ARTICLES

China Has Two Faces

Can the Church be Patriotic and Catholic?

By Joe Marti

Earlier this year the Bay Area was host to the funeral Mass and burial of a hero to Chinese Catholics. Cardinal Ignatius Kung died March 13 after serving thirty years in prison under the Communist regime of China in 1955. Many years were spent in solitude, and yet he remained loyal to the Magisterium and to his vows. In 1979, Bishop Kung was elevated to Cardinal in pectore by Pope John Paul II. Neither Cardinal Kung nor the rest of the world knew of this for the next 12 years.

Through the efforts of the Red Cross, Amnesty International, and his nephew, Joseph Kung, Cardinal Kung was released in 1985 to serve under house arrest under the custody of the Patriotic Association bishops. Formed in 1957, the Chinese Catholic Patriotic Church rejects papal authority and elects its own bishops. In 1988, Kung was released to go to Connecticut for medical attention and stayed there with his nephew until his death last spring.

Recent news has been made by the election of a bishop in June in the Hangzhou diocese by the Patriotic Association. The Vatican criticized the unauthorized ordination through spokesman Joaquin Navarro-Valls, who said Church law provides for "severe sanctions" against the bishop carrying out the ordination and the new bishop. Since the late 1970s, the Patriotic Association Church has ordained hundreds of priests and 50 bishops. None of the bishops were ordained licitly, according to the Vatican.

The Cardinal Kung Foundation reported recently that 24 Catholics, including a priest and 20 nuns, were arrested in the southeastern province of Fujian. Of the 24, the priest was severely beaten. Despite this, "Everything's going great for religions believers in China," said Fu Tieshan, a bishop and head of a delegation of Chinese religious leaders attending a religious summit at the United Nations in New York. "Facts speak louder than anything else; there is no religious persecution in China," he said.

Father Benedict Chang, a Chinese priest from Star of the Sea parish in San Francisco, warned against knee-jerk assessments of conditions in China. "The answer to the question is easy and hard," he said. He explained that the easy version would describe two species of the Church. One that is open and in the good graces of the government, and another underground Church that recognizes the Church and the Pope's authority.

"When I go home [to China], the officials know that I'm a priest. But as long as I don't make trouble, they don't bother me," said Father Benedict Chang. "If I wear regular clothes and don't go to the church in my village, I'm all right. I can celebrate Mass and dispense sacraments and everything else."

Father Benedict Chang made it clear that if it appears that nothing is amiss, nothing will normally happen. But if one were to appear brazen, the police would feel forced to act. However, he warned against trying to corner the Chinese mind into choosing one church over the other. He explained, "That is an American mindset. The cultural Chinese do not feel pressure to choose sides. That is why it is often hard to get opinions from Chinese people. They just won't understand the point."

Although there appears to be a great fracture in the relations between the two Catholic factions in China, Father Benedict Chang says that it is not that bad. He told of a church that was built under the nose of the local government with government assistance that was never registered by the government. "It all depends on which district you live in," he said.

The Ricci Institute, at the University of San Francisco, is regarded as the best source in the Bay Area for current information on Asia. It is named after 16th-century Jesuit missionary Matteo Ricci, and is dedicated to collaboration between Chinese and Western scholars in the field of Chinese-Western cultural history with a concentration on the history of Christianity in China.

Mark Mir, librarian for the Ricci Institute, agreed with Father Benedict Chang. "The situation there is extremely complicated. The oppression of the Church is highly localized. In some places it could be very intense, and in others there hasn't been a problem for a long time. The best way to describe the culture there is that it is porous, as opposed to monolithic."

He explained that in his travels there, especially in a predominantly Catholic district of Shanghai, he was surprised by the openness of belief. To him, the people there were open and unafraid about expressing their religious views. But, he acknowledged that things are far from being settled.

Mir claimed that as of now, the open church and the underground Church are of equal size. He said houses that facilitate underground Church members are shut down and people are persecuted in many instances. However, he also says that the Patriotic Church may be more Catholic than Patriotic, and that whenever they open a seminary, they are flooded with vocations.

Father Benedict Chang related a story of a recent encounter between some Patriotic Church seminarians studying in Europe with the Holy Father. He said, "They requested an audience and he admitted them. While in his presence, they began to weep, as he began to weep as well. They expressed their desire to be publicly loyal to the Holy See and regretted that they could not do so at that time. But they told the Pope that in their hearts they were loyal to him."

But the background of both the ecclesial and political realities at work in China make it difficult to get a clear perspective on just what is to be done, short of a miracle. Dr. Jerome Dinoto, principal of St. Mary's Chinese Day School in San Francisco, said that the current state of affairs in China is rooted in its pre-Communist past. He said that the problem has existed since around the time of the Boxer Rebellion. "The fear of foreigners and of foreign powers goes back to then from the effects of Europeans coming in and carving up the country amongst themselves," he said. He said that certain natural disasters happened around this time and as a result, many blamed them on advent of the appearance of foreigners. Thus, said Dr. Dinoto, those who were openly friendly to these foreigners, including missionaries, were ostracized and scorned. "During the Boxer Rebellion, Christian converts were martyred in the most grotesque manner," he said.

Mir believes that reconciliation will happen, though the time is hard to predict. He said, "Historically old-time Chinese Communists fear or dislike the influence of the Church, as it appears to them to be the same as the imperialism or colonization they have known before. But the newer leaders are open to change." It will be slow, however. Father Benedict Chang and Mark Mir agree on this point: It will take a strong leader to unite China and move it out of its past.

As far as Communism's role, Dr. Dinoto sees this as the fueling of the long-established fear that was firmly in place through foreign power and influence. "The Vatican is, after all, a foreign state," said Dr. Dinoto, "and the Chinese didn't want a foreign state deciding the fate of a Chinese church." He agrees that the lines are fuzzy in the modern Chinese Catholic Church. "Rome has recognized some of the Patriotic Church Bishops, and they certainly recognize the underground Church's legitimacy, so in a sense both sides have a claim to legitimacy," said Dr. Dinoto. That, according to him, places the Vatican squarely in the middle with no easy solution at hand.

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