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9/21/2017 0 Comments SAINT NICOLAS DU CHARDONNET, first published in Catholic Family News, December 2005 RECAPTURED PARIS CHURCH PRESERVES TRUE MASS By Theresa Marie Moreau First Published in Catholic Family News, December 2005 ---- A single tap of a priest’s knuckle upon the blackened mahogany arm of a choir chair signals the morning’s recitation of the Divine Office. The Roman-collared men gathered in the sanctuary of St. Nicolas du Chardonnet de Paris raise the breviaries they hold in their hands and flip the thin pages until each finds the day’s prayers. “Deus, in adjutórium meum inténde (O God, come to my assistance),” the church’s pastor, seated on the Gospel side of the altar, chants in a rich voice. From the Epistle side, four priests respond, “Dómine, ad adjuvándum me festína (O Lord, make haste to help me).” Their prayers rise. In the nave, a baker’s dozen of parishioners—some kneeling, others sitting—assist with their own prayers, in silence. For the next fifteen minutes, the men, dressed in the ankle-length, death-black cassocks appeal to God. They stand. They bow. They nod. They cross themselves in pious affirmations, as the first rays from the morning’s sun seep through the stained-glass depiction of the Crucifixion, two stories overheard. Although Catholic churches held rites like these for centuries, St. Nicolas du Chardonnet is no ordinary church. Freed from the diocesan bishop’s strangulating jurisdiction of the post-Second Vatican Council’s “new-and-improved” Roman Catholic Church, St. Nicolas, located at 23 rue des Bernardins in Paris, is one of a few churches in secular France that regularly and exclusively offers the traditional Latin-rite Mass. It all began in 1977. In Paris at that time, there was one old priest who clung to the Tridentine Mass of Pope St. Pius V, codified on July 14, 1570 following the Council of Trent (1545-63). The old religious Frenchman refused to go along with the progressives, the priests who experimented with innovations tossed into the Novus Ordo Missae (the New Order of the Mass). That man was the Rev. François Ducaud-Bourget, ordained in 1934. A bit on the short side, he stood slightly hunched over, with a hook nose that protruded from the center of his small face flanked by long tufts of white hair covering his ears. At times he pointed his crooked finger through the air to emphasize certain points in his sermons, always delivered with traditional instruction on morals and doctrine. He never went the way of the post-Vatican II folksy style of the self-reflective, feel-good homily commonly punctuated with jokes to keep the parishioners happy—and awake. He wouldn’t degrade himself, or his office, in that way. Even though Pope Paul VI had signed the Apostolic Constitution Missale Romanum on April 3, 1969, thereby handing the Church a reformed Missal, Ducaud-Bourget disdained the man-centered modernizations. He kept his back to parishioners. He continued to face the altar and to pray the ancient rite. As those before him, he began in the beginning with Psalm 42, a preparation for the sacrifice of the Mass, and ended with the emotionally inspiring Last Gospel. “He never said the New Mass. Never,” says Monsieur l’abbé (the Rev.) Bernard Lorber, of the Fraternité Sacerdotale Saint-Pie X (the Society of St. Pius X) and the premier vicaire of St. Nicolas. Best described as a priest independent from the diocese, in the ’70s Ducaud-Bourget frequently rented a meeting place where he could offer the Latin Mass for the community. Sometimes he paid for a room in the La Salle Wagram, a banquet hall near the Arc de Triomphe, at other times a room in Maubert Mutalité Lecture Hall, a building very near St. Nicolas du Chardonnet. But on February 27, 1977, Ducaud-Bourget had a plan. When traditionalists met at Maubert that Sunday, the old priest led everyone across the street to St. Nicolas, which suffered greatly from the chronic Novus Ordo syndrome: spiritual neglect. From 1968 to 1977, diocesan priests from the parish church, St. Severin, located a few blocks away, only opened the doors of St. Nicolas for a single new Mass once a week. Usually, only a handful of parishioners bothered to show up. Ducaud-Bourget hoped to inject some supernatural powers of Jesus, Mary and Joseph back into the church, thereby inoculating it against the fatalistic forces of humanistic relativism. He had no idea how successful he would be. “It was his intention to say the Mass here on this Sunday, then to pray during the day and then to leave the place after,” Lorber says. “But there were so many people, they thought they would stay one more day, then one more day, then one more day, then one more day. Eventually, they decided to stay here, to remain here forever.” There was only one problem: The occupation was illegal. Even though the diocesan bishop of Paris was deemed the caretaker for the property at the time, it was (and still is) the state of France that owns every church built in that nation before 1905. Going back a few years, in 1905, the Law of Separation of the Churches and the State (Loi de Séparation des Eglises et de L’Etat) made it official that the state of France no longer recognized the Roman Catholic Church, but only distinct associations cultuelles (associations for worship), ordered established in each parish. Where no associations formed, the state declared it would take possession of the church property. From his seat in the Vatican, Pope Pius X looked toward France and feared spiritual demoralization: state intervention in religious parish life. To take a firm stance against the meddling modernists, the Vicar of Christ, in his 1906 encyclical “Gravissimo oficii,” forbade the formation of any associations cultuelles. Thus, Rome forfeited property for principle. “The Church lost everything,” says the Rev. Thierry Gaudray, 38-year-old professor of Dogmatic Theology at St. Thomas Aquinas Seminary, in Winona, Minnesota. “Police entered the churches with guns. They opened the tabernacles. They forced out of the churches and onto the street the priests and nuns,” Gaudray describes. Everything the Church had gained with the Concordat of 1801, it lost in 1905. Not only had the nineteenth-century agreement between Napoleon Bonaparte and Pope Pius VII officially raised the recognition of Catholicism as the religion of the majority of French citizens, but it also stipulated that the state would financially support the clergy, which it did. Although one hundred years ago the Church lost its spot in France’s secular pecking order, it wasn’t a total loser, exactly. For when the state took custody of church property, at least it allowed bishops to remain in charge of the churches. With one single stipulation: In every church, one Mass was to be said each year. If not, the state would retake control of the sacred structure and do with it what it wanted. “So, St. Nicolas was part of the diocese of Paris, and the bishop of Paris was in charge of the building, but the state did own it,” Gaudray clarifies. “Ducaud-Bourget took the church against the will of the bishop, which was illegal. Taking over a church, to enter a church and to take over, it is illegal.” The state did decide to take legal action, but only after Ducaud-Bourget and his army of Church Militants had entrenched themselves deep in their sacred battlefield. For even on the first night when Ducaud-Bourget and the others entered St. Nicolas, they had adoration of the Blessed Sacrament. That lasted for the entire first week. What could officials do against a bunch of pacifist worshipers? “The police could do nothing, because the people prayed,” Lorber says. Months following St. Nicolas’ liberation from the Conciliar Church, the state indeed tried Ducaud-Bourget and issued a decree of expulsion. However, officials never executed the judgment. It’s now 2005, twenty-eight years later, and traditionalists continue to occupy St. Nicolas. Seated in the same sacristy where Ducaud-Borget sat, Lorber looks toward the altar as he tries to explain the state’s inaction. “Every Sunday, Monseigneur had 5,000 people here in St. Nicolas, and if they were forced to leave this church, they would just go to another church and takeover that one. Officials understood it would be the same problem, so they understood it was best to keep silent about our action. So they decided to do nothing, to leave us here.” And even if the diocese wanted to take back St. Nicolas, on principle, it wouldn’t work, Lorber says. The diocese wouldn’t be able to occupy all the churches. They don’t have enough faithful who attend Mass. Although a reported eighty-five percent of the 60.4 million French claims to be Roman Catholic, it is uncertain how many regularly go to church on Sunday. For a time, Ducaud-Bourget took care of the church, but he was already old. Desperate to continue the traditional efforts he resurrected in St. Nicolas, he sought help from one of the most vociferous defenders of the Tridentine Mass: Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre, who in 1969 founded the Society of St. Pius X, an order dedicated to the training of priests in the rites of the ancient Church, pre-Second Vatican Council style. Lefebvre aided Ducaud-Bourget and dispatched one of the Society’s priests to help the elderly man. Despite the leadership he demonstrated in his part to keep the old Mass alive, Lefebvre has had his detractors. Or maybe it was because of his leadership. Through the years, critics of the archbishop have accused him of being a religious Pied Piper responsible for leading a whole legion of Catholics into excommunication. That often-repeated description is absolutely not accurate, snaps Lorber, who explains that Lefebvre was already settled into retirement in 1968 when several young seminarians visited him. Unhappy with the Conciliar Church, they approached him and begged him to teach them the traditions of the faith, to pass on what he, himself, had learned. “The seminarians went to him and asked him why had did not found a seminary. He did not want to,” Lorber says. “I am an old man,” Lefebvre told them and sent the young men to a seminary in Fribourg, Switzerland. However, the modernistic teachings in that religious school were no better than any other seminary. The following year, the desperate seminarians and priests returned and insisted the archbishop establish a seminary where novitiates could learn the ancient-yet-solid foundations of the faith, including the Tridentine Mass. Lefebvre acquiesced. Meanwhile, in Paris, Ducaud-Bourget continued the occupation of St. Nicolas until his death in 1984. Subsequently, his body was interred behind the main altar, where he had offered the old Mass every day in the last years of his life. After the old priest’s death, Lefebvre sent two more priests from the Society to the Parisian church. Ducaud-Bourget’s dream would not die with him. Sticklers to tradition, like those in the Society, made the hierarchy in Rome cringe. Since the adoption of the vernacular rite in 1969, the Vatican found it had to deal with the holdovers who preferred the Latin Mass and refused to offer or even attend the new Mass, claiming it was a Protestantized fabrication. Only a couple years into his pontificate, Pope John Paul II established a nine-cardinal commission at the Vatican to study the Mass problem. On October 3, 1984, the Congregation for Divine Worship issued its circular letter, “Quattor Abhinc Annos.” This document describes the granting of and the restrictions placed on what is now commonly referred to as the Indult Mass. Indult, from the Latin indulgere (to indulge), is a privilege granted by the pope to bishops and others to do an action that the law of the Church otherwise prohibits. Yet the term “Indult” is misplaced, since the Latin Tridentine Mass has never been prohibited, which Alfons Maria Cardinal Stickler—one of the nine cardinals on the commission—admitted in May 1995 while speaking at a ChristiFideles conference held in New Jersey. Stipulations in the 1984 “Indult” included that the Mass only be offered (definitely not in parish churches) to those who request it, and those parishioners could in no way share the beliefs of those who question and doubt the validity of the new Mass. Meanwhile, the Society of St. Pius X continued to flourish and continued to offer the old Mass, not only at St. Nicolas, but also at other churches around the world. Lorber, now 41 years old, has witnessed much of the Society’s growth, despite the hardships the traditionalist order has had to endure at the manipulative hands of the hierarchy. Ordained on June 29, 1988, Lorber was one of the last to have his hands consecrated by Lefebvre, who died in 1991. A few weeks before his ordination, Lorber served the low Mass for the archbishop in the Notre Dame des Champs Chapel in the Seminary of Ecône on May 8, a Sunday. Lefebvre told Lorber how during the month before, in April 1988, he went to Rome to discuss with the Vatican the impending consecration of the bishops he had planned to take his place for the administering of sacraments, the ordaining of priests and the confirming of the faithful. Born in 1905, the archbishop was old and did not want to leave his priests without a spiritual leader. The Vatican’s representative at that time was Joseph Ratzinger, then a cardinal and now Pope Benedict XVI. In the end, after lengthy discussions and many compromises, a protocol was signed on May 5, 1988. The agreement stipulated that Rome would give Lefebvre one bishop and a commission in Rome to discuss the traditional Mass. “Ratzinger was quite hard with Archbishop Lefebvre,” Lorber says. After Lefebvre signed the protocol, he told Ratzinger that he had already announced the episcopal consecrations for the following June 30. Ratzinger’s response: No. It’s not possible. August? asked Lefebvre. No. It’s not possible, Ratzinger responded. November? No. December? No. Lefebvre left Rome and sought solace at the Seminary of Ecône, in Switzerland. He prayed. On May 6, he wrote to the Vatican and expressed that he did not have confidence in the agreement. “During the discussions with Rome, it was very painful,” Lefebvre told Lorber, “It was very painful, because they don’t take care of their souls. The only one thing they try to do is save their image, and this is why I will consecrate the bishops without Rome.” But the Vatican continued to pressure the archbishop. “The day before the consecrations, Rome sent a messenger, a nuncio from Switzerland, to take Archbishop Lefebvre back with him. The Pope asked if he could go to Rome to talk with him. The seminarians told him it was a good joke,” Lorber says. “The intention was to make Lefebvre nervous about the consecrations, but it didn’t disturb Archbishop Lefebvre.” Nothing bothered him. Not even the rumors circulating that he would be “excommunicated” if he went ahead with his plans for June 30. As for the excommunication of bishops, there were precedents. Decades earlier, in the 1950s, Pope Pius XII introduced into Canon Law, the prohibition of bishops consecrating bishops without papal approval. The Pope found this necessary after the Communist takeover in China. That was when the faithful of the Roman Catholic Church (the Underground Chinese Catholics) in China found themselves persecuted after the rise of the Chinese Patriotic Church (the pseudo-religious association that collaborated