The Two Sides of China’s Party

The Two Sides of China’s Party | Anthony E. Clark, Ph.D. | Catholic World Report

Remembering Fr. Charles McCarthy, SJ, an American Jesuit in Shanghai.

I have lived in China several times since my first stay in 1996, when I lived in Beijing as a Chinese language student. Deng Xiaoping was still alive then, and people thought that China was emerging from its hard-line era of Chairman Mao. And much has indeed changed since Deng took office and reformed China’s economic policies. I am once again in Beijing, this time during the Eighteenth Party Congress: newspapers, television specials, and long red banners with Communist slogans have covered the city in a “Red” canvas of optimism, and . . . propaganda. Here is one example: turning the corner after Mass this morning was an enormous red banner reminiscent of the Maoist era. “Long live the great people of China! Long live the great Communist Party of China! (伟大的中国人民万岁！伟大的中国共产党万岁！).” Slogans such as these are being given new birth as China struggles to redefine itself as a Communist country that is growing more conspicuously wealthy as Western countries grow more economically challenged. Exiting from the subway I saw still another banner extolling how Socialism will “manifest a great resurgence of the Chinese people! (实现中华民族伟大的复兴！).”

As the Party Congress continued, I thought it would be opportune to write a column on the other side of the Party, one that only fifty years ago imprisoned foreign priests, nuns, and Chinese Catholics, accusing them of being “spies,” “saboteurs’,” and “counterrevolutionaries.” One of the priests arrested in the 1950s was Father Charles McCarthy, a Jesuit from the California Province who lived and served in Shanghai until the Party arrested him and placed him in a small prison cell.

An American Jesuit in China: From California to Shanghai

The great German polymath, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, once wrote, “The moment one commits oneself, then Providence moves too. All sorts of things occur to help. A whole stream of events issue from the decision, raising in one’s favor all manner of incidents and meetings and material assistance which no one could have dreamed would come his way.” Some rare and adventurous missionaries in

China have left such extraordinary footprints in the Middle Kingdom so as to confirm Goethe’s assertion. Father Charles McCarthy, SJ, was such a man, whose uncommon mixture of intellect and piety fashioned one of China’s most tireless evangelists for the Gospel, and a gentle friend of the Chinese people. McCarthy’s life in China is hardly imaginable to most people; he was detained twice while in Asia, interned first by the Japanese from 1942-1945, and then later imprisoned by the Chinese from 1953-1957 during the radical Maoist era, and through all of his trials Fr. McCarthy remained an unwavering example of the Ignatian spirit, to, as Saint Ignatius of Loyola advised his successors, “give and not count the cost.”

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