The underground Catholic clergy of China require extraordinary faith in the protective powers of the Lord. Last November, Sister Maria (a pseudonym) traveled about 1,000 kilometers from her home in northern China to the eastern coastal city of Wenzhou to collect a dossier containing information on a priest killed during the Cultural Revolution. She didn't allow the risks to deter her from her secret mission: gathering information on Catholics who might one day be canonized for choosing death rather than renouncing their faith. Maria's local contacts asked her to meet at their state-approved church, but she refused. Fearing government spies would monitor her there, she instead met her contacts at the priest's grave. Maria took the documents and knelt only briefly before leaving. "When God is with me, who can oppose me?" she prayed. She later recalls, "It's the same prayer that protected me in prison."

Maria knows only too well how dangerous it is to keep faith with her religion. She and her fellow underground church members make up the biggest organization in China outside of Communist Party control, and police monitor them continually. Underground Catholics, numbering some 5 million, reject the government's oversight of their religion (although many still worship in official churches for lack of other options). Maria is at especial risk, traveling the country collecting stories of Catholics killed since the Party came to power—individuals whom she hopes the Pope will recognize as martyrs. It's a role that places her at the epicenter of international intrigue involving the Vatican, Beijing and even Taiwan. Yet her only true protection is her faith and, she hopes, the picture of the Virgin Mary that she keeps hidden beneath the battery in her Nokia mobile phone. "The work is risky," she admits, "but my whole life has been risky."

Maria was born into a peasant family of eight children in 1965, the darkest time for Chinese Catholics since thousands were massacred during the 1900 Boxer Rebellion. A year later the Cultural Revolution erupted. A band of Red Guards, Chairman Mao's ultra-leftist shock troops, smashed down the church her parents attended. In this atmosphere of fear, she says, "I was raised in a home with no Bible, no Cross on the wall." When the Party finally began tolerating worship again in the late 1970s, her family and neighbors met outdoors for Mass, often under umbrellas in the rain or ankle-deep in the snow. The bishop from her diocese returned from a labor camp and encouraged Maria to study the Bible in an underground religious school independent from those operated by the government. Her faith deepened. Against her family's wishes, she forsook an arranged marriage and joined a Theresan order of nuns.

Senior underground clergy discovered that Maria's modest manner and shy smile disguised an unexpected strength. In the 1980s they appointed her to oversee an orphanage that took in severely handicapped children who might otherwise die in state-run institutions. Local cadres periodically order her to close it down, but Maria resists. "When somebody leaves a child at our gate, can we turn it away?" she asks. Today the 70 cribs located in a building near her orphanage are all full, and Maria struggles to place them with families before the next abandoned children arrive. It's a demanding job that adds to her burden as a senior aide to her aging bishop. Police occasionally detain him and refuse to let him travel, so Maria passes messages to other underground dioceses on his behalf.

Maria grew aware of the lack of Chinese martyrs when she herself needed to draw from their strength. It was 1989, and the police had just arrested several priests who were negotiating the return of church property that the government had confiscated decades earlier. She joined the resulting demonstrations and was detained for several weeks. She and her cellmate, a young mother, were terrified. Police had beaten to death one member of their diocese; another remains brain-dead to this day. Stuck in a cement cell without bedding, Maria bolstered her companion by relating stories of the courage of saints tortured and killed for their faith. "I would have told her about China's martyrs," she says. "But back then we didn't know those stories."

Maria got her chance to learn about China's own Catholic martyrs three years ago when a church leader asked her to look into those killed in the Cultural Revolution. She chose the case of a woman in her early 20s. "Ruigu was a young girl who knew the officials were after her," says Maria. "She hid for days in the weeds sprouting from a dry irrigation ditch. It must have strengthened her resolve. After they caught her, they strung her up by her wrists over the rafter in their office. When Ruigu's family got her body back, her fingertips had been snipped off with pruning clippers. Her friend saw this happen and told me. Ruigu was like me; she was active. When there's trouble, we're the people they come for. She was afraid..." The story ends as abruptly as it began. She was afraid, but she didn't give in.

Maria passes her stories on to emissaries from Taiwan, who send them on to the Vatican. And that's where the political intrigue begins. The Vatican would like to establish diplomatic relations with China, one of the few countries in the world with a growing Catholic population (it now numbers about 10 million followers). In part to avoid roiling Beijing, the Holy See has not canonized Chinese Catholics killed for their faith since the Communist Party came to power in 1949. Indeed, of the 120 Chinese martyrs whom Pope John Paul II canonized three years ago, not a single one had been killed in the past half-century. As for Beijing, it wants to establish ties with the Vatican for a reason of its own: doing so might force its nemesis, Taiwan, to break links with the Holy See—Taiwan's last significant diplomatic partner.

Maria hopes the Vatican will one day establish relations with Beijing, and she longs for the day when China's Catholics will be free to worship more openly. But for now, she mostly hopes that China's forgotten dead will be commemorated by the church for which they died. So far, she and others like her have provided information on about 1,000 martyrs to the Vatican. The suggestion that her own efforts are heroic embarrasses Maria. "The only heroes in my work," she says, "are the martyrs."

Previous: Cynthia Maung	Next: Liu Binyan

	View all of TIME's Asian Heroes covers Reader's Choice: TIME's Online Asian Hero The Results are in! Find out who you said was the most inspirational person or persons of 2002 How well do you know your heroes? Take our quiz and find out!