with the Chinese Communist government), explains Gaudray. “The law of the Church is for the good of the souls, so when Pius XII issued the decree of excommunication for the bishops in China, it was for the good of the Church. It was to prevent the setting up of the national church in China, which is not Catholic. It was to make people aware that the Pope does not agree at all and for them not to be part of the schismatic church,” Gaudray says. “The purpose of Archbishop Lefebvre was not to form another Church. Our bishops do not have authority, even in the Society. We have bishops for the sacraments, ordinations and confirmations. In China it was to form a Church.” The day finally arrived. Lefebvre predicted in his sermon before the consecrations there would be an attempt to excommunicate him. Nonetheless, on June 30, without papal permission, Lefebvre consecrated four bishops: Bernard Fellay, Bernard Tissier de Mallerais, Richard Williamson and Alfonso de Galarreta. “Many realized that the consecrations was an historic event for the Church,” Lorber says. It was a matter of preservation, not of the self, but of the faith. As predicted, on July 1, 1988, the Vatican, represented by Bernardinus Cardinal Gantin, prefect of the Congregation of Bishops, issued the following: “I declare that the above-mentioned Monsignor Marcel Lefebvre, and Bernard Fellay, Bernard Tissier de Mallerais, Richard Williamson and Alfonso de Galarreta have incurred ipso facto excommunication latae sententiae reserved to the Apostolic See.” This was accompanied by even more threats. “The priests and faithful are warned not to support the schism of Monsignor Lefebvre, otherwise they shall incur ipso facto the very grave penalty of excommunication.” Excommunication, explains Gaudray from his office in Winona, is a severe technical punishment issued by the Pope that severs all ties between the chastised and the Church. Penalized priests cannot give or receive the sacraments. They cannot offer or even attend Mass (new or old). “This, of course, means it is a punishment, but it implies a fault, that something is wrong,” Gaudray says. Both Gaudray and Lorber claim the excommunication was unjustified. For, they believe, Lefebvre committed no wrongdoing. “This excommunication has no value, really,” Lorber says. “Because for there to be punishment, one must have done something wrong. Archbishop Lefebvre didn’t have any schismatic intention by consecrating the bishops. His act was never a wrong, and he should never have been punished. Furthermore, by excommunicating Archbishop Lefebvre, Rome lost its credibility, because it lets bishops and theologians, like Hans Küng, Leonardo Boff and all the liberal theologians run around and teach heresies, and they were never excommunicated by John Paul II.” Lefebvre only tried to keep the old Mass, and the true Catholic religion, alive. “Without the actions of Archbishop Lefebvre, there would not be anymore priests who could say the Tridentine Mass,” Lorber says. Thus, the traditional priests of St. Nicolas continue the ancient rites of the one, holy, catholic, apostolic Church they learned from the old archbishop, coaxed out of retirement, reluctantly. Still, every morning, a single tap of a priest’s knuckle upon the blackened mahogany arm of a choir chair signals the morning’s recitation of the Divine Office. The Roman-collared men gathered in the sanctuary of St. Nicolas du Chardonnet de Paris raise the breviaries they hold in their hands and flip the thin pages until each finds the day’s prayers. “Deus, in adjutórium meum inténde,” chants one, followed by the others responding, “Dómine, ad adjuvándum me festína.”
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The small river beside my home was called Erdao River, which means "the second river." It was actually a creek no wider than fifteen yards. Its greenish water had a slow moving, gelatinous appearance. It emanated the kind of pungent stink only humans could release -- the stink from garbage, human waste and worse. Once on my way home from a mass rally downtown, I was crossing the wooden bridge over the Erdao River when I noticed some movement under the bridge. I stuck my head out over the rail to see a middle-aged man stuffing an infant's body into a gunnysack. A middle-aged spectator told me it was "just a little dead kid." "There are many of them if you walk along the riverbed." He went on, with an even tone, in an attempt to calm me down. "But why are they here? They should be buried, shouldn't they?" He then explained to me that illegitimate or other unwanted babies were routinely strangled or drowned and then thrown into the river at night when no one was around. "Oh. So he is going to bury them." I was still recovering from my shock. "You are not from here, are you?" He wants these dead babies to use their brains to make antidotes for mental retardation. You've never heard of such a concoction in traditional Chinese medicine?" I didn't know what to feel. I hurried home and sat on the edge of the kang. Mother was yelling at me to buy some corn flour at the local grain store, but I was unable to respond. My mind was boiling. I could not erase those images and sounds from my mind -- the dark figure with the bag in his hands, the tiny pale feet, the shadows on the bridge, the music of "The East Is Red" billowing from the loudspeakers in the central square. Nothing had a reason. Nothing had a purpose. Nothing had meaning.  One day I was sorrowfully concluding my morning duties in Ch’en Lu Che, one of the parishes under my care, whose priest had been arrested by the Reds. The big bell in the village sounded, and a frightened youth, who had been the priest’s servant, came to tell me that the Communists had issued orders through the mayor to everyone in the village to assemble at an open place ordinarily used as a children’s playground. “You will have to go too, Father,” the young man said. “Everybody must be there at 10 o’clock.” The bell sounded again and its heavy, ominous peals depressed me even more. I questioned the boy, but he was too terrified to talk, so I decided to go along and see for myself what the Communists were up to now. When I reached the playground, I found the whole village assembled there, old and young, men, women and children. The children, with their teachers, were in the front row. I inquired what we had been brought here for, and one man whispered to me: “We are to witness an execution – a beheading.” His companion leaned over my shoulder and spoke in low tones behind his hand. “It is a big execution. They say there are many – 10 or more.” “What is their crime?” I asked. “They have committed no crime,” the man said with bitterness. “They are students. From the anti-Communist school in Chang Ts’un.” “Yes, that is right,” the man answered. Then he pulled my arm. “Look, here they come! And see – the children! These beasts will make the children witness this horror!” The man shuddered, then spat violently on the ground in anger and disgust. Memories came flooding of my young friend, Wang Chi-sien, a graduate of this school, buried alive when the Communists were systematically tracking down all its graduates. I prayed for strength; I reminded myself that I must be the coldly objective surgeon; I must no let my feelings and emotions overcome me. I must watch and observe and not let these Red devils prowling around up and down the lines of people suspect that I was sick with revulsion already. The man behind me had said, “Here they come.” I looked now and saw that a file of young men, most of them in peasant dress, hands bound behind them, were being led into the cleared space. They were all so young, so very young! A Communist soldier barked orders at them, and they were all obliged to kneel down facing the people. The Communist barked more orders, and the young men moved closer to each other on their knees until they were not more than a foot apart. I counted them. Thirteen of them knelt there in the brightness of the morning, the wind from the northern plains blowing across their young faces. These were the fine youth of China, the good, incorruptible ones, and they were going to be liquidated because they were incorruptible. The local militia, which had been guarding them, stepped back. A Communist officer read out a long rigmarole of charges against them. The word “traitor” kept jumping out of his mouth. The people were silent. Contempt was written on their faces. Everyone knew these young men and knew they were not traitors. The Seu-Tsuen School was a most democratic one. Its principal had conceived the idea of a half day of studies and a half day of agricultural work, a kind of practical training in new methods so that the students who couldn’t go outside their province for an education would at least have some knowledge and be able to read and write a little when they had to return to their fathers’ farms. It had made wonderful strides in giving a little education to peasant youths who otherwise would have been entirely unlettered. Given time, it could have leavened all of the largely illiterate are with knowledge. The people listening to the trumped-up charges knew, too, that even if these young men had wanted to be traitors they could have had no opportunity since there were no Japanese in the area. With this curious sense they have of knowing just when to stop their tirades and diatribes and strike, the Communist leader now gave two orders simultaneously: He told the teachers, white and trembling already, to start the children singing patriotic songs. And he gave the signal for the execution to the swordsman, a tough, compact-bodied young soldier of great strength. The soldier came up behind the first young victim now, lifted his great, sharp, two-handed sword and brought the blade down cleanly. The first head rolled over and over, and the crowd watched the bright blood spurt up like a fountain. The children’s voices, on the thin edge of hysteria, rose in a squeaky cacophony of dissonance and garbled words; the teachers tried to beat time and bring order into the tumult of sound. Over it all I heard the big bell tolling again. Moving as quick as light from right to left as we watched him, the swordsman went down the line, beheading each kneeling student with one swift stroke, moving from one to the next without ever looking to see the clean efficiency of his blow. Thirteen times he lifted that heavy sword in his two hands. Thirteen times the sun glinted off the blade, dazzlingly at first, then dully as the red blood flowed down over the shining steel and stained and dimmed its glow. Thirteen times the executioner felt steel pierce cartilage and flesh, slide between two small neck bones. Not once did he miss. Not once did he look back at what he had done. And when he came to the thirteenth, the last man, and had chopped his head off, he threw the sword down on the ground and walked away without looking back. I thought sardonically as I saw this through my own misted eyes that, inhuman devil that he was, he still believed in the ancient Chinese superstition that if a killer looks on the man he has killed at the instant of his death, the soul of the victim, escaping from the body the instant the head is severed, will rush into the soul of the killer, who never afterward in all his lifetime will know a moment's peace. The cautious Communist was taking no chances; this is why he had beheaded the men almost without looking at them. There were a few Chinese in that company of forced watchers who now rushed forward with piece of man tow, the steamed bread of North China, to dip them into the blood gushing from the trunks of the beheaded youths. Some chinese believe that if one has ye che – a weakness in the stomach – eating bread soaked in blood will strengthen the organ and cure the disease. Criminals were always beheaded in China in the old days and in modern times too, but it was rare for any Chinese to avail himself of the opportunity to test the gruesome remedy. The Communists, however, encourage the people in revolting superstitions like this. On this day, though, they didn't indulge them long. They had something they wanted to do themselves. My eyes started from my head when I saw what the Communist soldiers did next. Several of the strongest, most aggressive among the group rushed forward now and pushed the corpses over on their backs. I stared horrified as each soldier bent down with a sharp knife and made a quick, circular incision in the chest. He then jumped on the abdomen with both feet, or pumped on it over and over with one foot, forcing the heart out of the incision. Then he swooped down again, snipped and plucked it out. When they had collected the thirteen hearts, they strung them all on a pointed marsh reed, flexible and resilient, which they tied together to make a hand circular carrying device. The two villagers who had watched all this, too, turned looks of withering scorn on the departing Communists. “Why did they do that terrible thing?” asked the older one. “They will eat the hearts tonight. They believe it will give them great strength.” And he turned away and cursed them violently. “Look at the children,” sighed the other. “Our poor children!” he said, shaking his head sadly. The youngest were pale and disturbed. A few of them were vomiting. The teachers were scolding them and getting them together now to march them back to school. This was the first time I had seen small children forced to watch such bloody executions. It was all part of the Communist plan to harden and toughen them, make them callous to acts of barbarous cruelty like this, and terrify them with Communist power. Unhappily, it worked in many cases. After this I often saw children forced to witness executions. The first time they were horror-stricken and emotionally disturbed, often sick at their stomachs as these children were. The second time they were less disturbed, and the third time many of them watched the grisly show with keen interest. The second ringing of the bell for the execution of the 13 students of Seu-tsuen School was at 10 o’clock. The beheadings took about 10 minutes. It was all over in less than half an hour, the violation of corpses, the return of the children to school, the sad departure of the families of the young men with their desecrated bodies, and the dispersal of the crowds. Communism is most efficient. ------- by Raymond J. de Jaegher, from “The Enemy Within: An Eyewitness Account of the Communist Conquest of China”  9/17/2017 0 Comments SAINT NICOLAS DU CHARDONNET, first published in Catholic Family News, December 2005 RECAPTURED PARIS CHURCH PRESERVES TRUE MASS By Theresa Marie Moreau RECAPTURED PARIS CHURCH PRESERVES TRUE MASS By Theresa Marie Moreau First Published in Catholic Family News, December 2005 A single tap of a priest’s knuckle upon the blackened mahogany arm of a choir chair signals the morning’s recitation of the Divine Office. The Roman-collared men gathered in the sanctuary of St. Nicolas du Chardonnet de Paris raise the breviaries they hold in their hands and flip the thin pages until each finds the day’s prayers. “Deus, in adjutórium meum inténde (O God, come to my assistance),” the church’s pastor, seated on the Gospel side of the altar, chants in a rich voice. From the Epistle side, four priests respond, “Dómine, ad adjuvándum me festína (O Lord, make haste to help me).” Their prayers rise. In the nave, a baker’s dozen of