Farewell to an Enigmatic Chinese Bishop

BEIJING â€" Hundreds of people gathered Monday at St. Ignatius Cathedral in Shanghai for the funeral of Bishop Aloysius Jin Luxian, a towering figure of Chinese Catholicism who died Saturday at 96.

Missing among the mourners, according to eyewitnesses, were bishops from China’s state-run Catholic Church, which rejects the Vatican’s claim to lead all Catholics. The funeral of one of China’s most prominent prelates was a local, Shanghai affair.

The political slight probably would not have surprised Bishop Jin, a Shanghai native who spent nearly three decades in jail, labor camps or other forms of detention for his faith. Arrested in 1955 as the Chinese atheist state swept away Christianity, and not fully freed until 1982, for the rest of his life he walked a tightrope, trying to balance the interests of Beijing and Rome. China and the Vatican have long feuded but both recognized the prominent bishop, making him a deeply political figure.

“Yes, it is very complicated here, and I have had to be, how do you say, both a serpent and a dove. I am both a serpent and a dove,” the Jesuit said in an interview in 2010 in Ignatius Insight, an online magazine (IgnatiusInsight.com).

“The government thinks I’m too close to the Vatican, and the Vatican thinks I’m too close to the government. I’m a slippery fish squashed between government control and Vatican demands,” he said.

Politics dogged Bishop Jin to his end, as the apparent absence of bishops from the state-run church, the Chinese Patriotic Catholic Association, from his funeral at St. Ignatius (also known as Xujiahui Cathedral) showed. A likely cause of their no-show is a highly politicized dispute in Shanghai over Bishop Jin’s successor as head of the official Shanghai diocese, according to people with knowledge of the situation.

Last July, Bishop Thaddeus Ma Daqin, who was to succeed Bishop Jin, astonished and enraged officials by publicly declaring he was leaving the state-run church. No successor has been appointed.

Catholics in China say the pressure from the state-run church can be unbearable and many young priests are unable or unwilling to face it. In particular, those who “look to Rome” may prefer to remain at a lower level in the hierarchy.

Bishop Jin’s life was marked by extraordinary political conflict. Born in 1916, he was a patriot: in “The Memoirs of Jin Luxian, Volume One: Learning and Relearning 1916-1982,” issued by the Shanghai diocese in Chinese in 2008 and published late last year in English, he wrote: “I was born at a time when the people of our country were suffering from the chaos of civil disorder and foreign occupation, so during my youth there was no National Day and only national disgrace.”

Bishop Jin had both “the unalterably Catholic faith and the unassailable confidence of a Chinese patriot,” wrote Father Michael Kelly, a fellow Jesuit and the executive director of the Union of Catholic Asian News, or UCAN.

In 1985 he was appointed a bishop by the state-run church, and in 2004 recognized by the Vatican, bringing full circle a life that included studies in Rome in the 1940s.

Bishop Jin, who was orphaned by the age of 14, attended Jesuit high school in Shanghai and became a Jesuit in 1938, aged about 22. He obtained a doctorate in theology at the Pontifical Gregorian University in Rome, returning to China not long after Mao Zedong’s Communists took power in 1949, UCA News reported.

He was the “come-back kid,” the “Yellow Pope,” UCA News wrote, citing for the latter the title of a 2006 biography by a French journalist, Dorian Malovic.

Significantly, by cooperating with the authorities, he persuaded them eventually â€" by a circuitous route â€" to allow prayers for the Pope to be said during Mass and helped to develop the liturgy in Chinese, UCA News wrote.

Writing in Ignatius Insight in 2010, the historian Anthony E. Clark described Bishop Jin as “China’s most powerful aboveground bishop” (in contrast to the “underground” church that follows the Vatican).

“He is one of the Church’s most enigmatic men, and one often wonders if what he is saying is a direct truth or a circuitous statement, a result of his years of dealing with Communist officials who hold an ever-tighter grasp on his movements as China’s most public prelate,” Dr. Clark wrote.

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