BLOOD OF THE MARTYRS
TRAPPIST MONKS IN COMMUNIST CHINA
THERESA MARIE MOREAU
FOREWORD
“Blood of the Martyrs” reminds us how the Soldiers of Christ shed their blood, to witness their Faith, under the Communist regime. This story encourages us temporary men to live out our Faith. Our Church has given many Flowers under the Communist rule. Make Jesus more known, more loved.
Father Benedict Chao, OCSO
(Surviving Refugee of Our Lady of Joy)
January 26, 2013
Feast of the Three Founders of Cistercian Order
Father Benedict Chao, OCSO
(Surviving Refugee of Our Lady of Joy)
January 26, 2013
Feast of the Three Founders of Cistercian Order
OUR LADY of CONSOLATION
The blood of the martyrs is the seed of the Church.
– Tertullian, “Apologeticus”
1
Father Chrysostomus Chang plumbed the depths of his human will for a supernatural strength. With only a few minutes remaining of his life in the material world, he lifted his thoughts to the spiritual. Through screams from the mob, he addressed his confreres at his side one last time, to prepare them not for death, but for life, everlasting life.
“We’re going to die for God. Let us lift our hearts one more time, in offering our total beings,” he said.
Helpless, the six Trappist monks stood handcuffed and chained on a makeshift platform, targets of a frenzied hatred that surged toward them. The blood-encrusted, lice-infested men, wearing rags caked in their own filth, had nowhere to run, no one to help them. After six months of mind-bending interrogations and body-rending torture, it was over. It was all over.
The verdict had just been read by a Chinese Communist officer: Death. To be carried out immediately.
Hundreds of crazed peasants, with fists raised, with contorted faces, with spit-covered lips, screamed rehearsed slogans of approval for the approaching slaughter. Executioners – reliable Party henchmen – rushed to ready their rifles to exterminate the Roman Catholic monks, believers in the superstitious cult, lovers of the God on the Cross imported from the Imperialist West.
And so it happened on January 28, 1948, in the dead of winter in Pan Pu, an unmapped village, a frigid heathen hell in the Mongolian mountains, somewhere in the frost-covered north of the Republic of China.
Just over the ridge from the pandemonium staged by the soulless Chinese Communists – believers in the materialistic cult, lovers of the god of death and destruction – lay the charred ruins of Our Lady of Consolation, the once-majestic abbey the monks had called home.
Jostled in the madness, the monks fell to their knees. With their swollen hands tied and chained behind their backs, they couldn’t even cross themselves – In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost – a final time.
The death squad – Communist soldiers at the ready – loaded their rifles with fresh rounds of ammo.
Shots rang out. One, then the next, followed by the next, the monks collapsed upon the blood-splashed, frozen ground. Their lifeless bodies dragged to a nearby sewage ditch and dumped into a heap, one on top of the other. Alerted by the shots, wild dogs, roaming the village’s dirt roads, scavenging for scraps, hurried over to the bodies to investigate. Sniffing, they lapped up the warm blood, steaming in the icy air.
It was all over. Our Lady of Consolation was no more.
The tragic tale of Our Lady of Consolation began 65 years earlier, on June 16, 1883. On that glorious day, as the hot summer wind from the Gobi Desert carried its golden dust eastward, and the cicada nymphs emerged reborn, buzzing in celebration of their emergence into new life from their old shell of death, Father Ephrem Seignol, a Trappist monk, stood on a ledge in the shadow of the Mongolian mountains. Atop a ridge nearly 10,000 feet high, that much closer to God, he glimpsed for the first time the rock-filled valley of Yang Kia Ping (translation: Yang Family Land, old form of Yangjiaping). Before his eyes lay the birthplace of the Trappist Community in China.
With him, Father Ephrem brought little else except his dreams, his duties of state, God’s will and the name of the future abbey. Before he had departed from his priory in Tamie, France, for China, from the West for the East, from the Occident for the Orient, he visited his close friend Father John Bosco, in Turin, Italy. The future saint suggested that the abbey be christened with the same name as the chapel in which they were sitting: Our Lady of Consolation. And so it would be.