parishioners—some kneeling, others sitting—assist with their own prayers, in silence. For the next fifteen minutes, the men, dressed in the ankle-length, death-black cassocks appeal to God. They stand. They bow. They nod. They cross themselves in pious affirmations, as the first rays from the morning’s sun seep through the stained-glass depiction of the Crucifixion, two stories overheard. Although Catholic churches held rites like these for centuries, St. Nicolas du Chardonnet is no ordinary church. Freed from the diocesan bishop’s strangulating jurisdiction of the post-Second Vatican Council’s “new-and-improved” Roman Catholic Church, St. Nicolas, located at 23 rue des Bernardins in Paris, is one of a few churches in secular France that regularly and exclusively offers the traditional Latin-rite Mass. It all began in 1977. In Paris at that time, there was one old priest who clung to the Tridentine Mass of Pope St. Pius V, codified on July 14, 1570 following the Council of Trent (1545-63). The old religious Frenchman refused to go along with the progressives, the priests who experimented with innovations tossed into the Novus Ordo Missae (the New Order of the Mass). That man was the Rev. François Ducaud-Bourget, ordained in 1934. A bit on the short side, he stood slightly hunched over, with a hook nose that protruded from the center of his small face flanked by long tufts of white hair covering his ears. At times he pointed his crooked finger through the air to emphasize certain points in his sermons, always delivered with traditional instruction on morals and doctrine. He never went the way of the post-Vatican II folksy style of the self-reflective, feel-good homily commonly punctuated with jokes to keep the parishioners happy—and awake. He wouldn’t degrade himself, or his office, in that way. Even though Pope Paul VI had signed the Apostolic Constitution Missale Romanum on April 3, 1969, thereby handing the Church a reformed Missal, Ducaud-Bourget disdained the man-centered modernizations. He kept his back to parishioners. He continued to face the altar and to pray the ancient rite. As those before him, he began in the beginning with Psalm 42, a preparation for the sacrifice of the Mass, and ended with the emotionally inspiring Last Gospel. “He never said the New Mass. Never,” says Monsieur l’abbé (the Rev.) Bernard Lorber, of the Fraternité Sacerdotale Saint-Pie X (the Society of St. Pius X) and the premier vicaire of St. Nicolas. Best described as a priest independent from the diocese, in the ’70s Ducaud-Bourget frequently rented a meeting place where he could offer the Latin Mass for the community. Sometimes he paid for a room in the La Salle Wagram, a banquet hall near the Arc de Triomphe, at other times a room in Maubert Mutalité Lecture Hall, a building very near St. Nicolas du Chardonnet. But on February 27, 1977, Ducaud-Bourget had a plan. When traditionalists met at Maubert that Sunday, the old priest led everyone across the street to St. Nicolas, which suffered greatly from the chronic Novus Ordo syndrome: spiritual neglect. From 1968 to 1977, diocesan priests from the parish church, St. Severin, located a few blocks away, only opened the doors of St. Nicolas for a single new Mass once a week. Usually, only a handful of parishioners bothered to show up. Ducaud-Bourget hoped to inject some supernatural powers of Jesus, Mary and Joseph back into the church, thereby inoculating it against the fatalistic forces of humanistic relativism. He had no idea how successful he would be. “It was his intention to say the Mass here on this Sunday, then to pray during the day and then to leave the place after,” Lorber says. “But there were so many people, they thought they would stay one more day, then one more day, then one more day, then one more day. Eventually, they decided to stay here, to remain here forever.” There was only one problem: The occupation was illegal. Even though the diocesan bishop of Paris was deemed the caretaker for the property at the time, it was (and still is) the state of France that owns every church built in that nation before 1905. Going back a few years, in 1905, the Law of Separation of the Churches and the State (Loi de Séparation des Eglises et de L’Etat) made it official that the state of France no longer recognized the Roman Catholic Church, but only distinct associations cultuelles (associations for worship), ordered established in each parish. Where no associations formed, the state declared it would take possession of the church property. From his seat in the Vatican, Pope Pius X looked toward France and feared spiritual demoralization: state intervention in religious parish life. To take a firm stance against the meddling modernists, the Vicar of Christ, in his 1906 encyclical “Gravissimo oficii,” forbade the formation of any associations cultuelles. Thus, Rome forfeited property for principle. “The Church lost everything,” says the Rev. Thierry Gaudray, 38-year-old professor of Dogmatic Theology at St. Thomas Aquinas Seminary, in Winona, Minnesota. “Police entered the churches with guns. They opened the tabernacles. They forced out of the churches and onto the street the priests and nuns,” Gaudray describes. Everything the Church had gained with the Concordat of 1801, it lost in 1905. Not only had the nineteenth-century agreement between Napoleon Bonaparte and Pope Pius VII officially raised the recognition of Catholicism as the religion of the majority of French citizens, but it also stipulated that the state would financially support the clergy, which it did. Although one hundred years ago the Church lost its spot in France’s secular pecking order, it wasn’t a total loser, exactly. For when the state took custody of church property, at least it allowed bishops to remain in charge of the churches. With one single stipulation: In every church, one Mass was to be said each year. If not, the state would retake control of the sacred structure and do with it what it wanted. “So, St. Nicolas was part of the diocese of Paris, and the bishop of Paris was in charge of the building, but the state did own it,” Gaudray clarifies. “Ducaud-Bourget took the church against the will of the bishop, which was illegal. Taking over a church, to enter a church and to take over, it is illegal.” The state did decide to take legal action, but only after Ducaud-Bourget and his army of Church Militants had entrenched themselves deep in their sacred battlefield. For even on the first night when Ducaud-Bourget and the others entered St. Nicolas, they had adoration of the Blessed Sacrament. That lasted for the entire first week. What could officials do against a bunch of pacifist worshipers? “The police could do nothing, because the people prayed,” Lorber says. Months following St. Nicolas’ liberation from the Conciliar Church, the state indeed tried Ducaud-Bourget and issued a decree of expulsion. However, officials never executed the judgment. It’s now 2005, twenty-eight years later, and traditionalists continue to occupy St. Nicolas. Seated in the same sacristy where Ducaud-Borget sat, Lorber looks toward the altar as he tries to explain the state’s inaction. “Every Sunday, Monseigneur had 5,000 people here in St. Nicolas, and if they were forced to leave this church, they would just go to another church and takeover that one. Officials understood it would be the same problem, so they understood it was best to keep silent about our action. So they decided to do nothing, to leave us here.” And even if the diocese wanted to take back St. Nicolas, on principle, it wouldn’t work, Lorber says. The diocese wouldn’t be able to occupy all the churches. They don’t have enough faithful who attend Mass. Although a reported eighty-five percent of the 60.4 million French claims to be Roman Catholic, it is uncertain how many regularly go to church on Sunday. For a time, Ducaud-Bourget took care of the church, but he was already old. Desperate to continue the traditional efforts he resurrected in St. Nicolas, he sought help from one of the most vociferous defenders of the Tridentine Mass: Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre, who in 1969 founded the Society of St. Pius X, an order dedicated to the training of priests in the rites of the ancient Church, pre-Second Vatican Council style. Lefebvre aided Ducaud-Bourget and dispatched one of the Society’s priests to help the elderly man. Despite the leadership he demonstrated in his part to keep the old Mass alive, Lefebvre has had his detractors. Or maybe it was because of his leadership. Through the years, critics of the archbishop have accused him of being a religious Pied Piper responsible for leading a whole legion of Catholics into excommunication. That often-repeated description is absolutely not accurate, snaps Lorber, who explains that Lefebvre was already settled into retirement in 1968 when several young seminarians visited him. Unhappy with the Conciliar Church, they approached him and begged him to teach them the traditions of the faith, to pass on what he, himself, had learned. “The seminarians went to him and asked him why had did not found a seminary. He did not want to,” Lorber says. “I am an old man,” Lefebvre told them and sent the young men to a seminary in Fribourg, Switzerland. However, the modernistic teachings in that religious school were no better than any other seminary. The following year, the desperate seminarians and priests returned and insisted the archbishop establish a seminary where novitiates could learn the ancient-yet-solid foundations of the faith, including the Tridentine Mass. Lefebvre acquiesced. Meanwhile, in Paris, Ducaud-Bourget continued the occupation of St. Nicolas until his death in 1984. Subsequently, his body was interred behind the main altar, where he had offered the old Mass every day in the last years of his life. After the old priest’s death, Lefebvre sent two more priests from the Society to the Parisian church. Ducaud-Bourget’s dream would not die with him. Sticklers to tradition, like those in the Society, made the hierarchy in Rome cringe. Since the adoption of the vernacular rite in 1969, the Vatican found it had to deal with the holdovers who preferred the Latin Mass and refused to offer or even attend the new Mass, claiming it was a Protestantized fabrication. Only a couple years into his pontificate, Pope John Paul II established a nine-cardinal commission at the Vatican to study the Mass problem. On October 3, 1984, the Congregation for Divine Worship issued its circular letter, “Quattor Abhinc Annos.” This document describes the granting of and the restrictions placed on what is now commonly referred to as the Indult Mass. Indult, from the Latin indulgere (to indulge), is a privilege granted by the pope to bishops and others to do an action that the law of the Church otherwise prohibits. Yet the term “Indult” is misplaced, since the Latin Tridentine Mass has never been prohibited, which Alfons Maria Cardinal Stickler—one of the nine cardinals on the commission—admitted in May 1995 while speaking at a ChristiFideles conference held in New Jersey. Stipulations in the 1984 “Indult” included that the Mass only be offered (definitely not in parish churches) to those who request it, and those parishioners could in no way share the beliefs of those who question and doubt the validity of the new Mass. Meanwhile, the Society of St. Pius X continued to flourish and continued to offer the old Mass, not only at St. Nicolas, but also at other churches around the world. Lorber, now 41 years old, has witnessed much of the Society’s growth, despite the hardships the traditionalist order has had to endure at the manipulative hands of the hierarchy. Ordained on June 29, 1988, Lorber was one of the last to have his hands consecrated by Lefebvre, who died in 1991. A few weeks before his ordination, Lorber served the low Mass for the archbishop in the Notre Dame des Champs Chapel in the Seminary of Ecône on May 8, a Sunday. Lefebvre told Lorber how during the month before, in April 1988, he went to Rome to discuss with the Vatican the impending consecration of the bishops he had planned to take his place for the administering of sacraments, the ordaining of priests and the confirming of the faithful. Born in 1905, the archbishop was old and did not want to leave his priests without a spiritual leader. The Vatican’s representative at that time was Joseph Ratzinger, then a cardinal and now Pope Benedict XVI. In the end, after lengthy discussions and many compromises, a protocol was signed on May 5, 1988. The agreement stipulated that Rome would give Lefebvre one bishop and a commission in Rome to discuss the traditional Mass. “Ratzinger was quite hard with Archbishop Lefebvre,” Lorber says. After Lefebvre signed the protocol, he told Ratzinger that he had already announced the episcopal consecrations for the following June 30. Ratzinger’s response: No. It’s not possible. August? asked Lefebvre. No. It’s not possible, Ratzinger responded. November? No. December? No. Lefebvre left Rome and sought solace at the Seminary of Ecône, in Switzerland. He prayed. On May 6, he wrote to the Vatican and expressed that he did not have confidence in the agreement. “During the discussions with Rome, it was very painful,” Lefebvre told Lorber, “It was very painful, because they don’t take care of their souls. The only one thing they try to do is save their image, and this is why I will consecrate the bishops without Rome.” But the Vatican continued to pressure the archbishop. “The day before the consecrations, Rome sent a messenger, a nuncio from Switzerland, to take Archbishop Lefebvre back with him. The Pope asked if he could go to Rome to talk with him. The seminarians told him it was a good joke,” Lorber says. “The intention was to make Lefebvre nervous about the consecrations, but it didn’t disturb Archbishop Lefebvre.” Nothing bothered him. Not even the rumors circulating that he would be “excommunicated” if he went ahead with his plans for June 30. As for the excommunication of bishops, there were precedents. Decades earlier, in the 1950s, Pope Pius XII introduced into Canon Law, the prohibition of bishops consecrating bishops without papal approval. The Pope found this necessary after the Communist takeover in China. That was when the faithful of the Roman Catholic Church (the Underground Chinese Catholics) in China found themselves persecuted after the rise of the Chinese Patriotic Church (the pseudo-religious association that collaborated with the Chinese Communist government), explains Gaudray. “The law of the Church is for the good of the souls, so when Pius XII issued the decree of excommunication for the bishops in China, it was for the good of the Church. It was to prevent the setting up of the national church in China, which is not Catholic. It was to make people aware that the Pope does not agree at all and for them not to be part of the schismatic church,” Gaudray says. “The purpose of Archbishop Lefebvre was not to form another Church. Our bishops do not have authority, even in the Society. We have bishops for the sacraments, ordinations and confirmations. In China it was to form a Church.” The day finally arrived. Lefebvre predicted in his sermon before the consecrations there would be an attempt to excommunicate him. Nonetheless, on June 30, without papal permission, Lefebvre consecrated four bishops: Bernard Fellay, Bernard Tissier de