Milan (AsiaNews) - We are in the week leading up to 24 May, the feast of Mary Help of Christians, particularly dear to the Catholics of Shanghai, who venerate the Mother of Jesus under this title at the Sheshan shrine. And it is on this liturgical feast day that – since 2007, by the will of Benedict XVI – Christians throughout the world are invited to observe the Day of Prayer for the Church in China.
This is a precious opportunity to preserve the memory of the many Christians in 20th-century China who, at the cost of great suffering and in many cases even their very lives, kept the faith alive despite the persecutions of the communist regime. And to reflect on the journey of the Church in China today, which, although in a different era, is by no means free from serious forms of restriction on religious freedom.
This is the context that has prompted AsiaNews, in collaboration with the PIME Missionary Centre, to host an event on Thursday 21 May at 6.00 pm at its headquarters at Via Monte Rosa 81 in Milan. The evening will feature the presentation of the book “Calvary in China. The Last Parish Priest of Tong’an”, recently published by Edizioni Ares. The volume is the Italian translation, edited by the scholar Valeria Stella Papis, of the historic diary “Calvary in China” written by Fr Robert Greene, who served for fifteen years as a Maryknoll missionary in a town in Guangxi province where he experienced imprisonment, and which was published in 1953 in New York, a year after his release.
Even now, more than seventy years on, Father Greene’s account remains an important reference point for understanding what happened in China with the rise to power of Mao Zedong (the 50th anniversary of whose death falls this September). It is not certain which was the first published account of the sufferings endured by Chinese Christians during those years; but this book is unique in that it recounts them from a particular perspective: not a major city, but a rural setting such as Tong’an in Guangxi. A place where there had never even been a prison before the advent of the Communists. And where Father Greene, confined to his mission (though by no means spared the horrors of ideological violence), was able to witness first-hand the persecution and indoctrination of what was his community. A process that the missionary recounts in the book through the description of a highly effective gallery of characters.
“There is a duty to remember, and in particular to remember the martyrs of the 20th century, all martyrs, under any regime, without any further reticence,” writes the editorial director of AsiaNews, Fr. Gianni Criveller, a PIME missionary, in the preface to this Italian translation of the book. “The confessors and martyrs of the Church in China belong to the whole of Christendom.
It is the duty and right of Catholics to make their testimonies known so that they may nourish the faith of believers in Christian communities throughout the world. The open persecution of believers continued in China until the end of the Cultural Revolution (October 1976). The protagonists of that period of persecution have now almost all passed away. It is to be hoped that Chinese Catholics will gather the stories of suffering and martyrdom that have not yet been recorded and preserve them.”
“Greene’s book,” comments Father Criveller, “may draw the reader in like a detective novel. Except that, unfortunately, it is not fiction, and there is no happy ending, at least for the believers for whom Fr Greene devoted his life. As in other accounts of that period, those tumultuous years bear witness to heroic fidelity to the faith and loyalty in relationships with people.”
“Greene also describes the transformation that ideological propaganda is capable of bringing about in people,” continues the editorial director of AsiaNews, “some of whom become capable of feelings of hatred and violent actions that they would probably never have expressed under normal circumstances. Greene describes the almost religious messianism that, probably sincerely, motivated a generation of young people who believed in the realisation of a communist society. While the generous willingness of so many young people to sacrifice themselves for the communist cause is in some ways admirable, the justification of the most horrific violence as a necessary price to pay leaves one perplexed, not to say horrified.”
“What remains,” concludes the PIME missionary, “is the bitter realisation of an enormous waste of possibilities and promises that could not be fulfilled: young Christian communities cut short in their infancy; unfinished social, health and religious services; suppressed religious vocations; the beginnings of religious conversions cut short. The deprivation of many years of life for people confined to imprisonment, exile or forced labour, and the loss of numerous human lives, often young and promising.”
All this will be commemorated on the evening of 21 May in Milan with a talk by curator Valeria Papis, who will speak about the figure of Fr Greene and the general context of the persecution against Chinese Catholic communities in the 1950s. Fr Criveller, meanwhile, will speak about the current situation of Catholic communities in China, amidst new trials and a thirst for unity with the universal Church. Admission is free
