Jesus Cathedral in the city of Nanchong, which was attended by 800 people and 87 priests, including several from outside the province. Hundreds more who could not get into the cathedral watched the ceremony on a close-circuit TV screen at a nearby shrine, UCA News reported.
Bishop Fang was the main consecration. He had earlier requested and received pardon from Pope Benedict for having participated in an illicit ordination in 2011. Four other bishops in union with Rome joined him as co-ordaining prelates: Joseph Li Jing of Ningxia, Paul He Zeqing of Wanzhou, Paul Xiao Zejiang, coadjutor bishop of Guiyang and Peter Luo Xuegang of Yibin.
But, in a repeat of what happened at the last Episcopal ordination in Yibin last November 30, the event was marred by the participation of the excommunicated Mgr. Paul Lei Shiyin. Ordained bishop of Leshan diocese on 29 June 2011 without the papal mandate, he was subsequently declared excommunicated by the Holy See.
At the Nanchong ceremony, Mgr Lei was dressed in bishop’s robes and stood together with the five Vatican=approved bishops and laid hands on Mgr. Chen.
His participation in the ordination ceremony in defiance of Canon Law has aggravated his situation in the eyes of the Holy See as he is seen to be persisting in harming the unity of the Catholic Church in China.
Sources expect Mgr. Lei Shiyin’s case to be discussed at next week’s plenary session in the Vatican of the Papal Commission for China which Benedict XVI established in 2007. As the Commission is an advisory body to the Pope and does not have decision-making power, any further sanction against Lei Shiyin will be taken by the Holy See.
Apart from this troubling show of defiance, the ordination of Bishop Chen as new pastor of Nanchong diocese went smoothly and has been warmly welcomed by Catholics in the mainland.
Born in 1964, Bishop Chen graduated from Sichuan Catholic Seminary in 1988 and was ordained priest 1990. Elected by unanimous vote (23/23 votes) in a democratic election in 2010, he succeeds Bishop Huang Woze who died in 2004, and now leads a diocese with 86,000 Catholics, 11 priests and 11 nuns.
Interviewed by UCA News, Bishop Chen said his main priority is to enhance the quality of the priests, seminarians and nuns “so that the diocese’s work of evangelization can be developed in a more systematic manner.”
He also plans to organize formation for lay people, especially catechists. And referring to the forthcoming 50th anniversary of the Second Vatican Council (1962-65), he said he hopes “to open up new avenues for evangelization” by encouraging priests and lay catechists to spread and integrate Catholic teaching with the local Nanchong culture.
Furthermore, he said he would like to build a new cathedral to replace the Sacred Heart of Jesus Cathedral where the ordination took place because it was damaged in the Wenchuan earthquake in 2008 and, in any case, is too small to accommodate large-scale religious events.
At the end of the ceremony yesterday, Bishop Chen, addressing the congregation, thanked God for choosing him to be a bishop and also thanked the clergy and faithful for putting their trust in him, and for honoring him in this way.
He said he interpreted all this as “a sacred mission”, and promised that he would seek to “enhance” his spiritual life and ministry by “following the example” of his three predecessors in the diocese.
So Nanchong diocese finally has a bishop after eight years, but some 40 other dioceses in mainland China are still without bishops. The selection of candidates to fill those sees is a matter of the greatest concern for the Holy See, and it hopes that the Chinese authorities can agree to the nomination of mutually acceptable candidates, as it has done in Yibin and Nanchong.
Here's a situationer by a layman scholar who spends time in China to report on the Church in China, and says there os ,uch good news to report among the faithful:
April 17, 2012
Aristotle famously wrote that, “Hope is a waking dream.” Hope, to indeed be hope, must awake; it must be a dream that is made real.
China’s dreams for religious freedom and tolerance have for nearly a century been slumbering under a strong anesthetic, but recent months have shown slow but tangible signs of waking. China’s Catholics have embraced the “new evangelization,” and have decided that, as J R. R. Tolkien once said, “There is some good in this world, and it’s worth fighting for.”
As I write this column I am aware of the recent arrests of Bishop Peter Shao Zhumin and his chancellor, Father Jiang Sunian; they are scheduled to undergo ideological classes: brainwashing. Only two months ago, Bishop John Ruowang was also arrested and forced to attend government classes.
