Milan (AsiaNews) – Bishop Placidus Pei Ronggui, underground bishop of Luoyang, passed away on Saturday at the age of 91 in China. A Trappist monk originally from Hebei, he was ordained into the priesthood only in 1981, when he was 48, well after the Cultural Revolution. Nevertheless, he was imprisoned several times after 1989, for a total of four years, after he refused to join certain organisations of China’s official Catholic Church, controlled by the Communist Party.
His very experience with the Trappist monastic order was extremely significant. Before Mao’s rise to power, Hebei Province was home to two Trappist abbeys. The first, Our Lady of Consolation, in Yangchiaping (present-day Zhangjiakou), was destroyed in 1947 by communist militias. In the second, Our Lady of Joy in Chengting (present-day Zhengding), the monks were forced to flee after 33 of them were killed.
After various ups and downs, the monks were welcomed in Hong Kong, where Mgr Enrico Valtorta, a PIME missionary, served as the local bishop. In the early 1950s, he helped them reopen the monastery of Our Lady of Joy in Thai Shui Hang, in Hong Kong’s New Territories.
Bishop Pei was familiar about this tragic story from the times he was very young, and felt close to his fellow Trappists. In 2001, with the consent of the Holy See, he was ordained by Bishop Peter Li Hongye as his coadjutor for the underground Diocese of Luoyang, in the neighbouring province of Henan.
Bishop Li also spent a long time in prison out of loyalty to the Church, but when he died suddenly of a heart attack during the Easter Vigil in 2011, Bishop Pei also retired, returning to live in his village in Hebei, in a room he had turned into a chapel where he could perform his priestly ministry.
In 2016, Reuters met him in Hebei in the simple room where he heard confessions as part of a feature story about underground Catholic communities in China, when there was already talk of a possible agreement between Beijing and the Holy See on episcopal appointments.
“There’s no way there can be an independent (Catholic) Church (in China) because that is the opposite of the principles of the Catholic Church,” Pei told the news agency. “They (the Chinese government) have to change; if they don’t change, then the pope cannot agree with them.”
Following Bishop Pei’s death, sources in underground Catholic communities in China spoke to AsiaNews about the prelate.
“He once told us: 'In China, following the right path by believing in God and maintaining a pure faith inevitably leads to persecution’,” they said, “‘But even if we suffer a little to bear witness to God, all this is still a blessing from Him.’ We pray for Bishop Pei's soul and entrust ourselves to his intercession,” they added.
Reuters: Picture of Bishop Pei taken for the 2016 feature story on China’s underground Catholic communities.
