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There's something new in Shanghai too
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A journey among the Christians of the symbol city of the new China, among the memories of those who testified to the faith in the persecution and the defenseless new beginning of those who become Christian today. While the new auxiliary bishop nominated by the Pope is ordained with the approval of the government … |
by Gianni Valente
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 | | The Cathedral of Saint Ignatius in Zikawei, as it is now and as it appeared in the 'Twenties of last century | | |
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The new bishop Joseph has the face of ‘a
good boy’ and moves about the altar carrying his purple zucchetto with the
timid steps of a beginner, almost asking permission. At seven in the morning,
the whirling ventilators hanging from the roof of the Cathedral of Saint
Ignatius already fail to move the heavy, humid air of Shanghai’s summer
anymore. Before the mass, all recited the Rosary and the Stations of the Cross
on their knees. Some delay at the entrance, before the bookstall with the
stories of the saints above which a panel is pitched with the megaposter of
Pope Benedict. In the chapel behind the altar there is always a line of those
who light candles and kneel down before the picture of Wojtyla. And this Sunday
Jesus in the Gospel recounts and explains the parable of the sower. The seed
that falls on rocky ground is like the man who hears the word and immediately
receives it with joy, but «as soon as tribulation or persecution comes because
of the word he immediately falls away». That sown among the thorns «is he who
hears the word, but the cares of the world and the delight in riches choke the
word and it proves unfruitful». That sown on good soil «that is he who hears
the word and understands it;he indeed bears fruit and yields in one case a
hundredfold, in another sixty, and in another thirty». The morning of 28 June,
in this same Cathedral – and that day it was even hotter, so much so that
in order to keep the multitude of five thousand people who had come cool, they
had distributed enormous blocks of dry ice along the naves – Joseph Xing
Wenzhi became the first Chinese to be ordained bishop during the new
pontificate of Pope Ratzinger. Pope John Paul had nominated him before dying.
Then, the majority of diocesan representatives had «voted » him – priests,
nuns, the laity of the diocese of Shanghai. Afterwards, the Peking government
had «approved» him. Finally his ninety year-old bishop Aloysius Jin Luxian,
head of the diocese of Shanghai since ’85 with the recognition of the
government but – up until now – without the approval of the Holy
See, made him successor of the apostles by the laying on of hands in the
liturgy of episcopal ordination. He is the great “director” of his own
complicated succession, where all the controversial and anomalous happenings of
the Church in China in the last 55 years mingle and join at a point of
development. Because Shanghai, for the creation of a bishop, is certainly not
a place like any other.
ZIKAWEI, 8 SEPTEMBER ’55
The mandarin Xu Guangqi, powerful friend
of the Jesuit Matteo Ricci, donated the lands around the Cathedral, now
cultivated by skyscrapers and electronic megastores, to the Church from the
beginning of the 17th century, after having been baptized. Still
today the Xujiahui quarter – Zikawei in Shanghai dialect – takes
its name from Xu’s family. Here the Jesuits from midway through the 19th
century had raised their Christian citadel in the suburbs of what was already
then a large cosmopolitan metropolis. With the Cathedral, the seminaries, the
astronomic observatory. What was then the residence of the fathers is now the
Zikawei library, and the ancient refectory now serves as a reading room. What
was then the house of the sisters, now hosts a restaurant for the rich, on the
other side of Puxi Road. Here in Zikawei, Father Zhang Boda worked as rector of
Saint Ignatius College, the first Jesuit martyr who died as a counter-
revolutionary prisoner in the prisons of Mao already in Novemebr of ’51. Here
in Zikawei the Maoist strategy for annihilating the Chinese Church by
separating it from visible communion with the successor of Peter achieved one
of its most dramatic effects. Because the diocese of Shanghai and its bishop
Ignatius Gong Pinmei were a symbol for the whole immense country, the
stronghold of Catholic resistance to the project of the Communist Party to
create a national Church of the regime that would renounce every bond with the
Apostolic See, identified with the Vatican «imperialist center». The layman
Simon He, now 71 and then just finished middle school, has also not been able
to forget that night of 8 September ’55: «The police surrounded all the
religious buildings. The rounding up lasted all night and the next day. They
arrested more than four hundred people, all those most notable in the diocese:
Bishop Gong, all of his closest priest collaborators, and almost all the laity
enrolled in the Legion of Mary, with the accusation that they were a
paramilitary group in the pay of capitalist powers. They gathered another
thousand into the minor seminary, and they worked there for three years, with
brain washing sessions on socialism and against the imperialist Vatican».