In fact, the bureau chief of the Communist Party’s United Front Work Department met with representatives of the Chinese Catholic Patriotic Association on March 2, and exhorted them to “convert the underground community.”
What the media often fails to mention is that the two Catholic communities – sanctioned and unsanctioned – collaborate more often than they conflict. Despite official exhortations, “above ground” clergy are more interested in converting non-Christians than in playing ideological games with their fellow Catholics.
The state continues its old antics, and the world watches critically as it coerces and controls the Catholic Christians who desire little more than freedom to love and serve God, as well as love their country.
But I shall focus my remarks here on more optimistic news.
I am often struck by the irony that China’s Catholics, who have less access to papal encyclicals, are more interested in them than many American Catholics, some of whom it seems are unaware such encyclicals exist.
The Holy Father’s 2005 encyclical, Deus Caritas Est, has had a weighty effect on the routine lives of Chinese Catholics, and its opening line, “天主是爱” (God is love), has inspired a renewal of charity and evangelization throughout the country, and the first few months of 2012 have seen a precipitous rise in Catholic outreach and catechumens.
A Chinese priest in Rome has provided me with several reports of hope from within China’s long-suffering Church. In typically euphemistic language, the Chinese nuns of Guangxi went to a small leper community in the rural mountains to, as they said, “bring spring to winter.” In order to “be the hands and feet of Christ” in their “winter” of suffering, these sisters brought “smiles and gifts” to the forgotten victims of leprosy.
In the Wenzhou Diocese, Father Jiang initiated a new Lenten practice that he has called, “family Eucharistic adoration,” a movement that is swiftly sweeping across the area.
Seeing China’s economic rise and its trend toward materialism, Jiang complains that, “secularization is threatening our faith life and we do not have enough strength to combat against it... However, the almighty God is the source of our strength,” he suggests, and “people who rely on God will find joy and peace.”
To confront China’s materialism, Wenzhou’s Catholics are signing up to have a Eucharistic altar installed in their home for twelve to twenty-four hours; the individual families spend that time reading Scripture, praying together, and in prolonged adoration of Jesus in the Blessed Sacrament.
As one Catholic asserted, “耶稣的到来，不仅是贵宾、医生、而且还是家长” (When Jesus comes, He is not only a special guest, or even just a physician, but he is the head of our household). So far over fifty households have invited God into their homes during this Lent.
Not only is family Eucharistic adoration becoming popular, most dioceses are now organizing weekly adoration in major cities. Beijing, for example, now attracts large crowds of Catholic faithful to its four principal churches, where adoration of the Blessed Sacrament is held four days a week.
Echoing the sentiments of the Saint Francis, China’s Christians exclaim with him, “What wonderful majesty! What stupendous condescension! O sublime humility! That the Lord of the whole universe, God and the Son of God, should humble Himself like this under the form of a little bread, for our salvation.”
While traditional devotions have largely diminished in America, nearly all Chinese Catholics pray a daily rosary and recite evening prayers to the Sacred Heart of Jesus, for as they say, the battle cannot be won without the supernatural aid of Christ in the Sacrament and constant prayer to his Sacred Heart.
China’s Catholics often remark, “Outsiders already know about our struggles, but do they know about how God has blessed us? There are victories, too.” Believing in the salutary results of prayer and adoration, China’s Church trusts that God will help it survive.
Indeed, recent months have proven that God is more than assuring the Church’s survival, he has also facilitated its growth. Vocations are rising, as are ordinations, and as the government turns impatiently toward the lure of fiscal hegemony, more and more young Chinese are turning toward the waters of baptism.
On March 17, seven deacons were ordained priests for the Diocese of Shanghai. Festooned with streaming red banners, the Cathedral of Saint Ignatius was filled beyond capacity as the faithful gathered to celebrate their new priests.
Bishop Jin Luxian, currently in his late nineties, celebrated the Mass in Shanghai, while in distant Shaanxi four new priests were ordained. Already this year China is enjoying more vocations than it has in several decades.