Mallerais, Richard Williamson and Alfonso de Galarreta. “Many realized that the consecrations was an historic event for the Church,” Lorber says. It was a matter of preservation, not of the self, but of the faith. As predicted, on July 1, 1988, the Vatican, represented by Bernardinus Cardinal Gantin, prefect of the Congregation of Bishops, issued the following: “I declare that the above-mentioned Monsignor Marcel Lefebvre, and Bernard Fellay, Bernard Tissier de Mallerais, Richard Williamson and Alfonso de Galarreta have incurred ipso facto excommunication latae sententiae reserved to the Apostolic See.” This was accompanied by even more threats. “The priests and faithful are warned not to support the schism of Monsignor Lefebvre, otherwise they shall incur ipso facto the very grave penalty of excommunication.” Excommunication, explains Gaudray from his office in Winona, is a severe technical punishment issued by the Pope that severs all ties between the chastised and the Church. Penalized priests cannot give or receive the sacraments. They cannot offer or even attend Mass (new or old). “This, of course, means it is a punishment, but it implies a fault, that something is wrong,” Gaudray says. Both Gaudray and Lorber claim the excommunication was unjustified. For, they believe, Lefebvre committed no wrongdoing. “This excommunication has no value, really,” Lorber says. “Because for there to be punishment, one must have done something wrong. Archbishop Lefebvre didn’t have any schismatic intention by consecrating the bishops. His act was never a wrong, and he should never have been punished. Furthermore, by excommunicating Archbishop Lefebvre, Rome lost its credibility, because it lets bishops and theologians, like Hans Küng, Leonardo Boff and all the liberal theologians run around and teach heresies, and they were never excommunicated by John Paul II.” Lefebvre only tried to keep the old Mass, and the true Catholic religion, alive. “Without the actions of Archbishop Lefebvre, there would not be anymore priests who could say the Tridentine Mass,” Lorber says. Thus, the traditional priests of St. Nicolas continue the ancient rites of the one, holy, catholic, apostolic Church they learned from the old archbishop, coaxed out of retirement, reluctantly. Still, every morning, a single tap of a priest’s knuckle upon the blackened mahogany arm of a choir chair signals the morning’s recitation of the Divine Office. The Roman-collared men gathered in the sanctuary of St. Nicolas du Chardonnet de Paris raise the breviaries they hold in their hands and flip the thin pages until each finds the day’s prayers. “Deus, in adjutórium meum inténde,” chants one, followed by the others responding, “Dómine, ad adjuvándum me festína.”  -- Excerpt from AN UNBELIEVABLE LIFE: 29 YEARS IN LAOGAI -- A SCREECHING WHISTLE PIERCED Matthew’s sleep. He cracked open his eyes. Still dark, the sun had not yet risen. Guards in heavy boots stomped down the cellblock corridor, banging their truncheons against the bars, as they hollered, “Come out!” Prompted by the whistle and commands, Matthew and his four cellmates scrambled up from the prison’s pink terrazzo floor, where they had slept squeezed together, as tight as quintuplets in the womb. Without the modern luxury of heat, he exhaled little clouds of steam into the frigid air. Without a clock, he had no idea what time it was. Without a calendar, he had no idea of the day or the month. Sometime in Lent 1956, perhaps. A few days before, the floor’s worker prisoner had handed out bundles of black cotton: a rough-woven jacket and a pair of pants. Thick cotton means cold. We’re going to the north, Matthew thought at the time. As the shouting and banging continued, he wadded up and stuffed into his canvas bags the prisoner jacket, pants, violet-colored silk quilt, Mary’s altered pants, two shirts, underwear, socks and dwindling stack of toilet paper. With the sound of chaos echoing in the prison block, the cell’s small-group leader gave to Matthew his food ration for the trip: five long, thin loaves of rod bread with a hard crust, like French baguettes. Five loaves? Does this mean five days of travel? He straightened, hoisted his bags atop his boney shoulders, stood beside the other men and listened to the turning of the key in the locks approaching from the far end of the corridor, coming closer. When the guard stood before the cell, he slid the skeleton key in the lock and turned it three times. “Everybody out!” he yelled, as the gate banged open. In the mass commotion, Matthew rushed out, briefly stood at attention then, upon command, joined nine others to form a small group of 10. “Go! Go! Go!” yelled the guards. The whole line surged forward in a controlled frenzy, throwing shadows from the dim bulbs screwed into sockets along the third-floor ceiling, which gave off the faintest glow in the pre-dawn hours. The fast-paced line shuffled through a small gate, down two flights of stairs to the ground floor, out a big gate and into the dark prison yard, where World War II-era Chinese-manufactured buses waited. Without hesitation, he rushed up the steps, found a seat, sat down and wrapped his arms around his bags. With his feet still, his heart and mind continued to race. His travel companions – thieves, rapists, murderers – finished boarding, and the line of buses revved up and rolled forward, patrolled by an escort of police cars and motorcycles along the city streets, headed for the Shanghai North Railway Station, known as the Old North Railway Station, on Boundary Road (former name of East Tianmu Road), in the Chapei (old form of Zhabei) District. But the procession didn’t stop at the station. It stopped in a rail yard, about half a mile from the station’s passenger platforms. Still dark, the bus drivers pulled up to the waiting train and aimed the headlights toward the line of livestock cars, with the mouths of the doors gaping wide open. The bus doors unfastened with a whoosh. “Go! Go! Go!” yelled the guards. Caught in an energy that streamed out and formed a line that raced forward, toward the cars that extended so far, Matthew could see neither the locomotive in the front nor the caboose in the back. With the constant shouting of “Go! Go!” in his ears, he drew back his two bags, swung them forward and tossed them up and into one of the cars filling up with men. Ramps, reserved only for livestock, had not been put up for the inmates, so he wrapped his fingers around the lip of the doorframe and pulled himself up with ease. A dank smell of animal manure and urine-soaked planks hit him. He caught his breath, and his empty stomach twisted and tightened. An old man struggled at the doorway, not able to manage by himself. Matthew grabbed his wrists and hoisted him up. A bare floor without straw. In the middle, a solitary, wooden, empty barrel, into which the men were to relieve themselves. He stepped over to the side, out of the beam of headlights, dropped his duffel and travel bags and sat on top. Dozens of other men filled the railcar. Those without bags sat on the fetid planks. In minutes, the huge wooden door slid on its track and slammed shut, blocking out the light. With an unmistakable clicking of metal on metal, he heard the guards lock his only exit, as other doors slid closed, up and down the line. Everyone sat in silence. Holding onto his five loaves, he heard the soft sound of a few of the hungry and impatient men biting into the flaky crust and chewing their bits of rod bread. With a jolt and a slapping of metal couplers between cars, the train jerked and then jerked again as the locomotive in front rolled forward, gasped then slowly and steadily gathered speed. Early-morning sunrays soon filtered through the cracks in the car’s wooden panels that let in a little fresh air, but the permeated stench from waste remained trapped inside. As the hours and days passed, the foul air switched from animals to humans when the contents of the wooden barrel, shared by the men, sloshed onto the floor and splashed those sitting nearby. Eventually abandoned, the men opted to urinate out small holes that dotted the side of the car. “Where are we now?” occasionally someone asked, above the rhythm of the wheels rolling along the rails. No one knew. A slow journey with many delays, eventually the rhythmic to-and-fro rocking of the car ceased, and the wheels below finally stopped their endless turning. A long wait ensued. Why so quiet? Matthew strained to hear. Nothing. Minutes passed. Voices, muffled outside the railcar. Then one loud pound against the door startled him. Another and another. Unable to open the door, guards used a sledgehammer to chip away the frozen urine that had sealed the great sliding door closed. With a heave and a grunt, the guards finally slammed open the panel. Blinded, Matthew blinked back the whiteness reflecting the glow of the sun. White snow, everywhere white, everywhere snow, topped with a cloudless sky of blue. No wind. Just a cold, dead silence on such a beautiful and sunny day. Again, the train stopped between stations, to keep prisoners isolated from local residents. All inmates hopped out, from the first car to the last. Matthew sank up to his thighs in a snowdrift, and the men stepped into their line automatically, with their heads down. Looking up, forbidden. Dressed in police uniforms unfit for the freezing weather, the Tilanchiao guards quickly re-boarded the train for the long ride back to Shanghai after handing over the inmates to local prison guards. Prepared for the cold, they dressed in double-thick boots, thick black cotton coats and pants worn by the common people. On their heads, huge hats of black dog fur. Two-by-two, the inmates slogged. As the line snaked forward, Matthew cautiously peeked ahead and peeked behind, trying to see, trying to get some idea of where he was. All he saw, snow and an endless line of men in front of him and an endless line of men in back of him, a filthy black line trudging through pure white. Plowing through the fresh snow, he soon tired from having the additional burden of carrying on his back the two canvas bags. Along the way, on the side of the trail, he noticed that other men ahead of him had already dropped by the wayside their suitcases and bundles, which remained buckled or tied. No one else wanted the burdens either. Beside him walked a young man, very poor with nothing to carry. While on the train from Shanghai, he had slipped into his new cotton clothes. “Can you carry one of my bags?” Matthew asked. Happily, he grabbed one, and they plunged forward through the drifts, occasionally whispering to each other. The young man shared that he was 18 years old, from the countryside and had no family. Miles and hours later, exhausted, starved, filthy, damp, shivering, they stopped sometime in the afternoon. Ice-cold winter winds greeted the prisoners when they arrived at their destination: Fularchi (old form of Fularji) Prison Brick Factory, a forced-labor prison in Heilungchiang (old form of Heilongjiang), the province of the Black Dragon River, just one frozen breath away from Siberia. The redbrick wall stood as high as two men, maybe three men. Stationed at towers on top of the wall stood People’s Liberation Army soldiers, wearing uniforms, each with a single star blazing from the center of their dog-fur hats. Above the doors, at the iron-gate entrance to the prison, flapped a large character banner, buffeted by the Soviet wind. In Chinese characters, one of the most popular Party phrases repeated by the atheistic Chinese Communists and displayed everywhere: LABOR CREATED THE WORLD. No, that’s wrong. God created the world, Matthew thought. Materialists, Communists promote the ideology that the human body consists only of the natural without any supernatural. Catholics disagree. Centuries earlier, Saint Thomas Aquinas (122?-74, Order of Friars Preachers), philosopher, theologian, Roman Catholic priest, renowned as the Angelic Doctor for his elevated thinking, argued for the non-material, supernatural soul’s animation of the body, in his work “Summa Theologica,” Question 75: “To seek the nature of the soul, we must premise that the soul is defined as the first principle of life in those things which live: for we call living things animate, and those things which have no life, inanimate,” he wrote. “Now, though a body may be a principle of life, as the heart is a principle of life in an animal, yet nothing corporeal can be the first principle of life. For it is clear that to be a principle of life, or to be a living thing, does not belong to a body as such; since, if that were the case, every body would be a living thing, or a principle of life.” Communists scoff at Catholics, calling them the old-fashioned man stuck in the old-fashioned world. They boast that their thinking is progressive, that Communism is a progression from Capitalism toward Socialism, toward a Socialist earthly Utopia, in which Communism destroys the old world for the new world, destroys the old man for the new man. Atheists propagate the ideology that the God of the believers does not exist and is merely a superstitious delusion that could never have created man, because man, from his labor, created himself. “Labor created the world” was taken from Friedrich Engels’ unfinished work, “Dialectics of Nature,” in which he attempted to apply Karl Marx’s theory of dialectical materialism to science. More specifically, Engels applied it to the theory of evolution, in “Chapter 9: The Part Played by Labor in the Transition From Ape to Man.” “Labor is the source of all wealth, the economists assert. It is this next to nature, which supplies it with the material that it converts into wealth. But it is also infinitely more than this. It is the primary basic condition for all human existence, and this to such an extent that, in a sense, we have to say that labor created man himself.” Materialists reason that the ape evolved into man, because the ape labored. The Communist’s atheist worldview is the degradation of man, the demoralization of man to exploit man, just like a slave, just like an animal. It is easier to subjugate a creature that evolved from animals. For in Communism, all things – including people – exist for the State, belong to the State, produce for the State. Matthew had never accepted the Communist ideology that man descended from apes. Man, the intellectual soul, is a creature, a created being descended from God, the Creator, First Cause, Principle from No Principle, Subsistent Act of Existing Itself, Mover Unmoved, Divine Will, First Intellectual Being, Infinite Intelligibility, Cause of Goodness, Primal Truth, Supreme Essence, He Is Who Is. In the beginning, God created heaven and earth…and God created man to his own image,” he thought. INTO THE BELLY OF the prison, Matthew trudged. For the first time, he saw the hardened faces of Fularchi inmates. Eyes, vacant. Mouths, expressionless. Skin, dimpled and rough like the rind of a dried-out Mandarin orange, hanging from a branch long past harvest. Startled by their appearance, he stared at the physical effects of hard labor, bad weather and constant hunger. On that teeth-chattering, bone-rattling cold, crisp winter day, he moved along with the herd, hundreds of new arrivals, into the prison’s big yard, trodden bare earth with tufts of frozen mud. The sky had already faded from a robin’s egg blue to a congee gray by the time he sat down. His prison-issued