Decapitated of its leaders and a good part of its pastors, the Shanghai Church
lived for years in a limbo of uncertainty. Until when, half way through the
’Sixties, the dark night of the Cultural Revolution fell here also as in all of
China. «The seminary» Simon recalls «became a hospital. The nuns became workers
in their former house transformed into an umbrella factory. They requisitioned
or closed all the churches. We continued to pray, closing ourselves at home.
Zikawei Cathedral also went to ruin. The Red Guards broke the stained glass
windows, damaged the roof and steeples. But the rest remained standing».
«THERE IS NO NEED TO BE HEROS ANYMORE»
Since then everything seems changed.
Whoever goes to Zikawei today finds a church like all the others, attended in
complete freedom by Christians who don’t anymore need to hide themselves to say
prayers and make communion. Beside the Cathedral they have recently inaugurated
the new Episcopal palace and the ten floor high residence for priests, on which
the marble statues of the four evangelists soar. And yet, underneath the
appearance of ordinary ecclesial life, the years of great tribulation have left
wounds that are still open deep down in the Shanghai Church.
Fifty years ago, the young Jesuit Aloysius
Jin and his religious brother Joseph Fan Zhongliang were among the closest
collaborators of Bishop Gong Pinmei, they too arrested on the night of the
great roundup. Their bishop trusted them both: he had made the first one rector
of the major seminary, and gave charge of the minor one to the second. In 1954,
feeling the hurricane approach, those two also, along with all the priests of
the diocese of Shanghai, went up to their bishop at the sanctuary of Our Lady
of Sheshan to swear that they would not betray the faith, with the help of the
Virgin. The terrible years of the Cultural Revolution over, after almost five
five-year periods in prison, Jin and Fan were also freed, as happened in that
same period, the early years of the ’Eighties, to thousands of priests,
religious and faithful. The China of Deng Xiaoping reopened the churches,
invited priest, nuns and bishops to resume their own work, even if in a regime
of strict political surveillance. It was then that the paths of the two Jesuits
divided.
Jin accepted to become rector of the
seminary, and indeed in ’85 auxiliary bishop of Shanghai, with the permission
of the Peking government but without that of the Pope in Rome, while old Gong
Pinmei, legitimate titular of the episcopal see, remained in a regime of
probationary freedom. Fan, instead, refused all collaboration with the
“patriotic” associations that the regime imposed as instruments of control over
the life of the Church. In ’85 he too was ordained bishop clandestinely, and
the Vatican recognized him as the unique legitimate successor of Ignatius Gong
Pinmei. The dixia community,
the “underground” faithful who continued to say rosaries and to celebrate mass
closed in private houses, keeping away from the churches that reopened one by
one under the control of the government, gathered around Fan, feeling
themselves confirmed by Rome in their choice of inflexible resistance. They
were the “faithful Church”, those who in full fidelity to the successor of
Peter had rejected all compromise with the separatist line that the regime
wished to impose on Chinese Catholics. Jin, his curia and his priests were
traitors, usurpers, puppets in the hands of the regime. They were the
troublemakers in the field of the Lord.
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 | | Bishop Aloysius Jin Luxian places the Bible on the head of Joseph Xing Wenzhi during his episcopal ordination which took place on 28 June last | | |
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Now Bishop Fan is ill with Alzheimer’s, he
passes his days without memory in the apartment where for twenty years the
regime has tolerated his “illegal” activities, controlling him by sight and
limiting his freedom of movement. The news was communicated to the underground
community: the Holy See will not recognize any other clandestine bishop for the
Church of Shanghai. When Jin Luxian retires, the only legitimate pastor for all
the Catholics of Shaghai, and for them also, to follow will be his successor
Joseph Xing, recognized by the Peking government.
