The Pope on the 9th of January gave audience to the diplomatic corps accredited to the Holy See and made an important speech. According to custom, he outlined what the current situation in the world is and spoke about Faith, with special emphasis on the great suffering of people in certain places and situations, due to the violation of a fundamental human right, the freedom to believe in God and to pray.
He spoke of Africa, of Israel and of Pakistan, but in the speech there was no mention whatsoever of a country that is as large as a whole continent, a country where the religious freedom of Catholics, Christians and many other faiths is constantly violated, that country is mainland China.
This is a heavy omission especially as there are people in China who pay continuously and dearly for their loyalty to the Pope and the Roman Catholic Church.
Once more, like in the days of the Soviet Union and the Iron Curtain, the Church faces a dramatic dilemma, having to choose between a duty to denounce an oppressive dictatorship and the need to follow a line of conduct that will not jeopardize the possibility of finding opportunities for dialogue and openings to gain freedom for the Church.
The speech that the Pope gives every year at the beginning of January to the diplomatic corps is influenced by the care and attention of the Second Section of the Secretariat of State, the Vatican version of the ‘ Ministry of Foreign Affairs’.
Benedict XVI’s omission concerning the Church in China points to a desire to avoid provoking the ‘Land of the Dragon’ at a time when a new balance is being sought after the tensions and rifts of the recent past.
The omission is an understandable move, but also a really sad one. Especially as there are those who, forgotten by almost everyone, have been languishing in prison for decades.
In the last two weeks of 2010 the news agency ‘AsiaNews’ awarded a controversy-inspiring prize to those who in 2010 ‘had no public recognition and were forgotten in spite of having fought for years for truth, dignity and justice’.
It was a prize to the ‘famous unknown’.
The winners who sadly did really deserve this prize are two great unknowns, two Chinese bishops of the Church forced ‘underground’, who have been held by the police for decades.
Little is known of their fate.
The first is Monsignor Giacomo Su Zhimin, 80 years old, Bishop of Baoding (Hebei) arrested by the police on the 8th of October 1997.
Since then no one has been able to learn what he was accused of, whether a trial ever happened or where he is being held. In November 2003 he was found by chance in a hospital in Baoding, surrounded by police.
The authorities granted his relatives a brief visit, and then once more the old bishop disappeared shrouded by the secrecy surrounding police matters.
The second is Monsignor Cosma Shi Enxiang, 90 years old, bishop of Yixian (Hebei) arrested on the 13th of April 2001. We know even less about him. His relatives and followers keep asking for news from the police with patience and perseverance, but obviously with no luck.
The world’s press rightly got involved in order to support famous Chinese dissidents such as the Nobel Prize Liu Xiaobo or the great Bao Tong and with the publicity news spread also across the web.
Unfortunately, however, people like the two bishops, true prophets of the opposition since they have fought for decades for one of the most important and vital human rights, that of believing in God, will not be remembered.
They are prophets because they have fought for the freedom of the individual, they were among the first to be arrested and condemned, the first to launch appeals to the international community and the first to be forgotten.
Their life story is an emblem of loyalty.
Their life story is an emblem of loyalty.
Even before the last time he was arrested, Monsignor Su Zhimin had previously spent at least 26 years in and out of prison or forced-labour camps. He was branded as a counter-revolutionary just because since the 1950s he had refused to become a member of the Chinese Patriotic Association, which wants to create a national Church separate from Rome.
In 1996 while he was hiding from the police, he managed to circulate an open letter to the Chinese Government urging it to respect human rights and the religious freedom of the people. In total he has already spent 40 years in prison.
Monsignor Shi Enxiang has been in jail for an even longer time. From 1957 to 1980 he went from forced rural labour in Heilongjiang to being a miner in the coal mines of Shanxi. He was again incarcerated for three years in 1983, he was then under house arrest for another three years.
In 1989 when the conference of underground bishops was formed he was arrested once more and only released in 1993. Finally he was arrested again in 2001. At this present time, he has already spent 51 years in prison.
It is important to remember these men today, especially as there is a well-founded concern that the Chinese regime will torture them to death, as has happened in the past with other Chinese bishops (Monsignor Giuseppe Fan Xueyan in 1992; Monsignor Giovanni Gao Kexian in 2006; Monsignor Giovanni Han Dingxiang in 2007).
It is also important to remember them because the Chinese regime is afraid of them, so much so that last July it tried to stop Su Zhimin’s relatives in Baoding, Hebei, from celebrating his 80th birthday with prayers. There were police in the streets, mobile-phones were tapped and there was a ban against gathering in houses.
The incredible answer the Vatican has had from China when questions on the fate of the missing bishops have been tentatively asked during very private meetings with some Chinese bureaucrats has been, “We don’t know”.
Fearing that their fortune may worsen, their names are never even mentioned in the prayers for those who are persecuted.
There are doubts on whether and to what extent this soft-line of conduct may work with a regime of infinite arrogance, since it cannot even alleviate the suffering of the two old bishops or the scores of priests in the ‘underground’ Church who are also heroes and languish in Chinese camps.