Religion: Catholics in China

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In satellite countries where it seized control after World War II, Communism has been trying out its own special technique for battling its great international enemy, the Roman Catholic Church. The technique: set up a local church organization and try to split clergy and congregations off from Rome. "National Catholic" churches have already been promoted in Hungary, Poland and Czechoslovakia. Last week the Peking Communist government was trying with might & main to shatter the religious solidarity of China's 3,500,000 Catholic faithful.

The campaign was quietly launched last year as a simple patriotic movement applying to all churches, with the slogan, "Self-rule, self-support and self-propagation." Protestants had no reason to protest the formula itself, since their China missions had largely operated as theoretical steppingstones to the establishment of independent, self-supporting churches. The Catholics, with their ties to Rome, were more suspicious.

The Peking government's next step was the widespread publication of a manifesto supposedly written by one Wang Liang-tso, a young parish priest of Szechwan province, calling upon all Chinese Catholics to "build up a new church opposed to the imperialist conspiracy of aggression." The Communist press hailed Father Wang as the founder of an "independent Catholic Church movement."

Tea for Honey. But then the Red premier, affable Chou En-lai (TIME, June 18), invited a group of Chinese Catholic bishops and priests to tea. All that Peking wanted, he explained, was a declaration of Chinese Catholics' essential patriotism. Catholicism, he said, had been a good thing for China. Surprised and pleased, the Catholics drew up a statement supporting the ultimate aim of an all-Chinese clergy, "but only under the authority of, and in union with, the Supreme Pontiff of Rome, since without that the Church in China would cease to be Catholic."

When they were unable to get the newspapers to publish either their statement or Premier Chou's honeyed words, the Catholics concluded that the whole tea party had been a brazen attempt to fool them into giving a fuzzy declaration that could be twisted to look like a breakaway from Rome. Meanwhile, as the Reds turned on the heat, signatures began sprouting all over China on petitions for an "Independent Catholic Church." Archbishop Anthony Riberi, the apostolic internuncio to China, decided that the time had come to take off the gloves.

In a circular letter to all bishops he wrote: "The Catholic religion ... is superpolitical, indivisible by national boundaries or political differences . . . Any so-called Independent Catholic Church . . . is simply a schismatic church and not the true and one Catholic Church."