After taking a group photograph in front of a large Christmas tree, still outside the cathedral long after Christmas, forty-five catechumens were recently baptized in the mother church of Taiyuan Diocese.
As is the custom in northern China, the catechumens vowed to “follow Christ” and brought candles and salt during the solemn offertory, representing their promise to be the salt and light of the gospel in China and the world.
And despite the fact that Catholic orders are officially banned in Mainland China, forty Shaanxi Catholics joined the Franciscan Third Order in a ceremony officiated by Father Xia Changzhou, OFM.
This growth of Franciscan spirituality is intentional, for as secular China venerates the altar of wealth, Shaanxi’s faithful honor the words of Saint Francis, who said, “Grant me the treasure of sublime poverty: permit the distinctive sign of our order to be that it does not possess anything of its own beneath the sun, for the glory of your name, and that it have no other patrimony than begging.”
Not all is promising however, as Bishop Ma Yinglin, who remains one of the few bishops in China who is unrecognized by the Vatican, recently ordained priests for the Kunming Diocese.
The outspoken Hong Kong priest, Father Anthony Lam Sui-ki, responded to Ma’s disobedience to the Holy Father, stating, “It is very dangerous for the country and society to have a ‘son of corruption’ like Ma, as the mindset of conniving corruption is contagious, which would encourage more opportunists who disregard Church principles.”
While some dioceses boast growing numbers of priests and converts, others like the one under Bishop Ma continue to foster division and suspicion among the faithful. Before the recent ordinations, one Mainland blogger appealed to Ma to “repent and avoid making another mistake.” As Emerson once said, “Obedience alone gives the right to command,” and Bishop Ma has demonstrated little obedience to the pope he claims to follow.
During my last visit to Beijing, I spent time at two museums that are next door to each other, the Millennium Pavilion and the Museum of Military history; both are painstakingly crafted testaments of China’s cultural prominence in human history.
The Millennium Pavilion featured a newly-installed exhibit dedicated to the 1911 Revolution, when imperial China was at last replaced by a modern Republican government, and the Military Museum featured exhibits on people’s resistance to imperialist and foreign powers through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
I was most interested in the fact that both museums displayed historical images and descriptions of Catholic missions – photographs of churches, orphanages, and hospitals. Much has changed in China’s rhetoric regarding missionaries between 1960, when the Military Museum exhibit was installed, and late 2011, when the Millennium Pavilion exhibit was staged.
In the Military Museum, photographs of Catholic churches seized by the People’s Liberation Army are proudly displayed, touting the Party’s victory over “imperialist Catholic missionaries who had done only harm to Chinese sovereignty and culture".
The Millennium Pavilion, installed only a few months ago, featured a different narrative; in this new version of Catholic history in China foreign missionaries are shown caring for young orphans, treating sick villagers, and teaching Chinese women who had before then received little attention in China’s educational system.
In short, for the first time since 1949, Christian missionaries are presented in a government-sponsored exhibit as “beneficial” to China’s people and its transition into modernity.
My objective in this month’s column is not to downplay the real conundrums facing religious liberty in China, but like everyone else who reads the daily news, I have grown weary of the incessant reports of oppression, repression, and rebellion.
There is much happening in the world that is hopeful, and the Church in China, despite some major and minor glitches, is experiencing relative freedom and support. In
Les Misérables, Victor Hugo wrote that, “even the darkest night will end and the sun will rise.”
This, after all, is the meaning of the Paschal mystery; Christ is the God of hope, and grace, and resurrection. For some reason lies have always been more popular than the truth; that is, unless the truth appears somehow unbelievable.
Mark Twain once said that, “A lie can travel half way around the world while the truth is still putting on its shoes.” China’s official line on Christian missionaries has been built more upon lies than truth, and it was refreshing indeed to see, for the first time, an official exhibit praising the works of missionaries who came to China in the name of Christ; and it is encouraging to see the Church, at least for now, awakening a dream of hope.
Anthony E. Clark is an associate professor of Chinese history at Whitworth University and the author of China’s Saints: Catholic Martyrdom During the Qing, 1644-1911. He is also the host of the EWTN television series 'The Saints of China: Martyrs of the Middle Kingdom'.[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 21/04/2012 00:44]