China: faithful fear police will storm cathedral, take bishop’s body
Beijing, Dec 19, 2013: the faithful of the Diocese of Tangshan (Hebei) have been keeping
vigil over the body of Msgr. Paul Liu Jinghe, who died last December 11. The vigil
in the cathedral is not just about prayer: they want to stop the Tangshan police from
forcibly taking the corpse to bury it in common ground and not in the Catholic cemetery,
according to the deceased bishop's wishes.
The tension in the diocese is very
high: yesterday all the parish priests were forced to take part in a meeting with
the State Administration for Religious Affairs , after they published an open letter
. The website of the diocese was shut down for a while and cell phones placed under
control. Now the website is working.
The faithful expect the police to raid
the cathedral today forcing the common burial of the remains of the bishop who died
at 92 years of age.
, had been a "patriotic" bishop ordained without Holy See
mandate, but later reconciled with the Pope , and lived as a witness to the faith,
resisting the pressure of the regime and Patriotic Association and refusing to participate
in illicit ordinations .
Before dying, he expressed a wish to be buried in
the Catholic cemetery of Lulong, where the first bishop of the diocese, the Dutch
Lazarist Msgr. Ernst Geurts, who died in 1940 are buried. In the past, many priests
and nuns were also buried there. It is probable that Msgr. Liu's desire to be buried
next to Msgr. Geurts and other missionaries is emphasize his unity and belonging to
the universal Church.
In the '50s, with the rise to power of the Communist
Party, the cemetery of Lulong was desecrated and ordered destroyed. After a period
of neglect, the vast plot of land - about 2.7 acres - was converted into agricultural
land. Bishop Liu has asked authorities many times to be returned the ground, but only
in 1993 did was the diocese given permission to use a small part to rebury the remains
of Msgr. Geurts and other priests and nuns.
On the death of Mgr. Liu , the
diocese asked authorities permission to bury their bishop in Lulong, as was his wish
, but the government refused point blank, proposing a maximum contribution of 200
thousand yuan (about 33 thousand dollars) for the purchase of other ground to use
as a cemetery.
From the legal point of view, with a law passed by Deng Xiaoping,
all land requisitioned by the Party in the past, if they do not have a public use
, should be returned to its rightful owners . The return of the land is very rare,
with the party members more often using property for speculative purposes.
Also
in this case it is not clear why the government does not want to return the old cemetery
to its rightful owners, rewarding farmers who still use the land.