«THE SICK MAN»

     Today Africa is reaping the bitter fruits of the doctrine proclaimed by Pope Paul VI in 1964 on the occasion of the canonisation of the young martyrs of Uganda, according to which the «politics of the Gospel» are anti-colonialist. The Pope spoke a great deal about «colonialism», adopting this term of murderous hatred forged by Communism and repeated by all the agents of global subversion. «I must confess», wrote the Abbé de Nantes, «I wept when I read this text. One would think that the Church was demanding her share of the inheritance of the “sick man” and assuring everyone, rather too noisily for there to be any doubt, that she had helped to kill him.» (Lettre à mes amis n^o 189, 24 November 1964)

     These accusatory texts need to be read again. Today they are the objects of a lawsuit that has been taken all the way to the tribunal of the Apostolic Signatura. They echo «the malediction of the widows and mothers who see, standing behind the Vietnamese assassin or the murderous fellagha, the silhouette of the priest, the evangelical liberator!» For forty years, papal Christian democracy has paved the way for these massacres, its eye fixed on a chimera:

     «Stronger than the visions of pontifical glory in a Saint Peter’s sparkling with light, there rises in our throats a sickening taste of blood», wrote the Abbé de Nantes, «and the nauseous stench of the surgical unit in Dien Bien Phu. I see before my eyes the green flies swarming over those disembowelled at Meknes and the bloodless corpses at Oran. While our martyrs, our soldiers and colonisers were undergoing this long drawn-out Calvary, the Church was working for the future of the democratic society of her dreams! She needed this political void in order that she might “constitute the best organisations on the social plane”! A few tears and a little blood, and the Church would be in a position to establish everywhere on the smoking ruins of our centuries-old labours the Community of Pure Love whose prophets are announcing the coming of a new heaven and a new earth. “A new civilisation, chants Paul VI, the Christian civilisation of Africa, land of the Gospel, Christ’s new homeland… Immense Asia, the new modern world”, these vast spaces are now accessible to the preaching of the one Gospel. A “new era” has begun.» (ibid., p. 6)

     Here is the result, thirty-five years later:

     IN UGANDA, guerrillas spread terror “in the name of God”. On 1 October a Combonian missionary, Father Raffaele di Bari, was assassinated by rebels from the Lord’s Resistance Army» (LRA). The missionary was working in a territory where LRA guerrillas have been sowing death and destruction for a decade; but he had never wanted to leave: «He helped the poor because he recognised Christ crucified in them», explains Father Carlos Rodriguez Soto, himself a Combonian missionary and Father Raffaele’s heroic friend.

     The Ugandan army has never succeeded in defeating the rebels who ransack the villages, killing without pity and kidnapping children between eight and sixteen to force them to fight on their behalf. Everyone knows that their leader, Joseph Kony, is in the pay of the Sudanese government.

     IN SUDAN, the Moslem authorities of Khartoum have been exterminating Christians since 1983. The black Christians of the South are resisting the government’s determination to arabise and islamise the whole of Sudan and to destroy the barrier they pose in the south of the country which prevents Islam from spreading throughout the African continent: «We the Christians of Sudan feel that we have been forgotten by the rest of the Christian world, and that, to say the least, our problem has not been well understood by the rest of the world outside», declared Mgr Gabriel Zubeir Wako, Archbishop of Khartoum, before the plenary assembly of French bishops at Lourdes in 1999.

     What the French bishops require in order to understand the “problem” is to read the Abbé de Nantes rather than condemning him without a hearing as they have for the last forty years. Mgr Wako’s speech confirms his analyses point by point: «Democracy will be nothing but an interlude, he wrote in 1964, and the Church will be swept away with it, and what is more be accused of having declared herself behind it. This invasion is clearly marked out on the map. The first push, that of islamo-marxism, will be from Cairo to Casablana, whence it will descend on Black Africa, from Senegal to Chad, from Sudan to Eritrea, and suddenly Africa will be suffocating under a turban. We have foolishly abandoned political power to these totalitarianisms of race, religion and faction; when they have found their feet, they will chase out the Church.» (Lettre n^o 191)

     Such today is the fate of the Church in SUDAN: «Since 1965, explains Mgr Wako, there has been a systematic destruction of Christian schools and prayer centres on the pretext that they were located in places where planners wanted to build roads or else that they had been built illegally on land which had not received planning permission. Curiously, all the new roads pass through our centres.» Whereas mosques and Koranic schools are always spared from these acts of destruction, and sometimes Moslem schools are built close to Catholic schools earmarked for demolition…

     IN SIERRA LEONE, three Italian missionaries were captured by rebels from the RUF (Revolutionary United Front) in the Guinean village of Pamlap. «These events are extremely sad», declared Mgr Giorgio Biguzzi, the Bishop of Makeni, who complained that, «despite the deployment of UN troops, the peace process has not made any progress».