sneakers, hailed as liberation shoes, made of thin canvas tops and rubber bottoms, did nothing to keep his feet warm. He opened up one of his bags, reached in and pulled out one of his two well-made, thick-cotton, button-down white shirts and handed it to the young man as a gift. Happy with such a well-tailored shirt, the young man smiled, examining the quality, which he had never seen before in the countryside. Guards, standing on platforms, held rosters and started calling names, in the long process of culling the men, separating the inmates into their different groups. “You! Go there!” a guard yelled at the young man from the countryside, who quickly put on his new shirt as he disappeared into the crowd. Matthew never saw him again. “You! Go there!” a guard ordered Matthew, pointing to a silent group of shabbily dressed men huddled together in the dusk. When he joined the group, the leader turned around and guided the newcomers toward a one-story, dormitory brick structure. Its face nosed up against the rear end of the building that stretched in front of it, where a row of holes – natural toilets – had already been dug by the elderly inmates assigned to light duty. Into the dark, dank room saturated with the smell of smoke, he entered. Prisoners, 50-or-so old-timers, quietly sat, hunched atop their assigned spots on the two long community beds, about hip high, which stretched along the two main walls from one end of the dormitory to the other. “This, yours,” said the small-group leader, pointing to a narrow section. From his shoulders, Matthew removed the canvas bags and placed all of his belongings onto his bit of the boards shared by many men, sleeping side by side, with only enough space a few inches wider than their shoulders. He sat down, removed his wet, cold liberation shoes and tucked them under the bed. Without electricity, someone propped up the end of a limp string draped over the side of a broken bowl and lit the makeshift wick floating in a small pool of oil. The men climbed onto the bed, sat cross-legged in a circle around the lamp and listened as the small-group leader went through the list of rules. “Listen to the whistle. Go to sleep. Listen to the whistle. Get up. Each one gets the food in turn. Tomorrow,” he said, pointing to two new inmates, “you two go to the kitchen before you wash your face, and get the food. The next day, you two,” the small-group leader pointed to two other inmates, “go to the kitchen. You must be fast.” Even though the room had two wood-burning stoves, the fire did little to warm anyone. Looking around the dimly lit room, Matthew saw in the shadows that a layer of ice coated the inside of the brick wall. The window, with double-pane glass, was coated in a sheet of ice, as thick as the width of a man’s palm. When the night whistle sounded through the prison, someone snuffed out the flame, and all lay down. Matthew kept on his filthy, damp clothes and rolled up in his violet quilt, squeezed between two other inmates. Exhausted, he soon fell asleep. At the blast of the morning whistle, he jumped out of bed. For breakfast, the two previously designated inmates in his small group rushed from the dormitory for the kitchen. In their hands, they clasped their washbasins, about the size of pie tins, used for washing their faces and hair. Minutes later, they returned with the basins holding coarse bread made from ground corn. The rest of the 10-man group waited, sitting cross-legged in the shadows on the bed in a semi-circle, with their dishes and mugs already placed in front. Each hoped for a large, maybe the largest, portion and stared to see who received the most as the bread was doled out. For many days, Matthew had eaten only five loaves of rod bread. Starving, he grabbed his handful and took big bites, filling his mouth, swallowing the chunks and bits as he rose with the others and headed to labor. After quickly splashing water on his face, he walked toward the door and reached for the handle. “Watch out!” someone yelled at him. Startled, he pulled back his hand just before his wet flesh froze onto the metal door handle. “Fast! Fast! Fast!” someone ordered, as he walked to the tool shed to request two baskets and a shoulder pole, used to carry the frozen earth dug up by other inmates. Hoisted onto his right shoulder, the pole had one basket dangling in front and one in back. Rushing back to his big group, he joined the line that headed out to the clay pits. From behind, a rhythmic ting, ching, ting, ching rang out. Keeping his head down, he saw four men in fetters linked together at the ankles. Last to go to labor, the chain gang walked slowly, as their chains rattled ting, ching with each synchronized step forward. At the pit, he stood and waited as inmates heaved into his baskets clumps of clay that weighed all together more than 100 pounds. Tottering under the weight, pulling him first one way and then the other way, he could barely walk more than a step while carrying a full load. Shuffling, stumbling forward, by then the bread he had eaten for breakfast started to cause his stomach to severely bloat and sent sharp pains through his gut. He bent over in agony. “You! Only 35 pounds, for now!” the guard ordered. With difficulty, back and forth he carried the heavy, swinging load from the field to the brickworks, where he dumped the frozen clods of earth onto an ever-rising pile. All day, inmates dug up the earth for the brick making that would begin when the weather turned warm enough for the three different work groups: one to prepare the brick material, one to slap the brick mud into the brick molds and one to stack the bricks inside one of the four huge kilns. For the first few days, the pain from the pole digging into his shoulder ached and throbbed. But each night, he rubbed his fingers on the sore spot, where he felt a callus swell in size. The fifth day, his shoulder no longer hurt, and over the next couple of months, as the bump on his shoulder formed as hard as a rock, he worked his way up to 125 pounds. While carrying earth in his two baskets, one day he heard a man screaming in the distance. Across the field, he saw a figure collapse on the ground, refusing or unable to continue his work. “You! And you!” a guard pointed and called two inmates, who carried their own shoulder poles. As he carried his load, Matthew secretly watched as the two men dropped their baskets and walked over to the inmate sprawled on the ground. The two stood over the recalcitrant prisoner, on either side of him. One grabbed him under the left arm; the other grabbed him under the right arm. They lifted him up. His knees buckled. He screamed. He fought. He flailed his arms. “Up!” the men yelled. The struggle continued. He screamed, yelled and twisted his body, as they compelled him to stand and placed the pole back on his shoulder. “Go! Go!” the prisoners yelled at him, as they walked on either side of him, forcing him along. After several steps, the balker stood and stepped forward on his own. The other two returned to their own baskets of earth and resumed their own labor. It was a warning to all: Everyone must work. Fularchi was a prison of forced labor. For those who refused to work, they were forced. For Communists, proponents of forced will, free will does not exist. Warnings and threats remained constant. “Understand, you are being warned that your bad attitude needs to change. Labor is bad. Thought is bad,” a guard warned Matthew. One hellish day slogged into the next and the next, filled with pain, as death and disease raced through the prison. After the shrill of a morning whistle, Matthew roused himself and looked over to the man next to him. He hadn’t moved. “Get up. Time to get up,” he said. The man didn’t answer, so he reached over to give him a little prod and touched his shoulder. Cold. Stiff. The man, in his 40s, dead. Surrounded by men, he died completely alone. Then there were those who could not face another day in Fularchi. One prisoner jumped to his death in front of a truck. In the slave-labor prison for only a couple of weeks, he found life unbearable and chose suicide to escape the pain. Forbidden by Communists, suicide, like escape, was considered a crime against Socialism, viewed as a counterrevolutionary act of resistance against reeducation and reform. Sick and weak from eating less and laboring more, Matthew received permission from his team leader to visit the camp doctor, also a prisoner, who sent him to have some blood drawn for tests. Walking over to the laboratory, he pushed open the door. “Oh, Matthew! You?” It was Ming-Chung Shen (old form of Mingzhong Shen), a fellow seminarian also arrested on September 8, 1955. Because his father was a doctor, labor-camp cadres reasoned that he knew medicine and assigned him to work in the lab. “How are you?” asked Ming-Chung, who, with a round face, looked like Matthew’s brother Joseph. “I’m very weak. My health is not very good, so the doctor wanted me to come. Labor is too heavy for me.” “For me, labor is not too heavy,” Ming-Chung said. “But evening study is terrible, because we all have to admit our crimes and criticize ourselves and find the root of our crime, which is to say something against our conscience.” “For me, study is no problem. The prisoners aren’t educated, and they always talk about labor, never ideology,” Matthew said. Monday through Saturday, inmates endured two hours of mental labor, brainwashing study sessions in their 10-man small groups, from 8 p.m. to 10 p.m. During the winter, when the days were shorter and prisoners could not work long hours, the sessions frequently lasted several hours. On Sunday evenings, each Big Team, which generally consisted of more than 150 prisoners, met for Week Reflection Group, a contentious meeting in which they criticized themselves and others. Ming-Chung removed the needle from Matthew’s arm and placed the vial of blood in a tray. And then the confreres said their goodbyes. 9/14/2017 0 Comments CAN CATHOLICS BE COMMUNISTS? Catholic Bishop Alfonso Maria Corrado Ferroni upon his release after three years and seven months in a Chinese Communist prison. Decree Against Communism A question has been asked of the Supreme Sacred Congregation: 1. Whether it is lawful to be part of the Communist Party or to perform favors for the same; 2. Whether it is lawful to publish, propagate or read the books, periodicals, diaries or newspapers that defend the actions or the doctrine of the Communists; 3. Whether Christian faithful, who knowingly and freely committed an act mentioned in 1 and 2, may be allowed to receive the sacraments; 4. Whether Christian faithful, who profess, defend or spread the materialistic and anti-Christian doctrine of Communism as apostates from the Catholic faith, incur, ipso facto, excommunication reserved most especially to the Apostolic See. To 1. Negative: for Communism is materialistic and anti-Christian; the Communist leaders, even if the words they profess do not attack the religion itself, in their doctrine and in their actions they show their fury against God, the true religion and the Church of Christ; To 2. Negative: prohibited by the very law (1399 Code of Canon Law, 1917); To 3. Negative: according to the ordinary principles of the sacraments, those who are not disposed are to be denied; To 4. Affirmative. Given in Rome, on July 1, 1949, Peter Vigorita Notary Supreme Sacred Congregation of the Holy Office (From AN UNBELIEVABLE LIFE: 29 YEARS IN LAOGAI, page 42.)  Catholic Bishop Alfonso Maria Corrado Ferroni upon his release after three years and seven months in a Chinese Communist prison. China’s Doorman: Father Ambrogio Poletti By Theresa Marie Moreau One bridge connects the two territories. A few meters of barbed wire separate two worlds and two civilizations. The physical distance can be measured in a few meters. The moral distance, however, cannot be measured. On one side there is liberty, over there the negation of every religious liberty. – Father Ambrogio Poletti – from “The Priest at the Bamboo Curtain” Under the brim of a grimy, frayed newsboy cap, two sunken eyes rimmed in black stared straight ahead from their sockets, as if frozen from fear. A scraggily beard hung like gray stalactites from cavernous cheeks. Bald patches detailed a survey of where torturers had plucked hairs during interrogations. Upon a stretcher lay an Italian bishop, 63 years old, frail and weak. His black tunic and dirt-stained pants draped loosely over his bones. Chinese black-cloth shoes – wrapped around and tied with spare twine – swaddled his swollen feet. After three years and seven months in a Chinese Communist prison, Bishop Alfonso Maria Corrado Ferroni (1892-1966, Order of Friars Minor) weighed no more than 70 pounds, down from 180, a loss of 110 pounds. His first day of liberty: September 17, 1955, the Feast of the Impression of the Stigmata of Saint Francis. “Welcome to freedom. It’s all right now. It’s all over,” whispered Father Ambrogio Poletti (1905-73, Pontifical Institute for Foreign Missions). Father Poletti always welcomed those who reached Lo Wu Bridge, the “Bridge of Freedom” that spanned the border between the People’s Republic of China and the British Crown Colony of Hong Kong, the border between Communism and Colonialism, Marxism and Capitalism, savagery and civilization, tyranny and democracy, slavery and freedom, materialism and spiritualism, oppression and compassion, death and life. Some walked the short distance from the land under the Five-star Red Flag – with its bloody symbolism of Revolution and Communism – to the land under the Union Jack, emblazoned with the three Christian crosses of Saint George, Saint Patrick and Saint Andrew, symbolism of charitable love. Some arrived dead. Some nearly dead. Some out of their minds after years of sadistic abuse, starvation, humiliation, interrogations. Some limped. Some collapsed and were carried. Some were wheeled across. One Jesuit priest ran past the barbed-wire barrier, screaming, insane from the physical, emotional and mental torments he had endured. After the Communists gained control of the mainland, in 1949, the enforcers of the godless, materialistic ideology launched religious persecution against the believers of the God on the Cross. Those who refused to renounce the Church of the Imperialist West were arrested, imprisoned, interrogated, tortured. The regime’s aim: control native Catholics and rid the country of foreign “dogs.” With the help of British Police Superintendent A.L. Gordon, Father Poletti gently lifted the bishop from the canvas litter and carried the living corpse across the train tracks and across Lo Wu Bridge, a main crossing point at the border. Born on February 1, 1892, in Rignano sull’Arno, in Italy’s Florence province, Bishop Ferroni had been ordained in 1920. Assigned, in 1922, to mainland China, he spent 30 years ministering to the sick, the dying, the poor, the hungry, the needy, the orphans, the widows. In 1932, he was consecrated bishop of Laohekou (Laohokow) diocese, on the banks of the Han River, in Hubei (Hupei) province. Arrested in February 1952, he was handcuffed for the first three months, which left permanent scarring on his flesh. During his entire incarceration, he remained in solitary confinement, suffering torture, deprivation, starvation, beri-beri. All that time, he never had clarification of the charges against him. Banished forever from the mainland, the nearly dead