Shanxi: police crack down on unregistered prayer house, leave Catholic man in coma
The incident took place on 23 March in the Diocese of Lüliang, but the authorities tried to hush it up. The intervention of special forces attracted other Catholics from the nearby village of Xinli, home to an old Catholic community. An officer was also wounded in the incident. The parish priest and some parishioners were arrested. The community was forced to engage in "self-criticism", but the increasingly inflexible rules on religions are the real problem.
Lüliang (AsiaNews) – On 23 March, a middle-aged man suffered severe head wounds during a clash with police in a parish in the Diocese of Lüliang, Shanxi province.
The parishioner, Francis Zuo Shangwang, lives in Xinli, a village in Wenshui County. At present, he is in a coma in a local hospital. The incident that put him in the intensive care unit occurred in Zhaizi, a village about 70 kilometres southwest of Taiyuan, the provincial capital.
Three or four years ago, a devout parishioner in Zhaizi bought land and built a house to be used for prayers. A few days before the incident, the authorities informed parishioners that the building had not been correctly registered and could not be used for religious activities.
During Lent, however, parishioners gathered there anyway to pray the rosary. On Sunday, 23 March, special police forces arrived at the site and pushed around some elderly people. One fell to the ground causing a head wound.
The priest who was there to distribute the Eucharist informed the parishioners of the nearby village of Xinli by phone and they came to the site. As the number of faithful coming to show their solidarity rose, so did the number of police agents. While the latter tried to disperse the crowd with tear gas and batons, Zuo Shangwang was injured and fell to the ground unconscious.
At that point, the angry crowd attacked an officer left alone in a police car, seriously injuring him. The three injured (the two Catholics and the special police officer) were urgently taken to hospital.
Three days later, the parish priest – who also serves the prayer house in Zhaizi – and the head of the Xinli parish council were arrested. On 31 March, four other parishioners were also detained on charges of assaulting a police officer.
The villages of Xinli and Zhaizi are about 2.5 kilometres apart and belong to different counties: Zhaizi to Jiaocheng and Xinli to Wenshui. In Xinli, which according to official data has 1,026 residents, the Christian presence dates to the 17th century, and is the largest Catholic centre in the Diocese of Lüliang.
Saint John Wang Rui, one of the Chinese martyrs canonised by John Paul II, grew up here. The history of the faith in Zhaizi is more recent; it has only 40 to 50 Catholics, who are often helped by those from Xinli.
Jiaocheng County is also the birthplace of the Pure Land School, an important branch of Buddhism; the local Xuanzhong Temple has a history of 1,500 years, unlike the Catholic Church, which has a small community and a more recent history.
According to local parishioners, neighbours reported the meetings in Zhaizi’s prayer house, perhaps because they felt that the people coming and going were too noisy.
Other parishioners believe that a group in the village profits from beliefs in spirits and is inexorably at odds with Christians, and, for this reason, filed a complaint.
In Jiaocheng County, Catholics are said to number only 500 and hitherto the local Communist Party paid no attention to them. The summary way in which they have now been treated and the use of the special police have now brought into the open a major problem.
Some Catholics believe that the recent tightening of rules on religion in recent years and the fear of local officials of making mistakes is fuelling conflicts.
In Xinli, the stories of the many parishioners who preferred death to apostasy during the Cultural Revolution are handed down from one generation to the next. Over the years, many vocations to the priesthood have come from the village.
Bishop Ji Weizhong of Lüliang, who was ordained last 20 January under the agreement between the Holy See and China, was born in the village into a family that had been Catholic for generations.
He said that when he was a child, at the end of the Cultural Revolution, before the church was reopened, his mother would take her children to neighbours' houses to pray together; his family never stopped teaching catechism in the morning and evening.
For many years, this is how the faith was handed down in the village. For this reason, when people hear that their neighbours in the nearby village of Zhaizi are in difficulty, parishioners go to support them without hesitation.
The wounded man, Francis Zuo Shangwang, comes from a simple family that loves the Lord. A lorry driver by profession, he is the father of three girls, the youngest just two years old.
Last year, due to too much work, he fell and broke his spine; on 6 December, he underwent surgery from which he had not yet fully recovered.
When he heard about the incident in the village of Zhaizi, however, he did not hesitate to follow young people from his village to go and help fellow Catholics.
After being seriously injured in the clash, he underwent two craniotomies, but so far he has not woken up. The cerebral oedema has subsided, but a series of life-threatening complications persist.
The incident that took place on 23 March in Zhaizi was followed by greater exposure. The head of the parish council in Xinli and other members of the community are seemingly under strict surveillance, government agents are constantly entering the village to check out the situation, while all the priests of the diocese have been forced to undergo a week of study to learn about government rules and regulations, and the parish’s financial accounts of the last five years have been audited.
The priest under arrest, Fr Zhang Jinliang, was reportedly moved to another place of detention and villagers were told not to talk about the wounded. This explains why the outside world has not been able to obtain precise information so far.
Following the arrests, parishioners in Xinli and Zhaizi calmed down, and engaged in “self-criticism,” saying that the Church herself had faults, that she had not done her job well, continuing to hold meetings after being told that the prayer house had not been legally registered. Catholics should not have faced off with special police officers and harm them, especially those who did not hit anyone.
However, they cannot understand why the local administration did not take the initiative to help the prayer house to register since it had been in operation for years, but instead chose to enforce the law during Lent, the most important month in the Catholic Church's liturgical year, sending a team of special agents with pepper spray and firearms against unarmed worshippers.
Some Catholics called the Zhaizi village incident a "religious disaster", noting that “In the current circumstances, we can only pray more, hoping that government departments will apply the law impartially.”
"When we were confronted by the police in the village, we neglected prayer and chose confrontation, forgetting that prayer is the best weapon we can have. In this Holy Week, we must follow the example of Jesus, who went on to suffer. We must learn from his patience and pray for our brother Francis, who is suffering in the Passion of the Church, and anxiously wait for his reawakening.”
People are also concerned about the detention of Fr Zhang Jinliang, who is a committed evangeliser. There are fears that the local Church will become increasingly restricted in the future and that plans to build a church in the county may come to naught.
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16/03/2017 17:51