     The RUF rebels had however signed a peace agreement with the Freetown government at Lomé (Togo) in July 1999. Alas, they resumed hostilities at the beginning of May 2000 by impounding several hundred peace-keeping troops!

     FROM SIERRA LEONE TO ZIMBABWE, FROM CONGO TO SUDAN, what has been happening in the African States since the end of “colonialism” is of far less interest to international opinion than Kosovo and Chechnya. «But in terms of the number of the victims and the sheer devastation wrought in these countries, Africa’s acts of self-mutilation beat all the records for horror», writes Frédéric Pons. We must read his terrifying news report:

     «PANDEMONIUM: “imaginary capital of hell”. After Kinshasa (ex-Zaire), Mogadiscio (Somalia), Morovia (Liberia), Kigali (Rwanda) or Luanda (Angola), Freetown, the capital of Sierra Leone, takes its place within the long martyrology of barbarous Africa.

     «Foday Sankoh, a former corporal in the British army, an upstart diamond trafficker who goes around covered in amulets and protected by a battalion of “combat virgins”, has undertaken to transform this former British colony, a “pearl” in the tourist industry, into the antechamber of hell.

     «The methods of this war chief – formed by the American Black Muslims and animated by a strange eco-marxist philosophy which draws its inspiration from the theories of the Peruvian Shining Path – are marked by an unheard-of brutality. They have nothing to learn from the methods used by other war criminals who have brutalised the black continent since colonisation came to an end.» (Valeurs actuelles, 12 May 2000)

     This demon from hell «has devised a punishment to make his enemies “get the message”: mutilation by machete, called “long-sleeved” when only the hands are lopped off or “short-sleeved” when it involves the whole arm! “Take your destiny in hand”, he says to his victims, holding out to them their severed members.» Note that this is exactly the same “message” that was presented by Paul VI in 1964; and its concrete application was immediately foreseen by the Abbé de Nantes: under the pretext of taking their destiny in hand «we have bequeathed them a democratic ideology and institutions that have already worked to our ruin, dividing and destroying us. We were cheerfully working against France and the French people in the interests of universal democracy. Intense partisan excitement and electoral outbidding were the driving force, and it was not long before these awakened the old demons of Africa, tribalism, collective hysteria, and an instinct for orgies and massacres. It seems that no one lost any sleep over this, and so thousands of martyrs were added to the statistics of democratisation amidst general indifference.» (Lettre à mes amis n^o 191, p. 2, November 1964)

     IN CONGO, the Benedictine monastery of Saint Mary of Buenza, founded in 1958, 250 km to the south of Brazzaville, in the diocese of Nkayi, was famed for its pharmaceutical laboratory which produced about forty different kinds of medication, between three to five times cheaper than they were in western pharmacies. The monastery also housed a woodwork studio where many young people from the region came to train, a cattle farm and a beekeeping centre. In December 1997 it began to be pillaged on a regular basis. The monks had to leave in December 1998. Today, nothing remains of it.

     IN CONGO (ex-Zaire) there can be glimpsed the hidden hand of the enemy, the author of chaos, only too happy to fan the flames of local conflict: the United States. They are exceptionally interested in the cobalt, titanium, gold and diamond mines. Several mining companies from Kivu are in contact with the commercial department of the United States embassy in Kinshasa. No one is worried about the needs of the population... neither the soldiers sent from Rwanda, Burundi and Uganda who behave like conquerors, nor the militias armed by Kinshaha, and still less the mercenary forces hired by the businesses exploiting the mines.

     Where do the weapons come from? From Romania, from the Ukraine, and from Bulgaria which is on the point of entering NATO. Such is the part played by the West in Africa’s «taking in hand of its destiny» since the end of «colonialism». How can one not see in this continent the spectacle seen by Blessed Jacinta in her prophetic vision at the Cabeço in 1917:

     «Oh! Lucy! Can’t you see all those roads, all those paths and fields full of dead and bleeding people, and others who are crying with hunger and have nothing to eat?»

     But the sequel is yet to come:

     «And the Holy Father in a church, praying before the Immaculate Heart of Mary? And so many people praying with him?»

