For the better part of the past 60 years, Bishop Cosma Shi Enxiang (師恩祥) was imprisoned in Chinese jails and labor camps. For the last 14, he was held without charge in a secret location.
His offense: refusing to renounce his loyalty to the Roman Catholic Church, which ordained him in 1947.
Now, as unconfirmed reports of his death have emerged, Shi, who was to turn 94 this month, may face the gravest indignity of all. No announcement of his passing. No body for his family members to bury. No urn with his ashes.
The Chinese government has been so secretive about Shi’s detention that there is no certainty that he is dead.
EARLY REPORT
The Catholic news agency UCANews reported the bishop’s death on Feb. 2, citing his great-niece Shi Chunyan (師春艷), who said the family had been informed by a local official.
However, a Hong Kong-based reporter for the agency, Lucia Cheung (張介謹), said that after the family approached the local authorities to recover the bishop’s remains, they were told that the official who had told them he was dead had been drunk, or misinformed.
“The public has a right to know what’s going on,” said Joseph Kung, who runs the Cardinal Kung Foundation in Stamford, Connecticut, named after an uncle, Ignatius Kung Pin-mei (龔品梅), a former bishop of Shanghai. “I am not sure whether he is alive or dead.”
Shi is, or was, one of the last of a disappearing breed — Catholic bishops appointed by the Vatican decades ago who refused to cooperate with the state-sponsored Catholic Church, meant to supplant the church loyal to the pope.
Only a handful are still living, many well into their 80s or 90s. At least one other is in custody, and two are under close government surveillance. Their fate is one of the obstacles preventing China and the Vatican from re-establishing a centuries-old relationship that was severed in 1949.
“The Chinese government thinks the forced disappearances would scare people and stabilize the society, but this action will only lead to a more unstable and uncivilized society,” the Hong Kong Diocese, which falls under the Vatican, said in an open letter on Wednesday to the Chinese government, appealing for information about Shi.
Just as Beijing seeks to control the selection of Tibetan Buddhist leaders, such as the Dalai Lama and the Panchen Lama, so, too, does it insist that the government-controlled church appoint Catholic bishops. That is unacceptable to the Vatican, and the issue has also helped prevent Beijing and the Holy See from re-establishing diplomatic ties.
However in recent years, most of the bishops appointed by the official church were also, by tacit agreement, approved by the pope.
However, some were not. In the past five years, at least four bishops have been appointed without the Vatican’s approval, leading at least two to be excommunicated, raising tensions between the Chinese government and the Vatican.
Starting shortly after the 1949 Communist victory, many Catholic clergymen, including high-ranking church officials such as Bishop Kung, were jailed.
LONG-TERM THORN
Shi — he did not become a bishop until the 1980s — first went to jail in 1954, according to a biography posted online by a Catholic priest in Hebei, the Reverend Peng Jiandao (彭鑑道).
For the next quarter century, he was shuffled from one jail to another in northern China. During the 1966-1976 Cultural Revolution, he was sent to labor camps in the coal mines of Shanxi Province. In 1979 he was transferred to a jail in his hometown, Baoding, where the Roman Catholic Church had made deep inroads before 1949.
He was in and out of jail in the 1980s and 1990s. On April 13, 2001, at the age of 80, he was taken into custody at his niece’s home in Beijing and held without being charged. Cheung said his relatives had no contact with him during the subsequent 14 years.
A person answering the telephone at the religious affairs bureau of Hebei Province, where Shi oversaw Catholics in a rural county, would not give his name and said he had no idea whether the bishop had died, only that he had “disappeared for many years. But beyond that, I don’t know anything more.”
Another official with the bureau’s Catholic Office said over the phone that he had only “heard of Bishop Shi” but did not know anything else.
“In recent years, it’s impossible for us to just arrest a person based on his Catholic belief,” he added, refusing to give his name. “If a person is imprisoned, he must have broken some laws.”
Cheung said Shi’s family had heard rumors as long as three years ago that he had died.
“They are quite prepared to receive the news, but they at least they want to get the remains back,” she said.
The family could not be reached for comment.
The other bishop still in detention is Su Zhimin (蘇志民), who, like Shi, is from Baoding. He has been detained without charge since 1997.
At least two other bishops who refused to join the Chinese church, Julius Jia Zhiguo (賈治國) in Hebei and Joseph Wei Jingyi (魏景義) in Heilongjiang Province, live under strict government surveillance, Kung said.
The diocese of Hong Kong is appealing to Beijing to free Su and to release Shi’s body for burial if he has died.
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