China’s Catholics in 2024: A Year in Review

“Even though the New China continues to reject Christianity and tries to wipe away all traces of Christianity from its land, a dialog between Christianity and Mao’s ideology is essential.” — Fr. Domenico Grasso, SJⁱ

China’s Catholics do not view the present apart from the past. It is as if they have digested the advice of G. K. Chesterton who wrote, “We can be almost certain of being wrong about the future, if we are wrong about the past.”ⁱⁱ To discuss Catholic events in China during the last year without saying something about China’s Catholic history during the early years of the People’s Republic of China (1949-present) is tantamount to writing a man’s biography without acknowledging his childhood.

Catholics in China’s pews during 2024 lived in a landscape of ever-shifting sands; the sands of government policies and behaviors have changed since COVID-19, while those sands remain the same that was swept into China during the Maoist era (1949-1976)

To describe 2024 as “messy” is both accurate and hackneyed. It is accurate because China’s faithful were granted little solace under continued state scrutiny and coercion; it is also hackneyed because religious believers in China have never known freedom and stability. If the 1950s and ’60s were an era mostly of state persecution in China, 2024 was a year mostly of state control over the Church. To understand where the Church is and is heading, we must guard against being, as Chesterton advised, “wrong about the past.”

The Past: Persecution

During the early 1950s, as the torment of China’s Catholics was escalating into a furious storm, the Jesuit and fourteen-year missionary in China, Fr. Jean Monsterleet SJ (1912-2001) was collecting documents and conducting interviews about those who were suffering under China’s new communist government. His friend and fellow writer, Dr. John C. H. Wu (1899-1986), praised Monsterleet’s account of anti-Catholic persecution in China as an unexaggerated history of the “incredible cruelties of the persecutors, or … the almost superhuman fidelity and endurance on the part of their innocent victims.”ⁱⁱⁱ

Among the most widely celebrated victims of Party cruelty was the Chinese priest, Fr. Beda Chang, SJ (Zhang Boda, 1905-1951), a Shanghai Jesuit who had earned his doctorate at the University of Paris in 1937. After the Party’s political claim to China in 1949, Fr. Chang became an exemplar of loyalty to Rome while state pressures demanded China’s Catholics to discard Papal authority. He summoned the faithful to “an absolute unswerving allegiance to the Church at all times when the Faith was at stake,” while also encouraging “concessions on points of secondary importance.”^iv As Fr. Paul Mariani, SJ, summarizes Chang’s approach to handling pressure from Communist cadres, “yield in secondary matters, but remain firm in the essentials.”^v By 1943, he was appointed the rector of Shanghai’s Collège Saint Ignace, and after the Communists entered the city to take control in 1949, he encouraged local Catholics on loudspeakers to persevere as the first overtures of state persecution emerged. Fr. Chang urged Shanghai’s Catholics to practice their faith both resolutely and openly, and on 9 August 1951, the police knocked on his door and arrested him. They calmly stated that they “wanted to have ‘a little talk’ with him.”^vi He was imprisoned in the city’s notorious Ward Road Jail and only survived there for four months.

While in his cell, Fr. Chang was offered a leadership position in Shanghai’s “independent Church,” liberated from the pope.^vii He refused to denounce the Holy See. During unremitting interrogations, denial of sleep, and physical torture, fellow prisoners near his room reported hearing him repeat over and over, “Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, help me.”^viii He said nothing more to his interrogators, and by 11 November he was dead. Two days later, “3,000 people filled the Church of St. Ignatius-in-Zikawei for a solemn Requiem Mass at which the bishop of Shanghai sang the absolution.”^ix The bishop who offered that Requiem Mass for Fr. Beda Chang was Ignatius Gong Pinmei (1955-2000), who was himself arrested in 1955 by the Communist authorities and placed in the same prison.

When Chang’s body was laid to rest, a simple stone marked where he was buried. The authorities wanted to add an inscription that read, “Here lies the reactionary priest, Beda Chang,” but the stone remained uninscribed. Local Catholic students, however, wrote in chalk, “Long live Christ the King!”^x

To this day images of Christ the King adorn many of China’s churches, and the memory of Fr. Beda Chang is surreptitiously commemorated for his witness of loyalty to the Holy See and perennial teachings of the Catholic Church.

