The Catholic Weekly 17 May 2020

catholicweekly.com.au 12 17, May, 2020 FEATURE Chinese Catholics hold candles during the Easter Vigil Mass in Xi- aohan village, Tianjin, China, in 2009. PHOTO: CNS/VINCENT DU, REUTERS EVER SINCE the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) took power in 1949, critics and cou- rageous activists have worked to end its tyranny. But not everyone persisted in the fight. Those who do are often moti- vated by a religious faith which supported them through dec- ades of persecution. On 16 February in the mid- dle of China’s epidemic, hu- man rights activist and the leader of China’s ‘Weiquan’ (protection of rights) move- ment, Xu Zhiyong, was arrest- ed at his friend’s farm near the southern metropolis of Guangzhou. His crime was criticising President Xi Jinping and com- munist leaders for their initial response to the outbreak. At about the same time, a man who shares Mr Xu’s surname and disdain for the regime, Tsinghua University professor Xu Zhangrun, was placed under house arrest after he wrote an article po- litely asking President Xi to step down for the sake of the nation. Two months later, an un- likely ally also got into trouble with the regime for also asking Xi to step down. He is the wealthy ‘Red princeling’ (i.e. the descend- ants of the original Commu- nists who fought alongside Mao) and property tycoon Ren Zhiqiang, a man so brash and loquacious he earned himself the nickname ‘Big Cannon Ren’ in Beijing. Known for his outspoken criticism of the Beijing regime, despite being a Communist blueblood, Ren is now under investigation by the CCP Dis- ciplinary Committee (usually a pretext for jailing the per- son). Ever since President Xi came to power, hopes of form- ing a civil society in China and opening up the possibility for political reform have been dashed. The arrests of Xu Zhiyong and disciplining of Ren Zhi- qiang are simply the final ech- oes of that reformist dream, the last hurrah of a once-in- spirational hope. Does that mean all is lost? No. The most formidable ¾ ¾ William Huang foes of the CCP in its quest to maintain power are people who believe in a higher pow- er than the CCP, particularly Christians, both Protestant and Catholic. One shining example is the Protestant house churches, a uniquely Chinese phenome- non. House churches Since 1949, Christian churches in China have ex- perienced several waves of persecution. But one of mod- ern China’s greatest miracles has also come out of it — the house churches. House churches, to para- phrase one of its most famous leaders, Pastor Wang Yi of the Chengdu Early Rain Covenant Church, are the only organisa- tional bodies that have man- aged to escape subjugation China’s stubborn Christians The Communist Party has done its best to stamp out fast-growing evangelical Christianity. But it’s efforts seemdoomed to fail by the CCP (although Pastor Wang also includes the un- derground Catholic Church). They grew out of defiance against the Chinese govern- ment’s elaborate campaign to force all churches to de- nounce their “foreign” roots, cut foreign ties and come under the wings of the CCP, aka the “Three-Self Patriotic Movement”. The TSPM, a gov- ernment-controlled body, is the only officially sanctioned Protestant Christian body in China. All Protestant churches outside of TSPM are “illegal”, which of course includes Pas- tor Wang’s Early Rain church. The first house church- es were founded by Samu- el Lamb of Guangzhou and Wang Mingdao of Beijing. Despite undergoing intense pressure and fierce persecu- tion after refusing to join the TSPM, Wang stated in 1955 that he would not denounce the “imperialism” of Chris- tianity and that his church would be independent of the Chinese government. More than 65 years later, the house church movement, which only had a few hundred thousand people, less than a third of Chinese Christians in the 1950s (two-thirds joined the TSPM) and after the mar- tyrdom and jailing of hun- dreds of thousands of faithful, now has tens of millions of followers. More remarkable is the fact that generation after generation, new leaders take up the torch. Wang Mingdao and Samuel Lamb would be proud of pastors like Wang Yi and the ethnic Korean pastor Ezra Jin, who went on to build some of China’s largest urban house churches, numbering hundreds to thousands of faithful, in the 21st century. After Xi’s ascension to pow- er as General Secretary of the Communist Party in 2012, house churches suffered the same fate as secular activ- ists. Pastor Jin’s Beijing Zion Church was shut down, whilst Pastor Wang’s congregation and its illegal seminary saw waves of arrests and confisca- tions of all their church prop- erty, culminating in Pastor Wang’s sentence of nine years in prison in December 2019. However, house church members did not despair, silence themselves or dis- solve the congregation after their physical churches were closed. Jailed members con- tinued to spread the gospel in prison. Members outside continued to meet in groups The epic struggle of the house churches and their faithful members in China offers hope to Christians elsewhere. Matteo Ricci was an Italian Jesuit priest and one of the found- ing figures of the Jesuit China missions. His 1602 map of the world in Chinese characters introduced the findings of European explora- tion to East Asia. He is considered a Servant of God by the Catholic Church. Ricci arrived at the Portuguese set- tlement of Macau in 1582 where he began his missionary work in China. He became Jesuit Fr Matteo Ricci the first European to enter the Forbidden City of Beijing in 1601 when invited by the Wanli Emperor, who sought his services in matters such as court astronomy and calen- drical science. He con- verted several promi- nent Chinese officials to Catholicism, such as Xu Guangqi, who aided in translating Euclid’s Elements into Chinese as well as the Confucian classics into Latin for the first time. An illustration depicting Father Matteo Ricci in a traditional Chinese robe hangs in the Beijing Centre for Chinese Studies. PHOTO: CNS/NANCYWIECHEC