For over seventy years, Catholics in China have faced an extraordinarily painful dilemma: remain loyal to Rome and risk arrest, imprisonment, torture and persecution, or join the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) state-controlled “patriotic” church and risk selling out their souls. Few stories illustrate this stark choice more clearly than the lives of two rival Shanghai bishops: Cardinal Ignatius Kung Pin-mei and Bishop Louis Jin Luxian. Both men spent years in prisons and labour camps. But Cardinal Kung stayed loyal to the Vatican until the end, refusing to compromise, while Bishop Jin was drawn in and rose to become one of the most senior leaders of the state-controlled church.
7:34 AM
China’s Church divided: loyalty, compromise and the cost of faith
Fr Paul Mariani’s China’s Church Divided traces the lives of two Shanghai bishops whose choices — one loyal to Rome, the other to Beijing — expose the deep moral and political fractures faced by China’s Catholics under Communist rule.
Benedict Rogers
6 min read
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