Wes Beyer: The following is part one of an interview with Christopher Mee, conducted by Dr. William Saunders, Director of Catholic University’s Center for Human Rights. To listen to the rest of this interview, please check the link in the description.
William Saunders: Hi, I’m William Saunders, I’m the Director of the Center for Human Rights at Catholic University of America where Chen Guangcheng, the famous Barefoot Lawyer, is our distinguished fellow. Today, we want to talk about a report that came out recently from the Hudson Institute called, “10 Persecuted Catholic Bishops in China.” It was written by Nina Shea, who’s a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute and director of their Center for Religious Freedom. And with us today we have a law student from the Catholic University of America, Christopher Mee. Welcome, Christopher.
Christopher Mee: Thank you for having me!
S: So, Christopher, tell us… first, just introduce yourself. [It’s] your first year at the law school, right?
C: Yes, my name is Christopher Mee, I’m a first year law student at Catholic University. I’m interested in constitutional government and religious freedom, so it’s a pleasure to be here at Catholic University.
S: So how did you get involved with this report?
C: Sure, I interned for Nina Shea at the Hudson Institute this summer. I served as her research intern, and she put me on this project, and as it turns out it was a very meaningful project to be put on. Religious persecution is obviously a very important issue. It’s something that I didn’t know a lot about beforehand, but something that I learned about in the progress of researching the Church’s persecution in China.
S: Yeah, and for those listening in, we also have a Center for Religious Liberty her at the Columbus School of Law at Catholic University where I’m co-director, and Christopher is one of the students who is involved with our Center for Religious Liberty as well. So, Christopher, introduce the listeners to this report.
C: Sure, yes. So this report details 10 persecuted Catholic bishops in China. Seven of them are detained indefinitely in jails, and three of them are still being investigated in an ongoing basis by the communist government in China. But this story, it starts out with some policy recommendations, and then it gives the summary of what has happened to the Church in China, but then, really, the meat of this report is telling the stories of these bishops, and talk about their lives.
S: Yeah. Well, I want to get to those, but I want to, first of all, put it in some context. So, why don’t you give the listeners some kind of understanding of… some people may not even realize the Catholic Church is present in China, and it’s been there — I will just tell the listeners — it’s been there since the first millennium of the Christian Church, maybe as early as 500, certainly by 800, and it’s been present ever since. It’s been undergoing quite hard times since the Communist Party came to power after the Second World War. So, why don’t you put us in some context, Christopher?
C: Sure. Christian missionaries first came to China a long time ago, and, of course, they encountered persecution during the Mao era, and in response to the Catholic Church’s presence in China, the Mao government established the Catholic Patriotic Association, which was a way to control and manipulate the Catholic Church. They established this pledge of independence from the pope and independence from the hierarchy of the Catholic Church, so any bishop who signed this pledge would be pledging independence from the Church. So it was obviously antithetical to the tenets of the Catholic Church, and in 2007, Pope Benedict writes this letter, this pastoral letter, to the Catholic Church in China, first of all giving them hope, but also saying that it is not acceptable to join this Patriotic Catholic Association. It’s not a legitimate, papal-sanctioned body. And persecution obviously continued in the Church throughout the 90s and 2000s until… and it continues to happen today. But, in 2018, the Church signs this China-Vatican provisional agreement that is a secret treaty. No one knows the terms of this treaty except for those involved in negotiating it. But, this treaty tries to formalize some of the appointment of Catholic bishops in China, but, of course, eventually the Chinese government just appoints their own bishops to positions of authority.
