By AFP 21 May
2015
Opening the
church door in Baihanluo reveals a large portrait of Pope Francis
-- something of a paradox in an ethnically Tibetan area of
Communist China.
The village is
only reachable on foot or by horse, and surrounded by snow-capped
Himalayan peaks.
But despite its
remoteness French missionaries built the church -- with a curved,
Chinese-style roof -- at the end of the 19th century.
Pope Gregory XVI
assigned Tibet to the Foreign Missions Society of Paris, shortly
after China was forced to open its doors following its defeat in
the First Opium War.
Heading up the
river valleys into the hills, cut off by snows in winter, they
established "lost missions" in a still largely traditional and
theocratic society.
At times it was
a bloody cause, with evangelists martyred by monks opposed to
Christ invading their Buddhist territory.
"It was China's
far west. In Chinese, the Nu river was nicknamed the Valley of
Death. The saying was you had to sell your wife before going
because you didn't know whether you'd come back," said Constantin
de Slizewicz, author of The Forgotten Peoples of Tibet.
After the
Communist victory in China's civil war in 1949, foreign
missionaries were arrested as "agents of imperialism", maltreated
and expelled.
- Decades
without priests -
"The churches
were closed, or converted into schools or barns. Christians could
be jailed for having religious objects, and those who had important
roles were persecuted or taken for re-education," de Slizewicz told
AFP.
But Catholicism
persisted among the rural peasantry, their fervour as enduring as
their poverty.
"Tibetans are
mad about God. They dedicate their lives to their faith. Tibetan
Catholics don't convert by half," said de Slizewicz.
"In nearly 50
years without priests or sacraments they did not lose a single word
of a century of the fathers' teachings."
The mayhem of
Mao's 1966-76 Cultural Revolution brought with it another round of
destruction.
But as well as
maintaining the missionaries' tombs, the Tibetans have continued to
recite the catechism -- some in Latin -- and celebrate Easter and
Christmas, replacing the donkey and ox of the stable with a mule
and a yak.
Now, in a less
intolerant climate, as many as 500 parishioners gather for
festivals in Baihanluo, perched on a mountain spur in the
southwestern province of Yunnan, and recall the Nu patriarch
Zachary, who died around a decade ago aged more than
100.
He escaped the
Communist purges by fleeing to Taiwan, but returned after 30 years
of exile to join in the local Catholic revival.
"Zachary put
holy water from Lourdes, diluted in spring water, in every church
in the neighbourhood," said Zha Xi, 32, baptised Joseph. "One drop
was given to a sick believer, and three days later he was virtually
cured."
A Baihanluo
native called to the priesthood, Joseph has studied at seminaries
in Kunming and Chengdu, and is now preparing for the
ministry.
There are 16
churches in the area and farmer Yu Xiulian, 75, said: "There are
more and more Catholics here. We ordinary people want to make the
churches bigger but there isn't the money."
- Dalai Lama
-
Parish priest
Han Sheng, 39 -- known as Father Francis -- says there are more
than 10,000 Catholics in Tibetan areas of China, half of them in
Gongshan district, which includes Baihanluo.
China's
Communist authorities require religion to be supervised by the
state -- in the case of Catholics, by the Chinese Patriotic
Catholic Association, which oversees the churches of
Gongshan.
A separate
"underground" Chinese church recognises the authority of the
Pope.
The vast
majority of religious Tibetans are Buddhists, more than 130 of whom
have set themselves on fire since 2009 in protest at Chinese rule,
most of them dying.
Beijing accuses
the exiled spiritual leader the Dalai Lama of separatism and has
called him "a wolf in monk's robes", accusing the Nobel laureate
last month of backing "ethnic cleansing".
He was denied a
meeting with the Pope when he visited Rome in December, apparently
as the Vatican sought to avoid upsetting Beijing.
Father Francis
echoes the official line on the issue. "Speaking of the Dalai Lama,
we regard him highly as a religious leader," he told AFP. "But we
don't want him to carry out separatist activities."
He attributes
the growing number of faithful to the missionaries' historical
legacy, rather than a contest of beliefs between Buddhism,
Catholicism and Communism.
At night, an icy
draught blew through one of the district churches as women and
children sat on one side of the aisle, men on the other.
Simply dressed,
their skin tanned by altitude and field work, they knelt one by one
to whisper confessions of their sins to a priest by the
altar.
"If we follow
Your Words, we will go to Heaven," the congregation chanted
tirelessly.