2024: Control

What about 2024? News sources have had much to say about China’s political and military engines, but very little to say about religion in China. Perhaps this is systematic of the mainstream media’s general indifference to religious matters. My email inbox, however, is at times deluged with reports about both Protestant and Catholic events in China.

In one Protestant report, I was informed that Ban Yanchao and nine members of her community were arrested last year for selling bibles without official permission. Ban pleaded guilty to “illegal economic activity” on 15 April and was sentenced to five years imprisonment for the “crime,” even though the bibles she had made available were printed by the state-sanctioned National Chinese Christian Council and were sold below the purchase price. Other Protestants, too, were arrested and now await trials for religious activities intolerable to state officials.

Within the Catholic community, there have been developments to commend and others to lament. China’s Catholics are pleased with some 2024 events. The Catholic Diocese of Shanghai happily reported a high number of baptisms on Easter Vigil, announcing that 470 people received the sacrament in diocese churches.^xi Also in the Shanghai diocese, the Marian shrine dedicated to Our Lady of Sheshan was allowed to orchestrate processions of pilgrims to the basilica at the peak of Sheshan Hill. According to China’s official Roman Catholic periodical, Xinde 信德 (Faith Weekly), 13,893 pilgrims officially registered to make the pilgrimage on 1 May 2024.

This year, the large crowd of pilgrims processed and prayed while a canopied statue of Our Lady Help of Christian was carried to the basilica’s high altar for veneration.^xii China’s major seminaries in Shanghai and Beijing welcomed new seminarians. The Sheshan Seminary for the Diocese of Shanghai received twenty-five new seminarians, and the Beijing National Seminary welcomed seventeen new men.^xiii These new seminarians were required, however, to attend state-mandated military training, during which they were given military and ideological instruction, and were taught to chant Party slogans in favor of Communist ideals.

Other events have left China’s Catholics trepidatious about what lies in the immediate future. Perhaps the most alarming report is that two Chinese priests from the Diocese of Baoding, in Hebei Province, were abducted by local authorities. The underground priest, Fr. Chen Hekun, was taken from his home on 29 April, and Fr. Chi Huitian was arrested twelve days earlier. The reason for their arrests has not been revealed, and neither priest has been seen since their abductions. Fr. Chen had worked for the Baoding underground seminary, which had been under surveillance, and local Catholics suspect that he and Fr. Chi were seized for their determined affiliation with the underground community.

The Baoding Diocese has a particularly strong underground Catholic movement, and unregistered clergy there regularly face harassment and arrest. In the Diocese of Liaoning, a conference on the “Sinicization of Catholicism” was convened with sixty priests, sisters, and lay representatives to discuss, among other topics, how to “combine the bible and Church teachings and precepts with traditional culture and core Socialist values.”^xiv Bishop Pei Junmin, who I met this year, chose in his speech at the gathering to emphasize matters not related to Party ideologies. Pei outlined current issues faced by his diocese: the shrinking number of Catholics and the lack of vocations. The Diocese of Liaoning has only eighty-eight priests to serve more than 70,000 officially recorded faithful.^xv

When I spoke with Bishop Pei he was deeply concerned about the ratio of priest to faithful in Liaoning, around one priest per 800 lay Catholics, but most dioceses contain more underground than aboveground Catholics, so the disparity is likely much greater than he has reported. Bishop Pei studied at St. Charles Borromeo Seminary in Pennsylvania and is thus held under suspicion for being “corrupted by outside influences.”

In 2024, the Party emphasized its maxim that “Sinicization is the only way to adapt religions to Socialist society,” and as if to respond to global interest in whether “Sinicization” is understood as cultural adaptation or political conformity, Shi Taifeng, head of China’s Central United Front Department of the Party, provided clarification. Shi insisted, “Adhering to the orientation of our country’s religions toward Sinicization is the only viable way to actively guide religions to Socialist society,” and he explained that Sinicization has a sociopolitical rather than cultural meaning in state policies.^xvi It is clear that the Party’s aim for the “Sinicization” of Catholics in China is adaptation to Marxism rather than Chinese cultural traditions.