Bishop Ferroni barely survived the 700-mile journey from north of the Yangtze River, southward, to the Pearl River Delta. No one had been expecting the bishop. As Father Poletti comforted him, a British policeman at Lo Wu Station sent a telegram, at 2:30 in the afternoon, to the Franciscan Missions of Hong Kong, with a message: The bishop of Laohekou had just arrived from China. Authorities placed the delirious bishop inside an ambulance, where he muttered repeatedly, “You can’t change my mind. You can’t change my ideas,” as the emergency medical team rushed him to Saint Teresa’s Hospital, 327 Prince Edward Road, in Kowloon, founded in 1940 by the Sisters of Saint Paul de Chartres. After his arrival and admittance to the Catholic medical facility, he continued mumbling about the “Communist radio,” “lights” and “loudspeakers,” tools used against him during interrogations and physical abuse. During the first day in the hospital, he received urgent care, including a blood transfusion. On the second day, death looked so certain that a priest administered the Sacrament of Extreme Unction, the anointing of the Last Rites, a preparation for death as well as a prayer for recovery. Surprisingly, the bishop’s health took a turn for the better and continued to improve. Gradually, he recovered his strength and eventually resumed pastoral duties. But he never returned to the mainland, where the Communists had tried, unsuccessfully, to destroy him. “Despite their threats and torture, I would never change my mind. They wanted to put a Communist brain into mine. They failed,” he said. Father Poletti understood what it meant to cheat death on the mainland for life in Hong Kong. Born on June 11, 1905, in Italy’s Mandello del Lario, home to the world-famous Moto Guzzi motorcycle manufacturers, he was ordained on May 25, 1929. On November 9, 1930, he left his occidental homeland for his oriental apostolate, and, at the age of 24, arrived in Hong Kong, on December 4, 1930. After an accelerated, submersion course in the instruction of the Chinese language, he transferred to the mainland and was assigned, in 1931, to Shanwei (formerly known as Swa Bue), Haifeng County, with the Hakka-dialect people, and then to the city of Huizhou (Huichou), from 1932 to 1933, all in Guangdong (Kwantung) province. In 1933, he was appointed the rector of Tam Tong (now known as Dantang), a village on the east bank, in a bend of the Danshui River, near Wing Wu, about a 30-minute drive south of Huizhou. When the Second Chinese-Japanese War (1937-45) reached his district, he was detained and held, from December 1941 until March 1942, in an internment camp on Weizhou (Wai Chow) Island, in the Gulf of Tonkin. Upon his release, he returned to Hong Kong, which had been surrendered to Imperial Japan, on December 25, 1941, by Governor Mark Aitchison Young (1886-1974), who was seized as a prisoner of war. Father Poletti remained in the crown colony during the Japanese occupation, which ended with the conclusion of World War II, August 15, 1945. After a failed attempt, in 1946, to return to Tam Tong, the following year, he successfully sneaked through Communist lines on the mainland, where the off-and-on Chinese Civil War (1927-49) had resumed between the Nationalists, headed by Jieshi Jiang (Kai-Shek Chiang, 1887-1975) and the Communists, headed by Zedong Mao (Tse-Tung Mao, 1893-1976). In 1948, the Reds gained territory near his parish in Tam Tong. Soldiers surrounded his church, and when they called to the priest and ordered him to surrender, he clambered out a skylight onto the roof, where he remained all night while the Communists pillaged the church property. Bishop Enrico Pascal Valtorta (1883-1951, Pontifical Institute for Foreign Missions) had already sent a message to the priest in distress: “When the sky is clear, you can come back,” code for “Return immediately!” But the missionary never received the message, and when the bishop didn’t receive any response, he sent another: “Either you are not living or have no way to say your Mass. If you are alive, come back by any means that you can.” When Father Poletti learned of the instructions, he headed south. First, he hid among beggars, and then for the approximate 50 miles from Tam Tong to Hong Kong, he rode a bicycle over the mountains, crawled through rice fields and swam across rivers to freedom. Never would he see the villagers again. But years later, Catholic parishioners and Taoists friends smuggled across the border a heavy gold cross, paid for with their money hoarded and hidden from the Communists, to let him know that they had not forgotten him, that they still waited for him, that they still believed. Safe in Hong Kong, having survived the ordeal but with his health greatly deteriorated, his superiors repatriated him to his Italian homeland for a sabbatical. After two years, he returned to the crown colony, in 1950, and received various assignments, until he became rector of the northeast section of the New Territories, very near Lo Wu Station. In March 1951, Maryknoller Father Paul Duchesne (1910-83, Catholic Foreign Mission Society of America) casually shared his idea of greeting banished missionaries. The suggestion sparked a purpose, and it was then that Father Poletti began his apostolate, with daily treks to the border and became known as “China’s Doorman.” At Lo Wu Station, he prayed over the dead with solemnity and welcomed the living with charity. Of all the expellees and survivors whom he met, for him, one of the most exciting, and, perhaps, one of the most rewarding, followed an unexpected knock at the door. Father Poletti had already finished his day’s work, in the early evening hours of October 17, 1952, when an English policeman entered the rectory, at 5:30 p.m., with an urgent radio message that had arrived at the police station for the priest: A missionary expelled from mainland China had arrived at the border, but he carried an invalid passport. Although quite tired and without any idea who the missionary could be, Father Poletti mounted his motorcycle, gripped the handlebars, kick-started the engine with a hard jump, hunched over the gas tank and hurriedly sped off, as usual, with beard in the wind, as he headed for the border only a few miles away. After a short ride from his residence, he arrived at Lo Wu Station and parked his motorcycle. A Chinese officer presented the priest with a green Italian passport. Father Poletti pulled open the cover. “This is my bishop! Where is he?” he shouted, when he saw the identification of the missionary. “He is still on the other side, in the Communist zone, beyond the barbed wire of the border bar,” the officer said. Father Poletti rushed across Lo Wu Bridge, where he instantly recognized Italian-born Bishop Lorenzo Bianchi (1899-1983, Pontifical Institute for Foreign Missions) and ran to the man dressed in filthy beggar’s rags. “He is my bishop!” Father Poletti announced as he welcomed the bishop and ushered him into the free zone on the bridge, where they embraced in thanksgiving. In his usual hurried pace, the priest grabbed some food and fed the bishop, who hadn’t eaten anything since the previous day, and then seated him on the pillion of his motorcycle, driving very carefully back to the Tai Po residence, which included a small pack of parish dogs, a cat and even a black-feathered, yellow-billed mynah that croaked out invocations of “Ave Maria!” with a heavy Italian accent when prompted to say its prayers. Under construction was Saint Joseph Catholic Church, a beautiful gray-granite structure with a bright white interior, a few miles away, at 5 Wo Tai Street, Luen Wo Market, in Fan Ling, closer to Lo Wu. The 75,000-square-foot parcel of land had been a gift from Yan Kit Chu, a local Taoist. Inside the residence, he telephoned Father Antonio Riganti (1893-1965, Pontifical Institute for Foreign Missions), who had been appointed vicar general, to act as proxy for Bishop Bianchi, who, while still in prison, succeeded Bishop Valtorta upon his death, on September 3, 1951. Prepare for the arrival of the bishop, Father Poletti excitedly told an incredulous Father Riganti who thought the priest was joking. An English policeman offered to deliver the bishop to his cathedral in style and grandeur with a motorcade, but the freed bishop preferred to take the train to the brick-and-stone Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception, 16 Caine Road. However, he did accept a car ride to Tai Po Station, and by the time Father Poletti and Bishop Bianchi left the rectory, radio stations had already broadcast the news of his survival and of his arrival at the border. When Bishop Bianchi, still dressed in filthy rags, boarded the railcar for his cathedra, it was almost 9 p.m. En route, he slipped into Episcopal vestments brought for him, and he prepared to greet the faithful for the first time as their bishop. Born in the central Alpine village of Corteno Golgi, in the Italian province of Brescia, he had been ordained in 1922. The following year, he was sent to the East and arrived in Hong Kong, on September 13, 1923. On April 21, 1949, he was appointed coadjutor bishop of the British crown colony. At Kowloon Station, where news reporters waited for him, more than 1,000 Catholics welcomed the bishop. The faithful included most of the diocesan clergy as well as Archbishop Antonio Riberi (1897-1967), the apostolic nuncio who had been expelled the previous year, on September 8, 1951. When the train reached its destination and squeaked to a halt, the bishop proceeded down the steps from the car to the platform, where the crowd received the prisoner-turned-prelate with tears of happiness, as they sang “Christus Vincit,” “Christ Conquers.” ENDNOTE: I would like to thank Martin Chung for the map coordinates to locate Tam Tong village (22°57’47.0”N 114°30’47.2”E), his ancestral homeland. Miscellanea and facts for this story were pulled from the following: China Missionary Bulletin, published by the Committee of Catholic Missionaries; “From Milan to Hong Kong: 150 Years of Mission,” by Gianni Criveller; “Il PIME e La Perla Dell’Oriente,” by Father Sergio Ticozzi; “In Memory of the Past Members of PIME in Hong Kong,” edited by Father Sergio Ticozzi; Life magazine; Ofmval.org; “Padre Ambrogio, personaggio straordinario,” by Giovanna Gatti; “The Priest at the Bamboo Curtain,” by Wilmon Menard; and Time: The Weekly News Magazine. Theresa Marie Moreau is the author of “Blood of the Martyrs: Trappist Monks in Communist China,” “Misery & Virtue” and “An Unbelievable Life: 29 Years in Laogai,” which can be found online and at TheresaMarieMoreau.com.   (Left to right) Father Hezhou “John Nepomucene” Fu, Father Shiyu Li, Father Luxian “Aloysius” Jin, Bishop Pinmei “Ignatius” Gong, Father Xipin “Matthew” Zhang, Father Dianxiang “Gabriel” Zhen, Father Hongsheng “Vincent” Zhu. “Ready for yard time! Ready for yard time!” Telian Shao, the second-floor worker prisoner announced as he walked through the corridor. Shao had been sentenced to life in prison, because he had killed his wife after he found out that she had a lover. As the guard unlocked the cell doors, the inmates lined up, two by two, and waited for the order to walk to the basketball court between Cellblock Number 1 and Cellblock Number 2. Prior to his transfer to Tilanqaio, Chen had been locked up in the Xuhui District Police Station, where one of his cellmates, Old Yu, had told him about executions in the basketball courts between the cellblocks. Before he was arrested, Yu had been an investigator for the police department and had once been the supervisor of Officer Zhang, their jailer in the police station. Yu explained that when Zhang worked for the Public Security Bureau, he zealously joined in the Campaign to Suppress Counterrevolutionaries (1950-53). Day and night, he helped in the capture and interrogation of countless suspected enemies of the State. However, the number of prisoners quickly surpassed the number of available cells. With not enough room in the jails, prisoners were liquidated, sometimes in the Tilanqiao basketball courts. Like other executioners, Zhang enjoyed killing prisoners for the thrill of it. He would raise his pistol, only inches away from the back of the victim’s neck, and pull the trigger, sending the bullet into the neck and out through the mouth. However, one time Zhang had either aimed a little too high or scratched the bullet on a rock for more explosive destruction. As a result, the bullet hit the back of the victim’s skull, and his brains and blood spattered everywhere around the basketball court, including Zhang’s face and clothing. After that, Zhang began having nightmares, with visions of his victims haunting him in his sleep. Even during his waking hours, he feared that the dead would drag him into hell. During exercise yard time, when Chen saw the basketball courts, he remembered what Yu had told him. In the yard, inmates stayed in two-by-two line formation, walking circles around the court, nodding and smiling to one another. “You see the first one?” whispered Chen’s cellmate Youzhen Hong, who was walking behind him. Chen looked toward the front of the line, where he saw a short man wearing a government-issued policeman’s uniform, different from the usual prisoner clothing. He wore a blue, thick cotton jacket with four pockets in the front – two at the chest and two at the waist, thick cotton pants and army-issued thick cotton shoes, commonly called the big-head shoes. The white cloth badge he wore over his chest indicated that he was Prisoner Number 28234. He is wearing government clothes. He must not have any family visit him, Chen thought. “That is Pinmei Gong,” Hong whispered. Chen had heard about Shanghai’s Roman Catholic Bishop Pinmei “Ignatius” Gong (Pin-Mei Kung). He respected the man. Gong and several hundred other Shanghai Catholics had been arrested on September 8, 1955, in a big round up of those who had refused to renounce the authority of the Pope and join the Three-Self Reform Movement. With its three principles – self-government, self-propagation and self-support – it was the regime’s Communist, Marxist, atheist version of the Roman Catholic Church. Unsuccessful at winning over converts, the Movement had been replaced by and integrated into the Chinese Catholic Patriotic Association, on July 15, 1957. After his arrest, in 1955, Gong wasn’t sentenced until nearly five years later, on March 17, 1960, along with 12 other Catholic priests, after a two-day “trial” in the Court of Criminal Justice, Shanghai City Intermediate People’s Court, Zhong Xing, Number 162. In part, the verdict and subsequent sentencing read as follows: “Defendant: Pinmei Gong, alias Tian-Chueh Kung, male, born in 1901, Chuan Sha County, Shanghai City. Prior to his arrest, he was the Roman Catholic bishop of the Shanghai diocese, and concurrently bishop of the diocese of Suzhou. Former residence in this city’s Sichuan Road South, Number 36. Now under arrest… “On the basis of the evidence for criminal activities on the part of Pinmei Gong’s counterrevolutionary and anti-government organization, our court is perfectly cognizant of the fact that the accused, Pinmei Gong, is the leader of this counterrevolutionary and anti-government organization, hiding under the cloak of religion. He is collaborating with the imperialists in the betrayal of his motherland, and has served as an important tool for the imperialists to