     No, we have not seen that. Not yet. For the moment we see on the contrary what the Abbé de Nantes foresaw in 1964: «Will history record that the Church’s disgust for Christendom made her throw the people she had evangelised into the inhuman arms of Islam and Communist China? If that were to happen, it would be no different from losing the faith!» (Lettre n^o 191, p. 2)

     It has happened. And yet we have not lost the faith, because there is still Fatima, whose Secret should have been made public in 1960. The Abbé de Nantes requested this in vain during those years. And it is because it did not happen that we are now faced with what he foresaw: after «the first push, that of islamo-marxism» referred to above (p. 11), «the second push, implacable and secret, will be Chinese» (ibid.). This is exactly what we read in La Croix on 11 October:
 

«A HUGE RED DRAGON» (Ap 12.3)

     IN ASIA, the treason goes back to the trip which Pope Paul VI made to Bombay on 2 December 1964. «Conceived and presented as the first great act of dialogue between the Church and other religions», wrote the Abbé de Nantes on the day after the event, «it nevertheless had to use as its venue the ancient Goan Christian community of Bombay, its candles, its rosaries, its passionate Occidentalism, its touching strictness and fidelity to “Portuguese patronage”. But it is cruel to think that the Pope had come among them for an ulterior purpose, and that this chosen platform with all its missionary vigour should be relegated and sacrificed to this end. There was little if any homage paid to this profoundly Catholic population; the concern was rather to evoke the material misfortunes and the spiritual greatness of India, and this despite its indifference and even hostility to the Christian message.» (Lettre n^o 191, p. 6)

     INDIA sees itself today as a “great democracy”. The Hindu party in power persecutes the Church in the northern states. «It is easy for the Hindu militants to brainwash the illiterate peasants and push them into crime», comments Father George Manimala, chancellor of the archdiocese of Delhi. The Indian Catholic hierarchy responds to the assassination of priests and rape of nuns by appealing for dialogue: «Live and let live has always been the great principle of Hinduism, which has traditionally been open to other religions», pleads Fr Manimala. He adds:

     «We seek nothing other than the conversion of hearts to our values, not formal conversion.»

     Therefore the “untouchables”, the dalits, return to Hinduism, «for by going over to Christianity they lose all their rights (due to access quotas for public office and the University). A dalit convert to Catholicism therefore sinks to the lowest rung on the social ladder.» (François Boucher, in Valeurs actuelles, 28 April)

     IN INDONESIA Christians are massacred  by the Moslems out of hatred for Christianity, in both the Moluccas and East Timor. The media persists in speaking of «interconfessional conflicts» (Valeurs actuelles, 28 April), as though the blame could be equally divided! On 28 September the attack against the Christian village of Hative Besar, situated on the bay facing the town of Ambon, the archipelago’s main town, was carried out like a ritual sacrifice. Thirty-six people were put to death by soldiers dressed in white sacrificial robes. The village was set on fire and two thousand inhabitants fled. A Christian, Hery Kastanya, was thrown in the sea, swam to the nearest village, and gave evidence that the attackers were not guerrillas but soldiers.

     Another Christian, a survivor from the attack on the village of Suli, located on the eastern coast of the island of Ambon, testified that the attackers came from Afghanistan, Saudi Arabia and the Philippines.

     The Christians of the Moluccas called on the help of the “international community”. In vain since, at the height of the “millennium summit” at New York on 6 September, three civil employees of the High Commission for Refugees (HCR) were assassinated in the town of Atambua, situated on the border between East and West Timor. All their other personnel were forced to undergo emergency evacuation, driven out by the violence of the pro-Indonesian militias, which in 1999 had refused to accept the independence of East Timor (860,000 inhabitants), placed under the protection of UNO.

     Nearly ten thousand peace-keeping troops are stationed there, but the Bishop of Atambua, Mgr Anton Pain Ratu, has no illusions: «The next target in East Timor will be the Church.»

     IN CHINA: ever since the creation in 1957 of “the Patriotic Association of Chinese Catholics”, made up of men of the Church and laity who have taken a pledge to the Party, Catholics faithful to Rome are persecuted and killed. In 1981 priests who refused to disown the Pope were deported for the purpose of “re-education”. Mgr Zhang Jiashu, the President of the “patriotic” Episcopal Conference, described them as «outcasts of the Chinese Catholic community». In 1989 twelve bishops in communion with Rome, twelve like the Twelve Apostles! were arrested. In 1995 all unregistered churches were closed down and destroyed. Since last year, the ferocity of the persecution has known no limits: «A violence and fury never seen since the Cultural Revolution.» (Le Figaro, Friday 22 September)

     Now, the visit paid by Cardinal Etchegaray represented an appalling betrayal of the martyr Church by the hierarchical Church. For the ten million Catholic faithful in communion with the Pope, members of the “clandestine” Church, what a scandal! Here are the facts:

     Wednesday 13 September 2000: Cardinal Etchegaray arrived in China for an eight day visit, during which he would only meet members of the schismatic “Patriotic Association”. He tells us he protested against this, but it is in vain. Given the gravity of the situation, it was necessary to create a rumpus, even if this meant getting back on his plane or, even better, going to prison! Failure to do this would be to re-enact the treason of Judas; something which will not astonish those who know how this same Roger Etchegaray has sought to rehabilitate the treacherous Apostle ever since he became Bishop of Marseilles... Indeed, the papal legate’s visit “in some way” sanctioned the arrest that took place the day after his arrival:

     Thursday 14 September: two bishops and a priest were arrested in the province of Jianxi. Mgr Zeng Jingmu, who is eighty, was led away by some fifty or so agents and placed in a secret detention centre under close police guard. Ordained in 1949, before the Communists came to power, he has always refused to enter the Schismatic Church. That is why he has spent thirty years of his life in prison: from 1958 to 1976, then at the time of the Cultural Revolution from 1981 to 1989, and intermittently between 1994 and 1998, always for the purpose of “re-education through work”.

     At the same time as Mgr Zeng Jingmu, were arrested Mgr Deng Hui auxiliary bishop, who has spent three of his thirty-three years in prison, and Father Liao Haiqing who has spent seventeen of his seventy years in prison.

     Sunday 17 September: not far from Changle, in Fujian, seventy police officers surrounded the residence of Ye Gongfeng, an eighty-two year old parish priest. Tortured until he was coughing up blood, this heroic confessor of the faith died after seventeen hours in a coma.

     At this same time, the Cardinal Kung foundation in the United States was reporting that Father Gao Yihua, forty-four, had been captured by the police as he was saying Mass at a private house, close to Changle.

     In Changle 30% of the inhabitants are Christian: «We have not been able to attend Mass for two months now, so closely watched are we by the police. Our priests have gone underground, and nobody knows where they live. They move around continually. They simply have a beeper or a mobile phone whose number is only known by those closest to them. Masses are organized through a network of contacts, in the houses of Christians, for nobody would dare to enter the churches.»

     For all these Catholics, stresses the special correspondent of Le Figaro, there is no question of registering for the right to pray, nor of going to pray in a “Patriotic Catholic” church, i.e. one authorized by the Communist Party. «Catholicism must depend on the Vatican!» declare these faithful Roman Catholics, ready to testify to this with their blood.

     Alas! Imagine what they must have thought when they learned of the following events:

     Tuesday 19 September: Cardinal Etchegaray publicly celebrated a Mass at Sheshan, in a “patriotic” church. In this sanctuary on the outskirts of Shanghai, accompanied by the “patriotic” bishop of the city, Mgr Alois Jin Luxian, the Cardinal gave a talk at the seminary. In Peking, he met the bishop who is president of the Patriotic Association, Mgr Michel Fu Tieshan, who has protested against the canonization of the martyrs of China, planned for 1 October in Rome.

     Wednesday 20 September: in Peking, the Minister for Foreign Affairs is in his turn indignant at the date chosen for this canonization, the 1^st October which marks the fifty-first anniversary of the coming to power of the Communist regime: «This act of the Vatican is extremely hurtful to the Chinese people and the dignity of the Chinese nation, and it will absolutely not be tolerated!»

     Sunday 1 October. Pope John Paul II canonizes thirty-three missionaries as well as eighty-seven Chinese, declaring that they «give honour to the noble Chinese people», and offering them to the universal Church as «examples of courage and consistency (sic)». Numerous pilgrims were present from the countries of these missionaries: the Chapdelaines from La Rochelle in Normandy, who are related to Saint Augustus Chapdelaine; Alsatians who had come to commemorate Saint Modeste Andlauer, a Jesuit who was massacred along with the faithful who had taken refuge in the village church of Tchou-Kia-Ho in July 1900; inhabitants of the Auvergne from Lezoux, the birthplace of Mgr Gabriel Taurin Dufresse of the Paris Foreign Missions who was decapitated on 14 September 1815...

     Monday 2 October: Pope John Paul II publicly requests forgiveness from China, in Saint Peter’s, before all these pilgrims, for the «possible “errors” or “limitations” of missionaries in the exercise of their ministry»!

     This repetition of the “repentance” of 12 March led to the same result as John Paul II’s pilgrimage to Jerusalem: in the next few days, the Chinese government launched a campaign against the martyrs. In this way they would be put to death not once but twice! As for the bishops and the priests of the “patriotic” Church, they were carefully monitored. It was forbidden to preach about the holy martyrs, even – and indeed especially – in Hong Kong, recently reattached to Communist China.

     On the other hand, newspapers and Internet sites are inundated with articles and analyses, both “historical” and “scientific”, of the “crimes” of the foreign missionaries... Why take the trouble, seeing that the Pope himself has already admitted to this!