The Trappists had answered a call from Bishop Louis-Gabriel Delaplace (Congregation of the Mission), who wanted a contemplative community in his Peking diocese. The Catholics in Fan Shan village, desperate for the sacraments on a regular basis, offered to sell to the monks an immense valley of rocky, untilled land in Chahar province (now Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region and Hebei province).
Yang Kia Ping, approximately 60 square miles in size, about 75 miles – as the Mongolian ring-necked pheasant flies – west of Peking (old form of Beijing), the northern capital of what was at that time Imperial China, where Empress Dowager Tzu-Hsi (old form of Cixi) ruled from the Inner Palace of the Forbidden City.
Back in 1883, when Father Ephrem arrived in the valley, travel to the site of the future abbey was measured in days, not hours. The Imperial Peking-Kalgan Railway didn’t exist. Construction wouldn’t even begin until 1905, with its completion in October 1909. The fastest, smoothest form of travel consisted of jostling atop a mule, along narrow dirt ways through the fields and plains. To reach the stony plateau nestled in Cho Lu (old form of Zhuolu) County, a traveler had to be alert through the heavily wooded areas, on the lookout for bandits and bears. Along the death-defying paths, one had to rely on a trustworthy mule that tested the rock-strewn trails with its hoof before putting its weight down, hugging close to towers of sheer rock reaching skyward to avoid falling straight down the ravine on the other side.
To form a Trappist religious Community from a valley of rocks seemed intimidating, but not impossible. With religious recruits from Europe and from the local villages, despite a slow start, eventually, on those rocks, they built their church, Our Lady of Consolation, an impressive replica of the architectural beauty at Mount Saint Bernard Abbey. Pilgrims, arriving for the first time and looking down upon the abbey from any ridge high in the surrounding mountains, saw a Community so large inside its enclosure that it appeared like any village in the hills.
The church, designed by Belgian Scheut missionary Father Alphonse de Moerloose (Congregation of the Immaculate Heart of Mary), was encircled by several single-story buildings and three courtyards. A vegetable garden sprouted up in the middle of the valley, along with its blossoming fruit trees and, of course, a luscious vineyard, where Brother Ireneus Wang, the self-taught viticulturist, tenderly coaxed the grapes, harvested for the Mass wine.
From the Chinese countryside, and even from the highly cultured, international port city of Shanghai, many boys and men had felt the call to the Trappist austere way of life, with its silence and solitude, prayer and penance. The abbey had been blessed with vocations: oblates, postulants and novices. So many joined the Community that Pope Pius XI, in his 1926 encyclical “Rerum Ecclesiae,” lauded the monks for their exceptional work in the missions and for winning vocations by bringing pagans to the Church. Two years later, on April 29, 1928, the abbey opened a daughterhouse, Our Lady of Joy, with 95 Community members, about 3 miles from Cheng Ting (old form of Zhengding), in the province of Hopei (old form of Hebei).
By the time Christmas 1936 rolled around, Our Lady of Consolation was at its height, with the Community numbering around 120 monks, mostly Chinese natives who had attended Mass in the abbey’s chapel built for the faithful from the surrounding villages. The first chapel, built in 1909, at Gate No. 2, marked the entrance and exit in the second enclosure wall. A larger chapel was built in 1934, at Gate No. 1, during the construction of the third and outermost wall, which stood 12 feet high and spanned more than 2 miles. Along its partition, the wall was dotted with loopholes, narrow slits that were never used for their intended purpose – rifles – but instead as peepholes to peer out at the Pei Ho, the nearby river.
Even though majestic, the abbey reflected the austere nature of any cloister of Trappists, the common name for the Order of Cistercians of the Strict Observance, an offshoot of the Order of Saint Benedict. The Trappists, established in 1664 at the Abbey of La Trappe, in France, aimed to follow more closely the literal translation of “The Rule of Saint Benedict.” They focused on the penitential aspect of
monasticism: little food, no meat, hard manual labor and strict silence.
Life inside the abbey’s walls, peaceful; life outside, however, complete turmoil...