S: So, the listeners should understand that when Chairman Xi came into power, recently, the Catholic Church got increased persecution and increased harassment, and some things that would be hard to believe when I say them, but they’re true: They’re knocking the crosses off of buildings, they’re having [the] equivalent of hymns sung to Chairman Xi, they’re quoting from his little red book of his own sayings, they’re re-translating the Bible to make it friendly to the communists. So there’s been a very intense increase of persecution and harassment under Chairman Xi, and he’s still the chairman right now, and it was with his government that the Vatican concluded this agreement. And the agreement has been renewed twice, and it’s been criticized by a lot of people because, number one, nobody’s read it; number two, although as Christopher said it provides, we believe, for the appointment of bishops, the Communist Party has appointed bishops without the Vatican being involved. As we’ve talked about, actually, on previous podcasts, in China itself, Guangcheng has told us that the Communist Party has said that they will do what they want to do, they made this public, like a public proclamation, that they will do what they want to do, and they don’t care what the agreement says. So, there’s a lot of perplexity and confusion about this agreement and lack of knowledge of its details, and then the kind of overriding question is: is it working? And so Christopher is going to tell us about 10 bishops who are currently being persecuted, so go ahead.
C: Sure, yeah, I can’t get into detail on all of the bishops on a podcast this length, but I’d like to at least highlight three of them. The first would be Bishop James Su Zhi-min; he has been detained since 1997, and we have no news of his whereabouts. But, like you said, there was kind of this feeling of hope when the Vatican signed this agreement, and there was this feeling that maybe we could get information about him, and his family was very disappointed that nothing came out about him — whether he was still alive and what his whereabouts were. But he’s been locked up in various detainment camps since the 50s and 60s. I just wanted to read something about his torture: “In detention, security police once beat him with a board so savagely that it splintered, prompting them in a sadistic frenzy to tear off the doorframe for more wood to continue.” And another time, they beat him after suspending him from the ceiling by his wrists. They also confined him to a closet-sized cell for several days and filled it with water to prevent him from sitting or sleeping. And then later, members of the Chris Smith Congressional delegation came to visit China and check on religious freedom there, and they met with Bishop Su, and he was out of prison at this point during a brief stint, and he led Catholics in his Baoding Diocese in an outdoor Mass, and it was a very beautiful celebration. So he got to meet with Ambassador Chris… with Congressman Chris Smith, and eventually… we haven’t heard from him, but a Baoding priest says that “the influence of Bishop Su is actually the spirit of the older generation that affects us, encourages us, and inspires us,” and the Pontifical Institute for Foreign Mission says that, “for the faithful, he is the greatest and the most famous Chinese bishop because of the faithfulness of the Holy See.” So, Bishop Su’s witness is just something so powerful I think that all Catholics could learn from, and so we should definitely pray for him.
The next bishop I think that’s worth highlighting — I mean, all of them are worth highlighting — but the next would be Bishop Jia Zhiguo. His case is really interesting because he… the Chinese government has done this with many of the bishops, but especially with him: they keep these bishops in detainment for stints of time indefinitely, and no one knows how long they’ll be in prison. They’re held without even pretended due process, but he has been detained or arrested 35 separate times over the course of his life, and something that I thought was so amazing about his story is that he ran an orphanage for disabled children in his diocese of Zhengding. In the early 1990s, a disabled infant had been left on his doorstep, and he took the baby into his home and cared for him. And I thought, for me, this just reminded me of the Christlike-ness that we want to see in the clergy, and how he took care of the least among us. After this one infant, other parents began dropping off their sick and disabled children. So in recent years, the bishop, and the nuns who were living with the bishop, cared for 80 abandoned children there. Police declared his orphanage illegal as an unauthorized religious activity, and on June 24, 2020, a group of 70 police and 25 social service workers took custody of half the orphans. Facing widespread resistance from the children — including one who threatened to kill himself if he were taken away — the police halted the relocation of the younger children. So these kids, these parishioners, love their bishop, and the bishop has been detained indefinitely since then.
Will Deatherage: The Catholic University’s Center for Human Rights has published a documentary on the United Nations’ universal declaration on human rights. The documentary features world-class human rights experts, from former State Department officials to ambassadors and human rights activists. It can be found on our website at humanrights.catholic.edu.