     It would be enough to make one despair, if Our Lady of Fatima had not predicted this scandal and warned us about it in the marvellous vision of the third part of the Secret entrusted to the three little shepherds on 13 July 1917. She had shown the children in advance «a large city half in ruins» which is a figure, a «symbol» as Cardinal Sodano calls it, of the state of the Church. Therefore, now that we see with our own eyes the fulfilment of Our Lady’s words, how could we possibly lose the faith? On the contrary, there is something here to stir our souls, to arouse our hope, and to make our hearts burn with a wonderful tenderness for the gentle Heart of Mary.

(continued on page 19)     
 

Underground Mass in the province of Shaanxi in 1995 (report by Xiao-Ming Li of the Magnum Agency). Long under the care of the Franciscan missions, the Church of Shaanxi is a bastion of the “underground” Church, which currently numbers ten million faithful, against the four million of the “official” Church. By defying the prohibition of the Communist government to celebrate house Masses, they know that they risk arrest and death. They celebrate their martyrs whilst marching in their footsteps! Note, to the right of the Host, the engraving fastened to a sheet which represents the Immaculate Conception spreading Her rays of grace.

THE CHURCH OF THE HOLY MARTYRS OF CHINA

AT LAST RAISED TO THE ALTARS!

     «Six bishops, twenty-three priests, eight seminarians, seven nuns, thirty-six catechists, twenty-nine widows or virgins, two catechumens and nine children»: the list of this heroic phalange is impressive; it illustrates the valorous nature of the Church in China, which has continued to be persecuted for more than three hundred years, and which has rightly been compared with the Church of the first centuries.

     This canonization is something of a miracle. Opposition came not only from Peking – which did everything to block the local investigations by spreading a thousand calumnies about the martyrs, who were described as “devils from abroad” or “traitors to their fatherland” – but also, alas, from Rome. Indeed, when the bishops of Taiwan came in November 1985 to present the results of the work of their commissions, they were shown the door: «At the Secretariat of State, Cardinal Casaroli feared that the announcement of the canonisations would hamper efforts to normalise relations between the Holy See and the government of Peking... When I learned in 1996 that Father Gabriel Perboyre was going to be canonized, I wrote a memorandum addressed to the Holy Father, protesting in vigorous terms against the political obstacles thrown up against the cause of the Chinese martyrs. The martyrs of China, I said, were being exposed to a second martyrdom in Rome!» (P Jean Charbonnier, The one hundred and twenty martyrs of China, Churches of Asia, September 2000, p. 9).

     That is where matters would have remained, had not the Peking government on its own initiative broken the “normalisation” in progress by consecrating five new bishops of the Patriotic Church last January. As a result, Rome no longer needed to worry about diplomatic caution, and the new Prefect of the Congregation for the Causes of Saints, Don José Saraiva Martins – «who had the canonisation of the martyrs of China very much at heart», as he also had the beatification of Francisco and Jacinta Marto, his compatriots! – announced in March that the long-awaited ceremony of the canonisation of the Chinese martyrs would take place in Rome on 1 October 2000.

     The date was particularly fortuitous, as this was the day when the Church commemorates Saint Theresa of the Child Jesus, the patron saint of the missions, to whom the missions in China were particularly dear! But there was another coincidence, one no less providential: this day marks the anniversary of the proclamation of the People’s Republic of China (1 October 1949). Whence the fury of the authorities in Peking, who already felt the wind of defeat! The Vatican diplomats thought they could contain the situation by explaining that the Christians of China showed on this occasion «that they know how to unite love of their country with love of their religion, expressing themselves in terms sanctioned by official parlance»! However, the Communist government of Peking did not fall for this, knowing all too well that the “underground” Catholics who resist today are nourished by the example of the martyrs of former times, and that the most fervent Christian homes are found on those very spots where the martyrs shed their blood.

THE MARTYRS OF FUJIAN

     Heading the list of new saints are five Spanish Dominicans who had come in the mid 17^th century from the province of Our Lady of the Rosary in the Philippines. No question for them of adapting the Catholic faith and its rites to the so-called wisdom of Confucius and its rites, a policy in which the Jesuit Matteo Ricci and his disciples gloried. The Cross and the Holy Rosary were their only weapons. They travelled the length and breadth of the province of Fujian, opposite the island of Formosa, and there they reaped an abundant harvest. But the local mandarins denounced them to the imperial authority as rebels, and one of them, Francis de Capillas, shed his blood in 1648, followed by five others in 1748. Near Muyang, their tombs still attract many of the faithful to the “Holy Mountain”.

