The situation of the Catholic Church in China, divided between the official Patriotic and the underground church, is rarely understood by those outside the country. Here, a bishop from Hong Kong who is attending the current Asian Synod in Rome gives a rare glimpse of the realities of Catholic China. THERE are 10 million Catholics in China today, compared with only 3 million in 1949 when the Communists took over. Official Chinese sources report only about 4 million Catholics. This is partly because it would be an embarrassment for the Communists to admit that large numbers of people are entering the Catholic Church despite all the oppression it has undergone, partly because many believers belong to unregistered churches.

Here are seven stories from China, which parallel the seven miracles recorded in the first part of John?s Gospel.

In Jn 2:1?11 Jesus changes the water into wine at Cana. This episode reminds me of Sheshan, the famous hill outside Shanghai, with its seminary and Marian shrine. The seminarians sometimes place water and teapots on tables along the route, as well as leaflets explaining the meaning of the shrine and some basic Christian teachings. They hope in this way to quench both the physical and spiritual thirst of curious travellers, and indeed some of the tourists who climb to the top of this hill to enjoy the scenery later approach the Church and become believers.

In Jn 4:42?54, Jesus cures the son of a court official. Strange as it may sound, most conversions to Christianity in rural China can be attributed to exorcisms. According to certain reports, some who are possessed have called on Christians for assistance when doctors have been unable to diagnose and treat their problems. Healed of their affliction, they have entered the Church, and have urged others to do likewise. For example, in Jilin province in north-east China, in a village not far from Changchun, there was only one Catholic family in 1981. When a possessed person was healed after entering the Church, 300 other people were moved to conversion.

A third miracle is the cure of the paralysed man at the pool of Bethzatha (Jn 5:1?9). One priest who was arrested tells how a secret agent of the Nationalist Party was one of his fellow prisoners. He had to wear leg-chains day and night because he was both a soldier and a secret agent. He also had to endure an exhausting interrogation. I sympathised with him but how was I able to diminish his sufferings? The words of St Peter kept coming to me: ?I have neither silver nor gold, but I will give you what I have? (Acts 3:6). I could really say that my only possession was Jesus Christ. Finally I said to him: ?You are suffering so much. I really believe that only Jesus Christ can alleviate your pain.? Then I briefly explained the Church?s teaching to him and taught him to make the sign of the cross. The next morning I watched him do it. Silently I prayed together with him asking the Lord to strengthen his faith, and gradually he became more relaxed. One evening he spoke softly to me: ?Jesus Christ is really wonderful! He has actually changed my suffering into joy!?

The miracle of the multiplication of the loaves is recounted in Jn 6:1?15. One Chinese priest had a small parish of 200 Catholics before the Communist takeover. When he could no longer function as a priest, he was assigned to carry charcoal ? a hardship for an educated man not used to heavy manual labour. He adjusted to his new job, however, and decided to work as a Christian. He could not preach to people when he delivered his charcoal, of course, but he could have a Christian attitude towards them.

In the 1980s he was finally allowed to return to his church and to resume his sacramental ministry. Every weekend, 800 people now crowd into that church, four times more than in the old days, to learn the catechism and to hear the word of God. He is remembered as the old charcoal carrier who gave a convincing witness to Jesus.

The fifth miracle followed immediately afterwards, when Jesus walked on the waters (Jn 6:16?21). People can be afraid of water, as whoever invented the water prison realised. Imagine a small, dark dungeon with a narrow, concrete table or altar in the middle of it, flooded so that only the table is above the water level. The guards take two stubborn prisoners who need to be taught a lesson and put them on the table every morning. There they sit on the concrete, back to back with no space to move until bedtime. After 40 days the men should either be crazy or ready to sign any confession, if they have not already fallen into the water and drowned.

A Catholic priest was put into a water prison. His companion complained and cursed from the first day, but the priest decided to meditate and make a private retreat. Before long the other man became curious, wondering how his partner could be so serene, and began to ask questions. The priest took the opportunity to explain the Gospel and Catholic doctrine. Eventually the man asked: There is water here, what is to prevent me from being baptised? And so the priest baptised him.

Jesus?s gift of sight to a man born blind is the sixth miracle. On a visit to China a few years ago, I met an old couple who were both doctors. They had studied together at medical school, fallen in love and married. She was a Catholic, he was not. She wanted to convince him that he should join the Church, but he did not wish to be baptised. A short time later she had a child.

During one of China?s political movements, the husband, along with many other intellectuals, was sent to a labour camp. The separation was very difficult for the wife, who had to work long hours at the hospital during the day and care for her son at night. In addition to her loneliness, she was under pressure from the Government to divorce her husband and to renounce her religion, so that she could gain political advantages. But she refused. Every night after she returned home, she and her son knelt down to pray and ask strength from the word of God to endure the difficulties.

At the end of the 1970s, she heard that her husband and other intellectuals would be allowed to come home. When the day came, she and her son went to the railway station, where they were the only family members on the platform to welcome the men. Unable to endure the long separation, all the other women had divorced and remarried. Deeply moved, her husband took instruction and was later baptised.

