INA ROSENTHAL-UREY SAN DIEGO, CALIF.
DOLORES L. PIPER TAMARAC, FLA.
title: “Keeping The Faith” ShowToc: true date: “2022-12-09” author: “Hannah Johnson”
That the villagers have kept the faith is not the only remarkable fact about this outpost. They also happen to be ethnic Tibetans, who are usually raised as Buddhists from birth. That Catholic missionaries were able to make any inroads at all in this brigand-infested hinterland during the last century is testament to their persistence–and to Cizhong’s hard-bitten poverty. Nowadays, says an Asia-based Roman Catholic priest, “more than 4,000 missionaries, both Catholics and Protestants, are in China.” But few make it to obscure Tibetan areas of Yunnan and Sichuan provinces, which are adjacent to but no longer considered part of Tibet proper. As a result, some Catholic congregations are quietly dying out. “God has sent you!” exclaimed one wizened 73-year-old Catholic nun in another remote Tibetan village, called Daofu, in Sichuan, when Western visitors arrived unexpectedly. “Are you Catholic?”
Ho, who still speaks French, goes by the name Bernard-Marie. He is now the caretaker of Cizhong’s beautiful stone cathedral. It combines Western architectural styles with Chinese motifs, including yin-yang symbols painted on the ceiling. “When I was young I had no clothes. My family was very poor,” he recalls, “so a missionary named Angelis Lovey took me in and gave me food, taught me about Catholicism. I went to the seminary in Kunming.” But by the time he returned home in 1954, the communists had taken power in Beijing and foreign missionaries had been expelled. Bernard-Marie wound up in a labor reform camp for 22 years.
In his modest home in the village, the elderly Catholic proudly displays a photograph of his late teacher Maurice Tornay, who was “killed by Buddhists in 1949,” he says. Tornay, a European priest, was one of the 120 Chinese and foreign saints canonized by the Vatican last October.
Followers of the exiled Tibetan leader, the Dalai Lama, fret about an influx of Christian missionaries into Tibet over the last decade. While the Chinese Constitution guarantees freedom of religion, it bans proselytizing of any sort. Yet many Westerners who work as English teachers or travel through China are Christian clerics, some of whom are presented opportunities to spread their gospel.
But neither missionaries nor official priests get to remote Tibetan hamlets in Yunnan and Sichuan very often. “The government wants to be careful about possible frictions between Tibetan Buddhists and Catholics,” explained a local official in Sichuan. “So resident priests won’t be sent to such places unless the numbers of believers go up.” In fact, the opposite seems more likely to happen, unless aging believers like Bernard-Marie can spread the word themselves.
