The Voices of 20th-Century Chinese Martyrs

The Voices of 20th-Century Chinese Martyrs | Anthony E. Clark, Ph.D. | Catholic World Report

The stories of those Catholics persecuted under Mao are powerful, if often suppressed, evidence of the faith of the Chinese people.

The truth is always more complicated than fiction. While it is tempting to portray the Church in China in monochrome, a more accurate depiction provides us with a polychromatic canvas, and this more truthful painting casts more honest lights on both China and the Church. Let me give you an example.

When the founder of the Society of the Divine Word, Johann Baptist von Anzer, established his mission in China during the late 19th century, he brought with him an intense German nationalism, just as the French Jesuits had carried French nationalism with them when they built churches, schools, and French market areas in Shanghai. When Anzer arrived at his mission he draped a massive German flag from his church steeple and above the veranda of his rectory he installed a sign that read, “Vivat, crescat, floreat Germania,” or “May Germany live, flourish, and grow.” German nationalist songs were often intoned from his chapel with brio, and the native Chinese wondered if missionaries like him came to convert China or colonize it. Only a short decade previously, Britain had bombed China’s shores and bullied its court into legalizing the sale of Western opium, as well as to open all China to foreign missionaries. It did not help matters that Christian missionaries were thereafter connected to guns and opium in the eyes of most Chinese. There is little mystery, then, why common Chinese had become suspicious of Westerners and their religion. But despite appearances, most missionaries were not in favor of guns and opium, nor were most missionaries in favor of open displays of European nationalism.

I often tell my students that propaganda involves telling only one side of a story. And the more they read about history based on primary sources the more they agree with this assertion. Too often, historical monographs provide biased and un-nuanced depictions of the past, recounting a history that validates one’s preconceptions rather than explain what really happened.

Gerolamo Fazzini’s The Red Book of Chinese Martyrs, a collection of primary biographies, autobiographies, and documentation of Catholic martyrdom in modern China, provides readers with first-hand testimonies of the turbulent Maoist era; readers can decide for themselves how to interpret China’s policies regarding the Catholic Church from 1949 until Mao’s death in 1976. And by presenting these sources unedited, Fazzini avoids propaganda, allowing those witnesses to present both the brutal years of suppression and the more lenient years that followed Mao.

The Maoist interpretation of Christianity in China was formed both by Mao’s knowledge of Western imperialism (mixed as it was with mission churches marked by foreign flags) and Marxist materialism, which views religion as a form of self-comfort under the yoke of class exploitation. There is almost no evidence that Mao, or his comrades, truly understood the history, belief, and goals of Christianity apart from its nationalist underpinnings. While there were a few Christian missionaries, both Catholic and Protestant, who indeed embraced the imperialist enterprise in China, it is incontestable that the greater majority of these foreigners loved China and expressed that love through unselfish acts of charity. The manifest value of Fazzini’s book is that it consists of a collection of original testimonies by Chinese Catholics who demonstrate a profound love of their own culture, while also expressing an abiding belief in God in an era of forceful transition. We do well to recall as we read these testimonies that it was not Chinese culture that most harshly persecuted Christianity, but rather Western Marxist materialism that inspired the suppression of all religious commitment.

Read the entire article at www.CatholicWorldReport.com.

The Introduction to The Red Book of Chinese Martyrs, by Gerolamo Fazzini, can be read on Ignatius Insight.