The seventh miracle is the raising of Lazarus from the dead (Jn 11:1?44). A seminarian in China once told me when and where he heard the call. His uncle was a priest, who was put on public trial during the Cultural Revolution and sentenced to death. The boy, as the seminarian was then, was among the crowd of spectators, heard the rifles fire and saw the bullet enter his uncle?s heart, followed by a fountain of blood. At once he heard a voice inside him say, I must become a priest to finish my uncle?s work. That boy already sensed the truth of what Jesus said: his uncle, like Lazarus, would not end his life in death but in God?s glory.

But these miracles are achieved in a climate of repression. The Communists have, from the very beginning, imposed their own religious policy upon the Chinese Catholic Church. They demand that the Church should be entirely free from any foreign intervention and control.

In 1989, as China sought international dialogue, it realised that it needed to forge a new policy towards the Catholic Church. Document 3, issued in February 1989, permitted the Chinese Catholics to acknowledge the Pope as the spiritual leader of the Catholic Church. They may pray for him, but may not talk to him or have any dealings at all with him.

DOCUMENT 3 also spelled out a policy to deal with the underground Church. The people must be won over and united with the Government, while their leaders must be isolated and suppressed. It remains government policy that the Chinese Catholic Church should continue to select and consecrate its own bishops without recourse to Rome for approval.

Last August I was in Paris, where I met Archbishop Celli, the papal delegate who handles relations between the Holy See and the Chinese Government. He told me that on his way back from a visit to North Korea, he passed through Beijing and had a chance to talk freely for an hour with one of the Chinese vice-ministers. The Holy See would not permit an independent Church, Archbishop Celli told the minister, but was open to the idea of negotiations about an autonomous local Church. The bottom line was that though the nomination of bishops could be discussed, the appointment of bishops was only for the Pope. He must have the final say. The foreign minister did not indicate he agreed with this, nor did he repudiate it, but merely repeated the government line, that the Chinese Church should be self-supporting, self-governing and self-propagating.

One must remember that the Chinese Communists rode to victory on a wave of national patriotic sentiment: The Chinese people have finally stood up! declared Mao Zedong on 1 October 1949 in Tiananmen Square. Everything foreign had to go. When the Communists took over, foreign missionaries were expelled from the country, and because the Church was deemed to be a foreign religion, campaigns were held in which Catholics were urged to criticise their leaders. Bishops, priests and lay people were accused of being unpatriotic and co-operating with the foreign agents of imperialism in China?s humiliation. At that time foreign bishops were in charge of 120 of the 140 existing dioceses or apostolic prefectures.

In 1957, the government-approved Chinese Catholic Patriotic Association was formed. One year later, the first ordination of two Chinese bishops took place without Rome?s approval. From 1958 to 1962, as many as 52 Chinese bishops were consecrated in this way. Most were good and intelligent men. Undoubtedly their orders were valid, but all were declared illicit by the Holy See.

Of this number, nine are still alive, four of whom have retired. All are elderly men. Some have married, mostly because they came under political pressure to do so, but their marriages have never been accepted by Chinese Catholics. We should try to understand their situation and be compassionate towards them.

After the Cultural Revolution came to an end in 1976, a further 81 Chinese priests were raised to the rank of bishop with the Government?s approval, but not Rome?s. One of the first was Michael Fu Tieshan, who was consecrated Bishop of Beijing in February 1979. Of this latter number, 60 are still active.

The bishops consecrated during these years were motivated by pastoral concern for their people. Allowed to work in public under the new open policy of the Government, the Church had to have its own episcopal leaders. Most of them hope for reconciliation with the Holy See in the near future. Many, it is said, have already secretly sought legitimisation of their status from the Pope. It would be rash and unchristian to judge them.

When in 1992 the official Church convened its Fifth National Congress of Chinese Catholic Representatives, it drew up a constitution for the Chinese Bishops? Conference, which had been established in 1980. The congress asserted the legal authority of the bishops? conference within the Church. In Article Two of the constitution, it stated the apostolic nature of the Church and the role of the Pope. It also pointed out that the relationship of the bishops? conference to the Patriotic Association was one of cooperation. But when the Sixth National Congress met in January this year, the representatives elected two new men to chair both the Chinese Bishops? Conference and the Patriotic Association, and it became evident that the latter took precedence over the former.

Meanwhile, in the underground Church, other bishops were acting without recourse to the Government or the official Church, and consecrating priests who did recognise Rome. Bishop Fan Xueyan of Baoding Diocese, who died in 1992, consecrated three bishops as soon as he was released from prison after the Cultural Revolution. Only afterwards did he write a letter to Rome explaining the circumstances. The Pope in turn legitimised these three and granted them special faculties to consecrate their successors as well. They were also given authority to ordain priests as bishops in neighbouring dioceses where the need arose.

