A visit to two Chinese Catholic villages
By Anthony E. Clark, Ph.D.
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| Anthony Clark walks with villagers to the new church at Zhujiahe Village. |
“The more we share the sufferings of Christ, the more we share in his consolation.”
(2 Corinthians, 1:5)
Hebei, China, June 19, 1900. Surrounded by fields of corn, sorghum, apple trees, and cotton, two French Jesuits waited for the arrival of their executioners. Father Remi Isoré and Father Modeste Andlauer had heard that Boxers had already arrived in their small village of Wuyi, where the growing Catholic community had attracted the attention of the Fists of Righteous Harmony. The two priests decided to offer Mass rather than flee; they locked the chapel doors and began the Holy Sacrifice. As the Boxer crowd crashed through the door with their swords, the two holy priests knelt at the altar. They prayed as they were hacked to death. Their heads were displayed the next day at the village gate to warn other Christians what awaited them if they refused to denounce God, which was customarily done by performing some act of disrespect to a holy image of Christ or his Mother.
Hebei, China, July 20, 1900. More than 3,000 Chinese faithful had crowded into Zhujiahe, a tiny Catholic village on the vast flatlands of China’s Zhili province, today known as Hebei. Normally the village held only 300 poor peasants, but Boxers were sweeping through northern China destroying churches and killing Catholics who refused to apostatize, and Catholic villagers from other areas had accumulated there to marshal their forces and defend themselves. By mid-morning the two Jesuit priests in the village, Father Paul Denn and Father Léon Mangin, could see the signs; it appeared that in God’s providence they would all wear martyrs’ crowns by the end of the day. The two exhausted priests donned their sacred vestments—stoles and chasubles—and gathered with 1,000 others into the small village church, where they prayed aloud beside the holy altar. Having killed nearly everyone outside of the church building, the Boxers and Qing troops at last pried open the chapel doors and directed a barrage of bullets into the crowd. Fearful that bullets would kill her pastor, Mary Zhu leapt in front of Father Mangin and extended her arms to form a cross. She received his bullets and fell to the floor. Exhausted from shooting, the attackers at last barricaded the church doors with mattresses soaked in kerosene and ignited the building with sorghum reed torches. The sorghum palms the villagers had planted became the martyrdom palms that ushered them into heaven—all but a handful of 3,000 Catholics were massacred that summer day at Zhujiahe village.
Hebei, China, December 9, 2011. Passing by fields of crops, village walls with nationalist slogans, and factories billowing dark smoke into the skyline, I imagined what Hebei looked like in 1900. One can now reach Dezhou from Beijing in an hour and a half by speed train; 111 years ago it took several days by horse or wagon on rut-filled mud roads. I had visited villages before where simple men and women—farmers who worked the land in bitter conditions—had earned the crowns of martyrdom, but I knew that I would soon stand where the largest anti-Christian massacre in China’s long history had occurred. I would soon stand on earth that had absorbed the blood of the 3,000 Catholics who were killed during the fevered violence of the 1900 Boxer Uprising. I was taken first to Wuyi, where two Jesuits died alone at the altar, and then to Zhujiahe, where two other Jesuits died along with 3,000 poor Catholic villagers.