     «In this region, remarks Father Charbonnier, there are thousands of Catholics who simply will not tolerate the interference of today’s mandarins in Church affairs. Just as the disciples of the Jesuits clashed with the disciples of the Dominicans in times past, so today two groups are locked in confrontation: those “in the Church” who submit to the rites laid down by the present government in churches that are officially open, and those “outside the Church” who commend themselves by an absolute fidelity to Rome’s directives and refuse any compromise with “patriotic” Christians. These divisions have deep roots. The constraints recently imposed by the present government only serve to revive the vigilance of these Christians all too accustomed to weathering out the storm.» (p. 22)
 

“REBELLIOUS” PRIESTS AND CATECHISTS

     After the Company of Jesus had been dissolved, they were succeeded by the Paris Foreign Missions and the Lazarists. It was then that began the heroic era of the Chinese missions, with alternating periods of calm and cruel persecution. Mgr Gabriel Taurin Dufresse, accompanied by a handful of Chinese priests who helped him to evangelise Sichuan, laid the foundations of a regular Christian and sacerdotal life which would remain in effect throughout the whole of the 19^th century. Arrested and tortured in 1815, his answer when accused of rebellion against the Empire was: «My Kingdom, the only Kingdom I desire, is Paradise.» He was decapitated on 14 September, the day of the Exaltation of the Holy Cross.

     One of  his catechists, Peter Wu Guosheng, went to his execution, rosary in hand. Before receiving the fatal blow, he went down on his knees, raised his eyes to heaven and cried out in a loud voice: «Heaven, Heaven, my true abode! I see the glory of Heaven, I see the Saviour Jesus!» Numerous miracles were obtained through his intercession.

     Father Francis Regis Clet left France in 1791. Learning of the revolutionary fury that had broken out at home, he wrote to his sister: «It is much better to be in China than in France, our heathens are far from committing the atrocities of your ungodly citizens!» But when the persecutions started up again against the “Catholic sect”, considered perverse and dangerous by the imperial authorities, it was the missionary’s turn to lead the fugitive life of a rebellious priest in Wychang, a life he would continue to lead until his martyrdom in 1820. He established his mission centre in the mountainous area of Chayuangou, on the site of the former “Colony of the Sacred Heart”. He was, in his life and heroic death, an example of the perfect missionary, a man who would inspire Father John Gabriel Perboyre, another admirable Lazarist who was martyred in 1840.
 

FRANCE, PROTECTRESS OF THE MISSIONS

     In 1842, the Chinese governor of Canton had 20,000 cases of opium thrown into the sea. England had been conducting a lucrative trade in opium entirely unconcerned about the damage caused to the local population. At the end of the “Opium War”, the First Chinese Dynasty found itself obliged to open up five ports to western trade. France’s representative at Canton, M. de Lagrené, arranged for there to be added to the commercial treaty a tolerance clause regarding the Catholic missionaries and their converts: «From henceforth, any native or foreigner who studies or practises the religion of the Lord of Heaven [this is how Catholicism was referred to], who furthermore conducts himself well and excites no disorder, is to be held free from any fault or blame.» But the Chinese imperial power could no longer control its remote provinces, like Gouangxi, where the terrible Sect of Taiping wrought great devastation.

     This was the very province that fell to Father Augustus Chapdelaine, a missionary from Normandy. He celebrated his first Mass there on 8 December 1854, the same day on which Pope Pius IX proclaimed the dogma of the Immaculate Conception in Rome. But, a few months later, denounced by a traitor, he was horribly tortured and executed. The catechist Agnes Cao Kui, arrested at the same time, asked to undergo «the same punishment as Master Ma». Ma was Father Chapdelaine’s Chinese name... Their martyrdom led to a new intervention by foreign powers. The treaties of 1858 and 1860 confirmed the commercial advantages of the English at the same time as France’s right of protection over the Missions of the interior. Thus it was that for a considerable while the legal status of the Catholic Church in China rested on this Sino-French agreement.

     However, in various parts of China the persecutions continued as before. In 1862, the French missionary John Peter Néel, despite showing his passport duly signed by the two emperors of China and France, was still condemned to decapitation for «conspiracy», as were three catechists and Lucy Ly, one of those admirable consecrated virgins who devoted themselves with zeal to every kind of hardship among women and young girls. A globe of fire appeared above the body of the martyr. The mandarin who had ordered the execution was terrified by this: «This man had a star, I made a mistake in killing him.» In the Hall of Martyrs of the Paris Foreign Missions they keep a braid of his hair which his torturers had tied to the tail of a horse to force him to run... Another moving relic: the rosary made of black and pink stones that the virgin martyr Agatha Lin Zhao used to thumb while she was on her catechism rounds.