overthrow the People’s democratic political rights of our country to such an extent that he has accomplished serious violations of the country’s interests. In this case, each defendant has infringed the People’s Republic’s law against counterrevolutionary activities…all of which criminal activities are punishable by law. Our court, in accordance with the concrete circumstances of the defendant’s criminal activities, and with respect to any expression of repentance on the part of the accused subsequent to their arrest, has decided to pass the following judgment: “The accused, Pinmei Gong, is the head and leader of the counterrevolutionary and anti-government organization; he is in league with the imperialists, betrayed his motherland, and his crimes are of a very serious nature. But after his case had been brought forward, when confronted with actual circumstantial evidence, he did not deny his role, and furthermore he had something to reveal on the subject of how the imperialists under the cover of religion plotted subversive actions. Under the magnanimity of the law we hereby sentence him to lifetime imprisonment, and hereby strip him for life of all his political rights.” During his incarceration, Gong had never been allowed any visitors. His mother and other relatives made countless attempts to see him, but authorities never permitted the bishop any visitation rights. His family also made endless efforts to get care packages to him, even through the Red Cross, but he never received a single one. Gong had lived in isolation in a cell on the first floor of Cellblock Number 1, until the Cultural Revolution erupted, then he was moved up to the second floor. Chen stared at the bishop of Shanghai, forced to wear a shabby, policeman’s uniform. Barely 5 feet tall, the old man symbolized the strength of the Roman Catholic Church, not only in China, but in the world. His courageous strength and endless faith in God and Pope made him one of the most hated, most feared men by the Communists. Yes, Chen had a great respect for Bishop Gong. For those of you wondering if Communism is compatible with Catholicism, well, this document from the Vatican, in 1949, should clear things up... Decree Against Communism A question has been asked of the Supreme Sacred Congregation: 1. Whether it is lawful to be part of the Communist Party or to perform favors for the same; 2. Whether it is lawful to publish, propagate or read the books, periodicals, diaries or newspapers that defend the actions or the doctrine of the Communists; 3. Whether Christian faithful, who knowingly and freely committed an act mentioned in 1 and 2, may be allowed to receive the sacraments; 4. Whether Christian faithful, who profess, defend or spread the materialistic and anti-Christian doctrine of Communism as apostates from the Catholic faith, incur, ipso facto, excommunication reserved most especially to the Apostolic See. To 1. Negative: for Communism is materialistic and anti-Christian; the Communist leaders, even if the words they profess do not attack the religion itself, in their doctrine and in their actions they show their fury against God, the true religion and the Church of Christ; To 2. Negative: prohibited by the very law (1399 Code of Canon Law, 1917); To 3. Negative: according to the ordinary principles of the sacraments, those who are not disposed are to be denied; To 4. Affirmative. Given in Rome, on July 1, 1949, Peter Vigorita Notary Supreme Sacred Congregation of the Holy Office 9/7/2017 0 Comments SAINT NICOLAS DU CHARDONNET, first published in Catholic Family News, December 2005 RECAPTURED PARIS CHURCH PRESERVES TRUE MASS By Theresa Marie Moreau First Published in Catholic Family News, December 2005 A single tap of a priest’s knuckle upon the blackened mahogany arm of a choir chair signals the morning’s recitation of the Divine Office. The Roman-collared men gathered in the sanctuary of St. Nicolas du Chardonnet de Paris raise the breviaries they hold in their hands and flip the thin pages until each finds the day’s prayers. “Deus, in adjutórium meum inténde (O God, come to my assistance),” the church’s pastor, seated on the Gospel side of the altar, chants in a rich voice. From the Epistle side, four priests respond, “Dómine, ad adjuvándum me festína (O Lord, make haste to help me).” Their prayers rise. In the nave, a baker’s dozen of parishioners—some kneeling, others sitting—assist with their own prayers, in silence. For the next fifteen minutes, the men, dressed in the ankle-length, death-black cassocks appeal to God. They stand. They bow. They nod. They cross themselves in pious affirmations, as the first rays from the morning’s sun seep through the stained-glass depiction of the Crucifixion, two stories overheard. Although Catholic churches held rites like these for centuries, St. Nicolas du Chardonnet is no ordinary church. Freed from the diocesan bishop’s strangulating jurisdiction of the post-Second Vatican Council’s “new-and-improved” Roman Catholic Church, St. Nicolas, located at 23 rue des Bernardins in Paris, is one of a few churches in secular France that regularly and exclusively offers the traditional Latin-rite Mass. It all began in 1977. In Paris at that time, there was one old priest who clung to the Tridentine Mass of Pope St. Pius V, codified on July 14, 1570 following the Council of Trent (1545-63). The old religious Frenchman refused to go along with the progressives, the priests who experimented with innovations tossed into the Novus Ordo Missae (the New Order of the Mass). That man was the Rev. François Ducaud-Bourget, ordained in 1934. A bit on the short side, he stood slightly hunched over, with a hook nose that protruded from the center of his small face flanked by long tufts of white hair covering his ears. At times he pointed his crooked finger through the air to emphasize certain points in his sermons, always delivered with traditional instruction on morals and doctrine. He never went the way of the post-Vatican II folksy style of the self-reflective, feel-good homily commonly punctuated with jokes to keep the parishioners happy—and awake. He wouldn’t degrade himself, or his office, in that way. Even though Pope Paul VI had signed the Apostolic Constitution Missale Romanum on April 3, 1969, thereby handing the Church a reformed Missal, Ducaud-Bourget disdained the man-centered modernizations. He kept his back to parishioners. He continued to face the altar and to pray the ancient rite. As those before him, he began in the beginning with Psalm 42, a preparation for the sacrifice of the Mass, and ended with the emotionally inspiring Last Gospel. “He never said the New Mass. Never,” says Monsieur l’abbé (the Rev.) Bernard Lorber, of the Fraternité Sacerdotale Saint-Pie X (the Society of St. Pius X) and the premier vicaire of St. Nicolas. Best described as a priest independent from the diocese, in the ’70s Ducaud-Bourget frequently rented a meeting place where he could offer the Latin Mass for the community. Sometimes he paid for a room in the La Salle Wagram, a banquet hall near the Arc de Triomphe, at other times a room in Maubert Mutalité Lecture Hall, a building very near St. Nicolas du Chardonnet. But on February 27, 1977, Ducaud-Bourget had a plan. When traditionalists met at Maubert that Sunday, the old priest led everyone across the street to St. Nicolas, which suffered greatly from the chronic Novus Ordo syndrome: spiritual neglect. From 1968 to 1977, diocesan priests from the parish church, St. Severin, located a few blocks away, only opened the doors of St. Nicolas for a single new Mass once a week. Usually, only a handful of parishioners bothered to show up. Ducaud-Bourget hoped to inject some supernatural powers of Jesus, Mary and Joseph back into the church, thereby inoculating it against the fatalistic forces of humanistic relativism. He had no idea how successful he would be. “It was his intention to say the Mass here on this Sunday, then to pray during the day and then to leave the place after,” Lorber says. “But there were so many people, they thought they would stay one more day, then one more day, then one more day, then one more day. Eventually, they decided to stay here, to remain here forever.” There was only one problem: The occupation was illegal. Even though the diocesan bishop of Paris was deemed the caretaker for the property at the time, it was (and still is) the state of France that owns every church built in that nation before 1905. Going back a few years, in 1905, the Law of Separation of the Churches and the State (Loi de Séparation des Eglises et de L’Etat) made it official that the state of France no longer recognized the Roman Catholic Church, but only distinct associations cultuelles (associations for worship), ordered established in each parish. Where no associations formed, the state declared it would take possession of the church property. From his seat in the Vatican, Pope Pius X looked toward France and feared spiritual demoralization: state intervention in religious parish life. To take a firm stance against the meddling modernists, the Vicar of Christ, in his 1906 encyclical “Gravissimo oficii,” forbade the formation of any associations cultuelles. Thus, Rome forfeited property for principle. “The Church lost everything,” says the Rev. Thierry Gaudray, 38-year-old professor of Dogmatic Theology at St. Thomas Aquinas Seminary, in Winona, Minnesota. “Police entered the churches with guns. They opened the tabernacles. They forced out of the churches and onto the street the priests and nuns,” Gaudray describes. Everything the Church had gained with the Concordat of 1801, it lost in 1905. Not only had the nineteenth-century agreement between Napoleon Bonaparte and Pope Pius VII officially raised the recognition of Catholicism as the religion of the majority of French citizens, but it also stipulated that the state would financially support the clergy, which it did. Although one hundred years ago the Church lost its spot in France’s secular pecking order, it wasn’t a total loser, exactly. For when the state took custody of church property, at least it allowed bishops to remain in charge of the churches. With one single stipulation: In every church, one Mass was to be said each year. If not, the state would retake control of the sacred structure and do with it what it wanted. “So, St. Nicolas was part of the diocese of Paris, and the bishop of Paris was in charge of the building, but the state did own it,” Gaudray clarifies. “Ducaud-Bourget took the church against the will of the bishop, which was illegal. Taking over a church, to enter a church and to take over, it is illegal.” The state did decide to take legal action, but only after Ducaud-Bourget and his army of Church Militants had entrenched themselves deep in their sacred battlefield. For even on the first night when Ducaud-Bourget and the others entered St. Nicolas, they had adoration of the Blessed Sacrament. That lasted for the entire first week. What could officials do against a bunch of pacifist worshipers? “The police could do nothing, because the people prayed,” Lorber says. Months following St. Nicolas’ liberation from the Conciliar Church, the state indeed tried Ducaud-Bourget and issued a decree of expulsion. However, officials never executed the judgment. It’s now 2005, twenty-eight years later, and traditionalists continue to occupy St. Nicolas. Seated in the same sacristy where Ducaud-Borget sat, Lorber looks toward the altar as he tries to explain the state’s inaction. “Every Sunday, Monseigneur had 5,000 people here in St. Nicolas, and if they were forced to leave this church, they would just go to another church and takeover that one. Officials understood it would be the same problem, so they understood it was best to keep silent about our action. So they decided to do nothing, to leave us here.” And even if the diocese wanted to take back St. Nicolas, on principle, it wouldn’t work, Lorber says. The diocese wouldn’t be able to occupy all the churches. They don’t have enough faithful who attend Mass. Although a reported eighty-five percent of the 60.4 million French claims to be Roman Catholic, it is uncertain how many regularly go to church on Sunday. For a time, Ducaud-Bourget took care of the church, but he was already old. Desperate to continue the traditional efforts he resurrected in St. Nicolas, he sought help from one of the most vociferous defenders of the Tridentine Mass: Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre, who in 1969 founded the Society of St. Pius X, an order dedicated to the training of priests in the rites of the ancient Church, pre-Second Vatican Council style. Lefebvre aided Ducaud-Bourget and dispatched one of the Society’s priests to help the elderly man. Despite the leadership he demonstrated in his part to keep the old Mass alive, Lefebvre has had his detractors. Or maybe it was because of his leadership. Through the years, critics of the archbishop have accused him of being a religious Pied Piper responsible for leading a whole legion of Catholics into excommunication. That often-repeated description is absolutely not accurate, snaps Lorber, who explains that Lefebvre was already settled into retirement in 1968 when several young seminarians visited him. Unhappy with the Conciliar Church, they approached him and begged him to teach them the traditions of the faith, to pass on what he, himself, had learned. “The seminarians went to him and asked him why had did not found a seminary. He did not want to,” Lorber says. “I am an old man,” Lefebvre told them and sent the young men to a seminary in Fribourg, Switzerland. However, the modernistic teachings in that religious school were no better than any other seminary. The following year, the desperate seminarians and priests returned and insisted the archbishop establish a seminary where novitiates could learn the ancient-yet-solid foundations of the faith, including the Tridentine Mass. Lefebvre acquiesced. Meanwhile, in Paris, Ducaud-Bourget continued the occupation of St. Nicolas until his death in 1984. Subsequently, his body was interred behind the main altar, where he had offered the old Mass every day in the last years of his life. After the old priest’s death, Lefebvre sent two more priests from the Society to the Parisian church. Ducaud-Bourget’s dream would not die with him. Sticklers to tradition, like those in the Society, made the hierarchy in Rome cringe. Since the adoption of the vernacular rite in 1969, the Vatican found it had to deal with the holdovers who preferred the Latin Mass and refused to offer or even attend the new Mass, claiming it was a Protestantized fabrication. Only a couple years into his pontificate, Pope John Paul II established a nine-cardinal commission at the Vatican to study the Mass problem. On October 3, 1984, the Congregation for Divine Worship issued its circular letter, “Quattor Abhinc Annos.” This document describes the granting of and the restrictions placed on what is now commonly referred to as the Indult Mass. Indult, from the Latin indulgere (to indulge), is a privilege granted by the pope to bishops and others to do an action that the law of the Church otherwise prohibits. Yet the term “Indult” is misplaced, since the Latin Tridentine Mass has never been prohibited, which Alfons Maria Cardinal Stickler—one of the nine cardinals on the commission—admitted in May 1995 while speaking at a ChristiFideles conference