This led to the indiscriminate ordination of bishops on a larger scale than had been foreseen. Today the underground Church has as many as 50 bishops who were consecrated secretly; some dioceses have as many as three bishop-ordinaries. They are men of strong faith, but some have not received adequate training. Most live in the homes of Catholics, always trying to avoid arrest.

The underground bishops have established a number of seminaries in poor and backward places. Seminarians attend classes in the evening and rise in the morning for prayers and Mass at 4 o?clock. Their lives are difficult, and they are often in danger of arrest.

In 1990, when a rumour circulated that the Vatican was on the verge of establishing diplomatic relations with Beijing, some underground bishops, fearing that they would be overlooked, called a secret meeting to set up their own independent episcopal conference. They were all subsequently arrested by the Government.

The situation is complex. The Pope has directed seven speeches to the Catholic Church in China since 1981: in Manila in February of that year, in Seoul in 1989, to the bishops of Taiwan in Rome in 1990, to the Catholics of Taiwan by letter in 1994, to the Catholics of China in Manila in January 1995, to the bishops of Taiwan paying another ad limina visit to Rome in August 1995, and to representatives of the Chinese Church in Rome in 1996. In all these speeches, the Pope earnestly appealed for reconciliation.

The best story of reconciliation in the Bible is the parable of the Prodigal Son (Lk. 15:11?32). With God?s amazing grace, this is possible in China.

One winter in the mid-1980s, having finished my business in a city in central China, I went to the airport. But I had to return to the city, for there was a heavy fog, aggravated by air pollution from burning coal, and the planes were grounded. I asked Bishop A, the local bishop of the open Church, if he could recommend a hotel. Unexpectedly, he knocked at my door that night, having walked from his church wearing a cap and with a scarf around his face so that no one would recognise him. He explained that he had accepted his appointment as bishop while under pressure from the Government. He had made an effort to seek approval from Rome before his episcopal ordination, but did not succeed. He still wanted to be reconciled with the Holy Father. He was in poor health and heavily burdened spiritually and psychologically at not being reconciled to Rome. He wept as he spoke. He always prayed for the Pope, he said; he did not pick and choose what to believe, but accepted all the Catholic doctrines.

I told him I would convey his story to the proper people, and today he is in full communion with the universal Church, like the Prodigal Son reconciled with his father.

In that same city there is an underground bishop, Bishop B. Reconciliation between the two bishops was not easy, but they achieved it in stages. While the Government does not recognise Bishop B, he is allowed to serve as the spiritual director of the open seminary.

At the end of last year, the annual retreat for all the priests in the diocese was approaching. Government officials said that they would not permit the underground bishop to preach at it. But where there is a will, there is a way.

Bishop A preached a short homily, just a few sentences, then asked: Bishop B, do you have any questions? Bishop B stood up and asked a long string of them. After a minute, everyone realised that if in their minds they changed the questions to statements, they could hear a well-prepared talk by Bishop B. They smiled. The government officials were not happy, but there was nothing they could do.

In northern China, there is another city where the open and the underground Church have come to a modus vivendi, even if they are not yet fully reconciled. The diocesan headquarters is a crowded four-storey building, with offices, a rectory with resident seminarians, and quarters for the Sisters. The open bishop and an underground priest live and eat together, but the underground priest does not set foot inside the cathedral next door. Instead, he goes out every day to visit his flock, and on Sunday mornings between 50 and 100 underground Catholics squeeze into a room in that four-storey building for Mass.

So the open bishop protects the underground bishop by giving him a safe place to live and to pray with his flock, and in turn the underground priest protects the open bishop, since his Catholics mute their criticism of the government-recognised church. A broken relationship is slowly being restored, just as the older brother of the Prodigal Son could not immediately speak to his younger brother.

What can we do for the Church in China? It is a question I asked some years ago when an underground priest came to my room at night. Just as Nicodemus was afraid to be seen talking to Jesus during the daytime, so he did not want to be seen talking to me. He said that he could not in conscience join the Catholic Patriotic Association, since it was controlled by the Government. But he wanted to concelebrate Mass with me. We did so, and I noticed how he hurried through the Mass, glancing at the door every few seconds for fear the police might enter. I asked him: What can we on the outside do for you? We need your prayers, he answered. We also hope you do not do anything to increase the Government?s pressure on us.

In addition, the diocese of Hong Kong has direct and indirect ways of sending material help to the Church on the mainland. When I recite the Benedictus, I think of China with hope when I come to the line, Through the tender mercy of our God, the day shall dawn upon us from on high to give light to those who sit in darkness and in the shadow of death (Lk. 1:78?79).

***This is a shortened and edited version of an address given in Rome by Bishop John Tong Hon. Auxiliary of Hong Kong, to the SEDOS Symposium which is accompanying the Asian Synod. It was part of a series which will eventually all be published by the Sedos Institute (via dei Verbiti 1, 00154 Rome.)

Estimated statistics of the Chinese Catholic Church in 1998

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