THE VICTIMS OF THE BOXERS

     At the end of the 19^th century, everywhere missionary work grew a little stronger in China: in orphanages, schools and country pharmacies. The bonds with France were strengthened: for example, the work of the Holy Childhood for the baptism and education of abandoned children, – one of them, the seminarian Paul Chen, figures in the list of the martyrs, and his relics are preserved at Notre Dame in Paris, but are they still venerated there? – and the Carmel of Lisieux, where Sister Theresa of the Child Jesus prayed and sacrificed herself for her “brother”, a missionary in East Su-Tchuen:

In my profound solitude,
O Mary... I wish to win souls.
Through Your apostle, at the world’s end,
I will convert sinners.

     In 1900 the revolt of the Boxers broke out. This was a sect of Taoist inspiration savagely opposed to everything that bore the mark of the West and the name of Christian. Its rallying cry, “Serve the country and destroy the foreigner”, began a wave of persecutions and massacres the like of which had never been seen before. The number of Christians martyred before the protective powers of Europe started to intervene is estimated at more than thirty thousand, the Chinese suffering more than foreigners. Whole villages were massacred, like that of Zhujiahe, run by the French Jesuit Fathers Ignatius Mangin and Paul Denn; others were miraculously protected, like that of Donglu (see p. 18).

     The heroism of the Christians of the early Church was reborn in China at the beginning of the 20^th century. When the Franciscan Mission in Taiyuan, a province in Shaanxi, was threatened by the approach of bandits, seven Franciscan Sisters of Mary, including three Frenchwomen, asked Mgr Grassi to be allowed to stay with the orphans they were looking after: «Excellency, for the love of God, do not stop us from dying with you. We fear neither death nor the tortures with which the viceroy’s rage threatens us. We came here to practise charity and to shed, if need be, our blood for the love of Jesus Christ.» Having obtained permission, they commended themselves to Our Lady of the Angels and confidently marched to their martyrdom. Their sacrifice was not in vain. Today the diocese of Taiyuan, in spite of the Communist persecution, is one of the most flourishing.

     Nothing is more moving than the account of the martyrdom of Anna Wang, aged fourteen. Having sustained, with a quite extraordinary faith and composure, the courage of her companions, when her turn came, she went down on her knees in prayer, facing the village church.

     «The bandit named Song who was just about to cut her down suddenly stopped and came right up to her: “Renounce your faith!” he said. Anna, immersed in prayer, did not hear him. The man pushed her on the forehead with his finger. Anna stood up and drew back: “Do not touch me. I am a Christian. There is absolutely no question of my committing apostasy. I prefer to die rather than to apostatise.” The unbeliever returned to the charge: “Are you going to apostatise? If you give up your faith, we will marry you to a rich man who will offer you a comfortable life.” She replied, “I refuse to apostatise. Moreover, I am already promised in marriage” and, pointing to the church in the village of Weicun, she said, “I was betrothed at Weicun.” Then the bandit sliced off her left shoulder and renewed his request: “Are you going to apostatise?” No question of this of course. A second blow fell on her other shoulder. The girl knelt down, her face radiant: “The door of heaven is open”, she said. Then, in a quiet voice she pronounced “Jesus” three times. Then she lowered her head and held out her neck. The bandit Song raised his sabre and brought it down violently. The head of the young virgin rolled on the ground. The white dove took wing and went to curl up in the lap of her heavenly Spouse.» (Charbonnier, p. 152)

«THE CHALICE FILLED WITH BLOOD»

     The last on the list are two Salesians. The disciples of Saint John Bosco arrived in the diocese of Canton at the beginning of the 20^th century. Their superior, Don Louis Versiglia, who had received his formation at Valdocco in Turin, knew the prophecy of their founder: «In time our missions will even take them into China, but let them not forget that we go there on behalf of abandoned children.» In 1917, Mgr de Guébriant entrusted to them the whole northern area of his immense diocese. At the request of Don Versiglia, reinforcements soon arrived. In their baggage they brought with them a beautiful chalice, a gift from the Superior General.

     When he saw it, Don Versiglia was seized with emotion. He explained: «Don Bosco had a dream that when a chalice was filled with blood in China, the Salesian ministry would spread in a marvellous way among this immense people. You bring me the chalice seen by Don Bosco. It is for me to fill it with blood and so fulfil the vision.»

     On 25 February 1930 he was shot by a band of Communist rebels who were scouring the area. And so it was that he offered up, along with his companion, the first fruits of a new and far more bloody harvest of martyrs, a harvest which the «errors of Russia» were going to reap a few years later... all with the complicity of the Lazarist Father Vincent Lebbe, who tricked and indicted his brothers, having become the champion of Chinese nationalism against European imperialism, and the harbinger of Communism. His new “missiology” not only led to the Chinese schism, but, having been propagated throughout the whole Church thanks to Vatican II, it dried up the source of missionary vocations.