It would seem a paradox of ecclesiastical
ingratitude. The Roman Curia that turns its back on those who have paid most
for their fidelity to the Pope and makes deals with those who chose to
compromise with the persecutors. In reality, the episcopal ordination of
Shanghai clarifies the real contours of the intricate events of Chinese
Christianity in the last fifty years. And gives the lie forever to the
misleading theories according to which there were two Churches in China, one
faithful to the Pope and the other to the Party.
In recent years in Rome also they had
understood that neither did Jin betray the oath made in ’54, before Our Lady of
Sheshan. The canonical hazard whereby he accepted to become bishop without the
permission of the Pope exposed him for years to the accusation of being a
schismatic. But time revealed that he too, as the majority of bishops ordained
illegitimately in those years in China, never really thought of it as the
national “self-governing” Church cherished by the propaganda of the regime. In
the shadow of those slogans, it had to do with the faint openings conceded by
the regime to the resumption of ecclesial life. And with favoring the
continuity if the ecclesial institutions and the administration of the
sacraments necessary for the life of the faithful, in broad daylight. Because
of this, already in the early ’Eighties, the majority of them sent by secret
means their request to the Apostolic See to be recognized as legitimate bishops
in order to regularize their own status from the canonical point of view.
In Shanghai, the fruits gathered in these
years of “normal” diocesan life – new churches constructed all over the
city, avantgarde seminaries, printing presses that publish Gospels for all of
China, professional schools, the re-launching of the association of Catholic
intellectuals, links with Catholic universities and institutions throughout the
world – also speak for themselves. «Ecclesia Catholica una est, also in China» says Father Joseph Lu
smilingly, who has studied in the USA, leads two parishes in the center and has
now asked for the visa to come to Europe and hopefully drop into Cologne, as
chance would have it around 20 August, when the Pope will be there. «We and
those of the clandestine churches are two faces of the same coin. Formerly some
brother of the “underground” communities said of us of the “open” churches that
we would go to hell. But for some time now I haven’t heard that. It will take
time. But following the same pastor, sooner or later reconciliation will come.
And it will be they who will come out into the open and attend the open
churches. At this point, we certainly can’t become clandestines! Also because
there is no need. If there are the open churches, why hide yourself in a house
to say mass. At least here in Shanghai, there’s no need to be heroes anymore».
THE HEART FORGETS
The Shanghai without heroes anymore is
that decadent Liberty one that still shows itself off well at the Bund, along
the left bank of the Huangpu, where the stone buildings in European style now
house prestigious restaurants and representative centers of the Chinese
financial giants. It is the intellectual and pleasure seeking one that passes
its evenings euphoriant in the New Heaven and Earth, the artificial quarter
with the buildings reconstructed like the houses of the early 20th
century, among Italian restaurants, French strippers, Latin American music,
German beer and design laboratories of the new Shanghai art. But it is
especially the financial heart of the megalopolis that beats with tachycardiac
rhythms in Pudong, on the other side of the river. The immense area where the
extreme capitalism that causes convulsions to post-communist China is
incarnated in a mammoth urban planning project. There, on the periphery of the
financial heart of all of Asia, the poor Church of Jesus Christ is represented
by Father John Gong and his thousand parishioners of the Immaculate, the new
church inaugurated in May. A defenseless seed, among the glass block skyscraper
structures and the super protected residential complexes of the new rich.
Where, faced with the new times, it is not rare that a thread of unconfessed
nostalgia for the epoch of heroic Christian witness, now over, flowers.