What seems to be on the minds of most Catholics I meet is the renewal of the Sino-Vatical Provisional Agreement, which remains a secret accord, although the Vatican has revealed that the document centers largely on the appointment of bishops. The Holy See announced the renewal of this agreement with the People’s Republic of China, and the Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman, Lin Jian, expressed China’s satisfaction with the results of the Party’s negotiations with the Vatican. During his return flight from Singapore in September, Pope Francis stated: “I am satisfied with the dialogue with China, the result is good, work is also being done with goodwill regarding the appointment of bishops.”^xvii

In 2024, there were four consecrations of new bishops and the state officially recognized the ninety-five-year-old underground bishop, Shi Hongzhen, as the bishop of Tianjin. Bishop Shi had previously been under house arrest because of his refusal to join the Chinese Catholic Patriotic Association.

While the Vatican heralds 2024 as a successful year for the addition of new bishops to govern China’s Church, Chinese Catholics are quick to complain that more than thirty episcopal sees still remain vacant and that a large number of the bishops are “obedient to state pressures.” As is always the case for those who are attentive to China’s Catholic situation, there are reasons for both optimism and caution. When Zhen Xuebin was consecrated the new coadjutor bishop of Beijing on 25 October at the city’s cathedral, something was heard by those present that caught their attention.

When the letter of approval by the Chinese Bishop’s Conference was read aloud, it contained the conspicuous sentence, “Ciren xuan yijing Jiaozong tongyi 此人選已經教宗同意,” or “This man was already approved by the pope.”^xviii

Like Bishop Pei of Liaoning, Bishop Zhen studied in the US and is thus among those prelates who the government watches for “appropriate loyalty to Party policy.”

I was in Germany this year at a gathering of cardinals, bishops, priests, sisters, and scholars, the 11^th European Catholic China Colloquium. I had an unexpected lunch with a Chinese seminarian between meetings, and since it was just the two of us, we enjoyed a candid and animated discussion of the “actual situation” of Catholics in China at present. We spoke much about government demands on the clergy, methods of resisting or navigating those demands, and how the Sino-Vatican agreement has impacted the life of everyday Catholics in China.

Our discussion grew more lively as he informed me how challenging it is to be a practicing Christian under Communism, and how painful it is to witness bishops and priests collapsing under the strain. China’s Catholics are as divided as the rest of the world regarding the Vatican’s policies. What are we to make of Vatican agreements with China’s political system and how did these settlements affect the lives of China’s faithful in 2024?

The last time I was in Beijing was several years ago before the pandemic seemed to restore the “bamboo curtain” limiting travel into China. While there I visited the rector of the Beijing cathedral and several of the ecclesial officials who oversee Catholic activities throughout China. I had a rosary in my pocket that had been blessed by Pope Francis, intended for Beijing’s Catholic Patriotic Association official. As I reached out to hand it to the priest beside me in the cathedral, he paused, looked into the distance, and expressed his unwillingness to accept it. I pressed, and at last he said, “Hao, geiwo ba” 好，給我吧.” “Fine, give it to me, then.”

It was an icy reception by one of the Chinese priests who serves at a high level in China’s Catholic Patriotic Association. I was in no position to ask him about his discernable disdain for the gift from the pope, but during our long discussions, it was clear that China’s clergy are of mixed minds regarding Rome’s policies toward China, and the clergy of both the aboveground and underground communities.

If 2024 serves as an example of how things are going for China’s Catholic community, there is reason for concern, and also cause for hope.

As a Chinese Catholic would say, fear of the state remains in the air, but trust in God remains in the heart. The death of Fr. Beda Chang in 1951 persists in China as a memory of past persecution, and today China’s faithful live under a different form of government suppression, constant control. The Party’s aim to eliminate religion has gone nowhere; it has simply changed from fierce persecution to relentless control. And one wonders, from the pews, wonders if control will prove to be a more effective agent of erasure than violent persecution. Beijing’s officials seem to have learned that making martyrs of China’s Catholics increases religious fervor, while simply controlling their actions and thoughts dampens their faith.

The question in my mind is how Rome intends to navigate through the present waters of Sino-Vatican negotiation at a time when China’s Communist Party seeks to manipulate the Holy See as much as it desires to manipulate China’s holy faithful.

Endnotes: