Published: December 12, 2012
 
BEIJING — A Roman Catholic bishop who stunned congregants and Communist Party officials last July when he renounced his government position during his consecration has been stripped of his religious title, according to two Catholic Web sites that cited contacts in the Chinese church.
 
Thaddeus Ma Daqin, 45, the auxiliary bishop of Shanghai, has been under house arrest since he told a crowd of more than 1,000 people that he was resigning from the Chinese Patriotic Catholic Association, the party-run bureaucracy that oversees the religious life of the nation’s 12 million Catholics, nearly half of whom are thought to practice in underground churches.
 
While not unexpected, the revocation by the Chinese Catholic Bishops Council is likely to aggravate tensions between Beijing and the Vatican, which have been at loggerheads over the ordination of bishops.
 
Bishop Ma’s public rebuke of government interference in religious life was especially troubling to the authorities because his consecration had been the product of a rare agreement between both sides. In the past two years, the Patriotic Catholic Association, which does not recognize papal authority, has consecrated a number of bishops over the Holy See’s objections, resulting in their automatic excommunication.
 
Bishop Ma’s announcement last July prompted a standing ovation from those attending his consecration. Afterward, he was whisked away from the church. Several reports say he is being confined to a seminary outside Shanghai and is barred from celebrating Mass with other priests.
 
According to the Catholic Web sites AsiaNews and UCANews, a number of nuns and seminarians who supported him were punished or forced to attend “political education” classes that emphasized the primacy of the party-run association.
 
Officials at the Patriotic Catholic Association in Shanghai could not be reached for comment on Wednesday.
 
The Rev. Federico Lombardi, the director of the Vatican press office, declined to comment on the decision to strip Bishop Ma of his title. But he referred to earlier comments made by Cardinal Fernando Filoni, the prefect of the Congregation for Evangelization, who voiced deep concern over Bishop Ma’s detention and the fraying relations between Rome and Beijing, saying they were “creating a dramatic crisis of conscience.”
Rachel Donadio contributed reporting from Rome.