     The Secret of Fatima promises us that the Church of the martyrs will be reborn: «Beneath the two arms of the Cross, there were two Angels each with a crystal aspersorium in his hand, in which they gathered up the blood of the Martyrs and with it sprinkled the souls that were making their way to God.»

Brother Thomas  of Our Lady of Perpetual Succour     
 

THE «WHITE LADY» OF DONGLU

	The shrine to Our Lady of Donglu, Empress of China, was the work of French Lazarist missionaries.

IN June 1900, forty thousand Boxers attacked the village of Donglu, approximately 175 km south of Peking. They were armed with lances and large knives. They believed they were invulnerable. This time they encountered some unexpected resistance. The seven hundred Christians of the village, reinforced by more than nine hundred refugees, had organized their defence. They had dug large ditches around the village, thrown the earth back inside to form ramparts and planted sharp branches with long points in the ground. Two of them were once brigands in Mongolia. Each of them bore a rifle and bullets. The Boxers attacked four times. They were pushed back with heavy losses. The Christians pursued them crying, “Death to the Devil, death to the Devil!” Every day, a priest carried the Blessed Sacrament around the ramparts. The Christian women and the children accompanied him saying the Rosary and the litanies of the Virgin Mary: “Help of Christians, pray for us!”

     In July the Boxers called for help from the imperial army. Several thousand soldiers armed with rifles and old guns [and brandishing their yellow standard containing an image of the imperial dragon], gave the attack, forty-four times it is said. On each occasion they were repelled, leaving behind on the ground their guns and rifles. After 15 August, the news reached Donglu of the capture of Peking by foreign troops. The soldiers withdrew shouting from a distance, “Live in peace, we are leaving.” Twenty-two Christians had died, the majority in accidents caused by weapons which they had never handled before. Many Boxers, who later became converts, confessed that what frightened them most was a “White Lady” who had frequently appeared above the village. In their eyes this was an evident sign that whoever entered the village would not come out alive [it was the sign of the «Woman» victorious over the Dragon]...

     After the victorious resistance put up against the Boxers, the fortifications of the village were improved: large gates were built on the East, West, North and South, and above each gate were placed the following inscriptions: “Help of Christians”, “Tower of David”, “Saint Michael” and “Saint Louis, king”. The Lazarists built a large church, schools, and a convent for the Chinese nuns, the Josephines, who taught young girls. On 15 August 1915, Donglu became the centre of a deanery comprising thirteen parishes, nineteen priests and forty-two thousand Christians divided into some two hundred Christian communities. At the same time the country became a great centre of devotion to Mary. An early picture of the Virgin carrying the Child Jesus and surrounded by the Donglu faithful was placed behind the altar. It was Our Lady of Donglu.

     In 1908 Father Flament commissioned a more majestic picture from the Jesuit studio in Shanghai. This was Mary, Queen of China: the Virgin is dressed as the Empress of China sitting on Her imperial throne, and on Her left the little Jesus stands on the throne, decked out like a Chinese prince. At the top of the picture one reads: “Mother of God, Queen of Donglu, pray for us.”

     In 1928 the apostolic delegate Mgr Costantini and several bishops asked Father Trémorin, a Lazarist Father and the local parish priest, to turn Donglu into a place of pilgrimage. In May 1929 [the year of the apparitions at Tuy!], the pilgrimage was solemnly inaugurated in the presence of four bishops. During the Second World War, the Japanese army and the Communist guerrillas devastated the area. The church buildings were all set on fire on Holy Saturday 1941.

     Today the Christian community of Donglu is rising from its ruins. A large basilica dedicated to Our Lady of China was under construction from March 1989 to May 1992. The enormous brick building capped with sparkling metal sheets rises up on the edge of the village. Two high spires point towards heaven. Like a Chinese Chartres, the large gothic building towers above an immense plain where an abundance of corn and maize grow. It is the work of poor peasants, who remain Catholic over and above anything else. Every year in May, more than twenty thousand Christians come on foot from all over the region, treating the road barriers installed by the security forces with open contempt.

(FATHER J CHARBONNIER, HISTORY OF THE CHRISTIANS OF CHINA, DESCLÉE, 1992, p. 241-243)     

PS: The history of Donglu, the jewel of the Lazarist missions in North China, is highly symbolic. Before its conversion, the village was divided into two “clans”. The labours of the Lazarist missionaries, as well as the miracles and graces that the Immaculate poured out in profusion, made this Christian community a magnificent achievement, but under the Communist persecution the old ancestral divisions reappeared, setting “underground” Catholics against “official” Catholics. Tomorrow, the Immaculate will perform the miracle of uniting these Catholics in one and the same Church!