Schism in China

"Eternity was every day; Hell began at five in the morning." So Jesuit Thomas Phillips describes his life in a Chinese Communist jail. In a new book, I Met a Traveler (Farrar, Straus & Cudahy; $3.50), Fellow Jesuit Kurt Becker describes how Father Phillips, former rector of Shanghai's Church of Christ the King, spent three years (1953-56) in Shanghai cells, for the most part squatting in one position all day, forbidden to speak a word. By refusing to defend himself against any charge ("I know that I am here only because I am a Catholic priest, sir"), he finally thwarted his jailors' attempts to make him "confess."

The techniques and tortures of brainwashing are only one aspect of the Communists' unremitting war upon the Roman Catholic Church in China. Each week Rome learns new details of the Reds' increasingly successful drive, not to suppress but to capture the church in what is fast becoming one of the major schisms in Catholic history.

Weekly Torture. In charge of the program is a layman named Ho Chang-hsiang, officially in charge of the government's Department for Religious Affairs.

Ho began by ferreting out a few priests willing to collaborate as a step to higher rank, installed them in key posts. "Patriotic Priest" Chang Shih-liang, for one, has run the Shanghai diocese since the jailing of Shanghai's Bishop Kung Pinmei in 1955, goes about dressed in full bishop's regalia, including mitre. Ho's most recent refinement is to force valid bishops to consecrate Communist bishops, thereby attempting to maintain Roman Catholic validity. With liturgically correct bootleg rites, he has created ten "progressive" bishops, is planning consecrations for Nanking, Suchow and Hanchow, will soon appoint new bishops for Canton and Shanghai. When Bishop Li Tao-nan of Puichi was first ordered to consecrate bishops, he refused. But after two weeks of torture, he surrendered. Last April he officiated at the consecration of Tung Kwang-ching of Hankow and Yuan Wenhua of Wuchang.

Such consecrations are valid because by definition a bishop has the power to create other bishops--a power which, in Catholic doctrine, is transmitted in unbroken line from the apostles themselves. But no bishop may exert jurisdiction over a diocese without specific appointment from Rome. China's new "progressive" bishops are therefore subject to excommunication.

Daily Lesson. So far, Rome's response has been gentle. Having no lines of communication with its captive flock in China, Vatican officials explain, the church cannot distinguish clearly between Chinese priests forced to collaborate under extreme duress and those who merely succumb to ambition.

Today, at least half the remaining 3,000-odd Chinese priests are in prison or are undergoing three daily two-hour "indoctrinations" on the advantages of joining the Patriotic Association. "We are groping in the darkness," wrote one of them in a letter smuggled from Shanghai to Hong Kong. The "tumultuous" Red preaching sessions "are enough to drive one mad," he added. "The director is always present. He pounds the table, shouts, yells and screams at the stalling tactics of the assembled priests. You can't imagine how these rabid talkers force you to think, concede, admit, and at last get you on their side . . .

"They pretend not to force or impose on us. They insist, again and again, breaking us down. One is finally prepared to say: 'Well, have it your own way.' But they won't accept that. They want us to concede as though we proposed it, to submit as we would to our own self-imposed directives. What are we to do? Everyone well realizes that little by little, outward resistance will be weakened, that eventually, only one's innermost, secret adherence to faith will be possible."

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