Father John also, who every morning here
reads the breviary and then celebrates the Eucharist for the fifty faithful who
are daily mass-goers, was among the young seminarians who after the roundup of
’55 had to put up with three years of “re-educative” lessons on socialism and
the Vatican plots given by the Maoists in the Zikawei seminary. Then, for
thirty years, he waited for the storm to pass, remaining faithful to his
youthful promise. He did not marry, in ’87 he re-entered the Sheshan seminary,
the first to re-open in the years of the Dengian openness. He became a priest
only in ’90, at the fine age of 52. But now that he already sees the China of
tomorrow from the privileged observatory of Pudong, things don’t add up for
him. «When the persecution was about to arrive, Bishop Gong Pinmei warned us to
keep ourselves ready. Pray the Lord, he said, that He may help you to keep the
faith, which is the only treasure. Today it seems that no one is aware of this
treasure anymore. They all think of making money, they even work twelve hours a
day. For the young, also those of Christian families, the stories of those who
kept the faith in those difficult years are things past. The heart of men can
also forget the greatest past».
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A Station of the Cross recited by the faithful before Sunday mass | | |
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ONE TO ONE
In the West journalists of remarkable
fantasy forecast an imminent explosion of Christian spirituality in China, as a
religious corollary to the widespread consumerist standardization in act in the
Chinese world. If it is so, nothing yet allows a glimpse of it to be caught in
the satisfied and curious faces of the multitudes that swarm in Shanghai
continuously, swept away by the exhausting neo-consumerist liturgies of the
megalopolis that knows no rest. Maybe they wear the cross on their neck in
imitation of some local rapper. But they certainly know nothing of the
ejaculatory prayers sung in Latin in the lagers, of the Patriotic Associations,
of the government that spies, much less of twenty years of fraternal rancor
between the “underground” Christians and those of the “open” churches.
Even Teresa knew nothing about it. When
she was a child in Peking, her parents, communist functionaries, certainly did
not talk to her about it. Also because they were never there, caught up as they
were by their political career in Mongolia. Then she met a Christian friend,
began to attend the churches, received baptism at twenty-five years old. She
recounts that when asked what Christian name she had chosen, she answered that
she wanted that of the prettiest saint. «The god-mother looked at me askance,
but then she gave me a present of a book about the life of Teresa of Lisieux …
when I went abroad, a foreign priest asked me if I were part of the
“underground” Church. I didn’t understand what he was talking about. I replied
that in China I didn’t know any churches built underground, I hadn’t ever seen
any in the underground stations …». Now she moves with ease in the neo-hedonist
rhythms of Shanghai. She likes to stay out late in the atelier of the artists, or to discover new
restaurants to then take her friends to. But it is indeed she who is drawing
the Gospel scenes and the Chinese symbols for the stained glass windows of
Zikawei Cathedral. The same that were once destroyed by the stones of the Red
Guards. The seminarians also, the young priests and the nuns who meet in the
parish of Saint Peter’s before dispersing throughout Shanghai to hold summer
courses in catechism, don’t seem to occupy themselves too much with imaginary
Christian conquests that should find an open field in the spiritual desert of
the Chinese megalopolises. But neither do they curse the satiated and by no
means desperate consumerism of their contemporaries. «These are the times we
live in», says Anthony Zhao, spreading his arms, who is finishing theology in
Sheshan seminary and who also followed the retreat of four days organized by
the diocese at the beginning of July to study the methods «of how to
communicate the faith in an attractive manner to young boys and girls, youths,
and adults to whom we go to give catechism». Knowing well that, as happens to
the poor devils who witness Jesus Christ in the work fields, it will not be the
good intentions and the carefully measured human stratagems that will make the
beginning of faith blossom or that protects its perseverance. That in China, as
everywhere, today also, the small remainder who bear the name of Christ is a
helplessness protected by Another.
This is perhaps also the consolation of
the new bishop Joseph Xing when he imagines the adventurous years that await
him: it will not be his skills or his suitability nor even his errors or
limitations that decide whether and how the seed of Christian joy spread in the
Chinese earth, after having borne fruit even in the storms of persecution, will
dry up or can miraculously take root, one by one, in the busy hearts of the men
and women of this immense city full of lights.
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