held in New Jersey. Stipulations in the 1984 “Indult” included that the Mass only be offered (definitely not in parish churches) to those who request it, and those parishioners could in no way share the beliefs of those who question and doubt the validity of the new Mass. Meanwhile, the Society of St. Pius X continued to flourish and continued to offer the old Mass, not only at St. Nicolas, but also at other churches around the world. Lorber, now 41 years old, has witnessed much of the Society’s growth, despite the hardships the traditionalist order has had to endure at the manipulative hands of the hierarchy. Ordained on June 29, 1988, Lorber was one of the last to have his hands consecrated by Lefebvre, who died in 1991. A few weeks before his ordination, Lorber served the low Mass for the archbishop in the Notre Dame des Champs Chapel in the Seminary of Ecône on May 8, a Sunday. Lefebvre told Lorber how during the month before, in April 1988, he went to Rome to discuss with the Vatican the impending consecration of the bishops he had planned to take his place for the administering of sacraments, the ordaining of priests and the confirming of the faithful. Born in 1905, the archbishop was old and did not want to leave his priests without a spiritual leader. The Vatican’s representative at that time was Joseph Ratzinger, then a cardinal and now Pope Benedict XVI. In the end, after lengthy discussions and many compromises, a protocol was signed on May 5, 1988. The agreement stipulated that Rome would give Lefebvre one bishop and a commission in Rome to discuss the traditional Mass. “Ratzinger was quite hard with Archbishop Lefebvre,” Lorber says. After Lefebvre signed the protocol, he told Ratzinger that he had already announced the episcopal consecrations for the following June 30. Ratzinger’s response: No. It’s not possible. August? asked Lefebvre. No. It’s not possible, Ratzinger responded. November? No. December? No. Lefebvre left Rome and sought solace at the Seminary of Ecône, in Switzerland. He prayed. On May 6, he wrote to the Vatican and expressed that he did not have confidence in the agreement. “During the discussions with Rome, it was very painful,” Lefebvre told Lorber, “It was very painful, because they don’t take care of their souls. The only one thing they try to do is save their image, and this is why I will consecrate the bishops without Rome.” But the Vatican continued to pressure the archbishop. “The day before the consecrations, Rome sent a messenger, a nuncio from Switzerland, to take Archbishop Lefebvre back with him. The Pope asked if he could go to Rome to talk with him. The seminarians told him it was a good joke,” Lorber says. “The intention was to make Lefebvre nervous about the consecrations, but it didn’t disturb Archbishop Lefebvre.” Nothing bothered him. Not even the rumors circulating that he would be “excommunicated” if he went ahead with his plans for June 30. As for the excommunication of bishops, there were precedents. Decades earlier, in the 1950s, Pope Pius XII introduced into Canon Law, the prohibition of bishops consecrating bishops without papal approval. The Pope found this necessary after the Communist takeover in China. That was when the faithful of the Roman Catholic Church (the Underground Chinese Catholics) in China found themselves persecuted after the rise of the Chinese Patriotic Church (the pseudo-religious association that collaborated with the Chinese Communist government), explains Gaudray. “The law of the Church is for the good of the souls, so when Pius XII issued the decree of excommunication for the bishops in China, it was for the good of the Church. It was to prevent the setting up of the national church in China, which is not Catholic. It was to make people aware that the Pope does not agree at all and for them not to be part of the schismatic church,” Gaudray says. “The purpose of Archbishop Lefebvre was not to form another Church. Our bishops do not have authority, even in the Society. We have bishops for the sacraments, ordinations and confirmations. In China it was to form a Church.” The day finally arrived. Lefebvre predicted in his sermon before the consecrations there would be an attempt to excommunicate him. Nonetheless, on June 30, without papal permission, Lefebvre consecrated four bishops: Bernard Fellay, Bernard Tissier de Mallerais, Richard Williamson and Alfonso de Galarreta. “Many realized that the consecrations was an historic event for the Church,” Lorber says. It was a matter of preservation, not of the self, but of the faith. As predicted, on July 1, 1988, the Vatican, represented by Bernardinus Cardinal Gantin, prefect of the Congregation of Bishops, issued the following: “I declare that the above-mentioned Monsignor Marcel Lefebvre, and Bernard Fellay, Bernard Tissier de Mallerais, Richard Williamson and Alfonso de Galarreta have incurred ipso facto excommunication latae sententiae reserved to the Apostolic See.” This was accompanied by even more threats. “The priests and faithful are warned not to support the schism of Monsignor Lefebvre, otherwise they shall incur ipso facto the very grave penalty of excommunication.” Excommunication, explains Gaudray from his office in Winona, is a severe technical punishment issued by the Pope that severs all ties between the chastised and the Church. Penalized priests cannot give or receive the sacraments. They cannot offer or even attend Mass (new or old). “This, of course, means it is a punishment, but it implies a fault, that something is wrong,” Gaudray says. Both Gaudray and Lorber claim the excommunication was unjustified. For, they believe, Lefebvre committed no wrongdoing. “This excommunication has no value, really,” Lorber says. “Because for there to be punishment, one must have done something wrong. Archbishop Lefebvre didn’t have any schismatic intention by consecrating the bishops. His act was never a wrong, and he should never have been punished. Furthermore, by excommunicating Archbishop Lefebvre, Rome lost its credibility, because it lets bishops and theologians, like Hans Küng, Leonardo Boff and all the liberal theologians run around and teach heresies, and they were never excommunicated by John Paul II.” Lefebvre only tried to keep the old Mass, and the true Catholic religion, alive. “Without the actions of Archbishop Lefebvre, there would not be anymore priests who could say the Tridentine Mass,” Lorber says. Thus, the traditional priests of St. Nicolas continue the ancient rites of the one, holy, catholic, apostolic Church they learned from the old archbishop, coaxed out of retirement, reluctantly. Still, every morning, a single tap of a priest’s knuckle upon the blackened mahogany arm of a choir chair signals the morning’s recitation of the Divine Office. The Roman-collared men gathered in the sanctuary of St. Nicolas du Chardonnet de Paris raise the breviaries they hold in their hands and flip the thin pages until each finds the day’s prayers. “Deus, in adjutórium meum inténde,” chants one, followed by the others responding, “Dómine, ad adjuvándum me festína.”  9/6/2017 0 Comments TrotskyismPolish poster of Leon Trotsky, “Bolshevik Freedom.” Translation: “Bolsheviks promised, ‘We will give you room. We will give you freedom. We will give you land, work and bread.’ Abjectly, they unleashed war against Poland. Instead of freedom, they gave fists. Instead of land, requisitions. Instead of work, misery. Instead of bread, hunger.  ON MAY 25, 1949, the distinct thunderous booming of massive heavy artillery exploding in the outskirts of Shanghai caught Matthew’s ear. Throughout the day, violent eruptions continued. Then the next day, nothing. The raging battle between the Nationalists and the Communists died, replaced with an eerie silence, a creeping rigor mortis that froze the city. With a heightened sense of awareness of impending doom, the entire Koo household, family and servants, remained indoors as no one dared to step outside. From a second-story window, Matthew stood behind the curtains. Carefully, slowly, he parted the material and peeked out. No one walked on the normally crowded sidewalks. But in front of the China Industrial Bank, on the corner of Museum Road and Peking Road, a man wearing a Chinese gown lay lifeless in the gutter. That man must have been shot, he thought. Movement caught his eye. A People’s Liberation Army soldier, with a yellow armband wrapped around his biceps and a gun gripped in his hand, rushed down the street. Not daring to look out the window any longer, he withdrew. On May 27, the Communists proved victorious, for when he peeked through the curtains to look out the same window, he saw posters plastered onto the faces of the once-pristine museum and bank. Large Chinese characters, written with jubilant ink strokes. LONG LIVE CHAIRMAN MAO! WELCOME PLA! Down Museum Road, a group of exuberant Communist soldiers marched with a joviality, singing with heartfelt enthusiasm, “Today we liberate China! Tomorrow we liberate the world!” Shanghai had been “liberated” by the Communists. Earlier that month, with a final we-can-do-it demonstration of strength and resilience, Nationalist Army troops, in an endless line of two by two, had marched through the city streets. Soldiers plodded along, many just teenage peasant boys, outfitted in uniforms with field caps, bursting rucksacks and mud-spattered puttees. The on-again-off-again Chinese Civil War, which stretched on for decades, had begun with the purge of Communists from the Nationalists, in 1927. Fighting temporarily ceased, in 1937, when the Communists hoodwinked the Nationalists into a temporary truce to join forces in the Second United Front to fight the invaders from the Empire of the Sun in the Second Chinese-Japanese War (1937-45). Malefactors, the Reds had actually plotted the lull as a ruse to gain more control and power, which they did. With the end of the war between the Allied Forces and the Axis Powers, on August 15, 1945, the civil war picked up in the countryside where it had left off. For years, the Nationalists – headed by Chiang – and the Communists – dominated by Mao – clashed on the battlefields, and as the fighting destroyed the nation, the Communists continued to gain more ground and more control in the rural areas. Then the Reds aimed for the cities, coveted war trophies. On February 3, 1949, victorious troops paraded through the ancient gates and onto the streets of Peking, the North Capital, greeted as heroes, not as conquering enemies. Two months later, on April 23, they marched triumphantly into Nanking, Chiang’s South Capital in the province of Chiangsu (old form of Jiangsu), ending 22 years of Nationalist rule over the mainland. Defiant but not yet defeated, Chiang fled for Chengtu (old form of Chengdu). Only 187 miles separated Nanking and Shanghai. With the enemy that close, panic hit the foreigners, who had made their homes, expanded their families and created their businesses in Shanghai, the city in the East built by the West. Though deeply entrenched and invested emotionally and financially, many Americans and Europeans soon began packing their trunks and valises with whatever necessities they could carry with them to the docks, where they boarded passenger ships, including the USS President Wilson, one in the fleet that made up the American President Lines. On October 1, 1949, in a final flourish, Mao, who had manipulated his way to the chairmanship of the Communist Party, stood behind a bouquet of microphones atop Peking’s Tiananmen, the Gate of Heavenly Peace, and announced the takeover of the nation’s political seat of power. “The Central People’s Government Council of the People’s Republic of China took office today in this capital,” he proclaimed. In Peking, Mao flaunted his victories. In Chengtu, Chiang continued to hope the winds of war would shift in his favor. Even after Mao’s pronouncement, Chiang waited until the early-morning hours of December 9, 1949, when he finally, reluctantly boarded the Mei-Ling (old form of Meiling), his plane christened in honor of his wife, Mei-Ling Chiang (née Soong, 1897-2003). With propellers spinning, the Mei-Ling flew for Formosa (Portuguese name of Taiwan), where he would reestablish the capital of the diminishing Republic of China. On December 10, the Communists claimed Chengtu as their final conquest. For Matthew, changes were abrupt. Communist authorities shuttered the nearby branch of Saint Francis Xavier College, at 281 Nanzing Road (former name of Nanxu Road), a 10-minute walk north across Chapoo Bridge. Without a choice, he returned to the campus located on Avenue Foch. Crucifixes in the classrooms were ripped down from their places of honor. In their stead hung posters of those deemed great revolutionaries. Forms of address such as Mister and Miss, considered pollutions from Western Capitalist countries, were replaced with titles of political connotation. Marxist ideological indoctrination began, and regular political study sessions became mandatory for all students, supplied with textbooks written with a definite atheistic, materialist leaning. During in-class question-and-answer periods, Political Teacher Yang jotted down notes regarding the students’ answers. Not only in charge of the youths’ thoughts, he was also the cultivator of the school’s branch of the Communist Youth Group. Between classes, to help with recruiting, members of the Communist Youth Group politely handed out fliers, offering fun and festivities with music, dance, parades and celebrations, an important part of the first phase in the indoctrination process. “Welcome! Come join our celebration!” one young man encouraged, handing a flier to Matthew. Taking the announcement from the friendly teen, Matthew briefly considered joining. He liked music. He liked to dance. His school was an all-boys school, and maybe he would be able to talk to a girl. But quickly, he decided against it. Communism has been described as having three phases: The first phase is bow head (polite); the second phase is shake head (forbid); the third phase is behead (kill). After the short recruitment drive, the first phase ended and the veneer of the Communist Youth Group peeled away and exposed the true grain of the members, who began to struggle the Catholic students, those in the minority who followed the teachings of the Church. Bitterness between the two groups accelerated during the campaigning for student council president after each selected its own candidate. On election day, Catholics voted for the Catholic candidate, and non-Catholics voted for the Communist Youth Group candidate, a Communist Party supporter. With the pro-Communist students making up the majority of the school population, they easily won, and in the post-election euphoria, tensions began to twist and strain in what remained of civility and tranquillity in the school’s former scholarly atmosphere. Immediately, the newly elected council president initiated a political movement. He hounded students and ordered them to sign a patriotic contract that announced: “We support the Communist Party. We support the People’s Republic of China.” Even though everyone in school was to sign, most Catholics refused, and those who did not sign had their names placed in files. That included Matthew.  |
AuthorTHERESA MARIE MOREAU is an award-winning reporter who covers Catholicism and Communism. Archives
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