2015-02-09
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Cosmas Shi Enxiang in an undated photo.
Photo courtesy of UCAnews
An underground Catholic bishop in China has died at the age of 94, 14 years after his ‘disappearance’ at the hands of authorities, a Catholic news website and a religious rights activist said.
Bishop Cosmas Shi Enxiang of Yi county in Hebei province was arrested on Good Friday, 2001, at a relative’s home in Beijing, and had been held without charge at an unknown location since then, the UCANews website said.
Joseph Kung, spokesman for the U.S.-based Cardinal Kung Foundation, said the family had been trying to discover Shi’s whereabouts for years.
“Bishop Shi has been disappeared for 14 years, and neither we nor his family knew where he was being held,” Kung told RFA.
He said authorities in Hebei’s provincial capital Baoding had only informed the family of Shi’s death.
“[Then] the Baoding authorities informed his relatives that he had died, but the family still doesn’t know where his remains are, nor his personal effects,” Kung said.
According to the bishop’s great-niece Shi Chunyan, the family was wasn’t told exactly when or how Shi died, UCANews reported.
A Beijing-based underground church member, who gave only his surname Ding, said Shi had been persecuted by the authorities because he wasn’t a member of the China’s ruling Communist Party-approved China Patriotic Catholic Association, which doesn’t recognize the authority of the Vatican.
“He was held for a very long time, and died in jail in his nineties,” Ding said. “I think this is very inhumane, and it makes one very angry.”
“It’s a typical example of China’s track record on religious freedom,” he said.
Religious freedom
Officially an atheist country, China has an army of officials whose job is to watch over faith-based activities, which have spread rapidly in recent decades amid sweeping economic and social change.
Party officials are put in charge of Catholics, Buddhists, Taoists, Muslims, and Protestants. Judaism isn’t recognized, and worship in non-recognized temples, churches, or mosques is against the law.
Ding said China has a huge state “machinery” dedicated to ensuring its religious believers toe the party line.
“The older generation of religious leaders in particular spent a much longer time in jail,” he said.
He said China’s underground Catholics were forced to be more secretive in their activities because they retain allegiance to the Pope, regarded by Beijing as a foreign power with no say in its internal affairs.
“I think there’s a lot that the rest of the world doesn’t even know about the oppression directed at them by the Communist Party, since it came to power,” Ding said.
“I think it’s very widespread, deep and dark, and we shall see if people can expose more of it,” he said.
Shi Chunyan told UCANews that his family had taken the news of his death very hard.
“My parents and the bishop’s other siblings are particularly sad,” she said.
“They had been unsuccessfully trying to discover his whereabouts for many years. Now the answer to their questions is that he is dead,” she said.
Shi, a native of the northern province of Hebei, was hailed by some in online comments as “a martyr of the Church,” UCANews reported.
Bishop Su
Meanwhile, city authorities are also holding Catholic bishop James Su of Baoding at an unknown location, after he ‘disappeared’ in October 1997, Kung said.
