Italy's Olive Garden, and Bishop Fan's heroics
The Tuesday Pillar Post
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Hey everybody,
On April 13, 1992 — 33 years ago last month — an old man died alone, suffering from pneumonia, in an undisclosed location in northern China, a prison with no name and no warden, a place which did not officially exist.
The man was Peter Joseph Fan. When he died, his family and friends had not heard from him in years. Most assumed he was dead already, and those who believed he was still alive probably prayed that his death would come quickly.
Soon after his death he was dumped without fanfare at his family home, wrapped in plastic and a cheap body bag, with a note saying he had died of pneumonia. Many of his bones were broken. Some had been broken, knitted back together without treatment, and broken again. He had been tortured and abused. He was malnourished.
He was a bishop, a successor of the apostles, and a priest of Jesus Christ.
Peter Fan was ordained a priest in 1934, in Rome, after studies at the Urbaniana. He went home to China soon after. In 1951, when he was 43, Pope Pius XII named him Bishop of Baoding.
Soon after, it became impossible for the Vatican to appoint bishops in China. Persecution of Christians expanded amid the nation’s Cultural Revolution, and Beijing claimed for itself the right to appoint bishops to Chinese dioceses.
Meanwhile, Fan, respected among his brother bishops and with a supposedly big personality, became a target of the Communist authorities. In 1957, when the Chinese Patriotic Catholic Association was founded by the Beijing government, Fan resisted.
He would not swear an oath granting supremacy of the government over the pope. He would not concede civic authority over liturgy and catechesis.
Bishop Fan was arrested. He spent the next 21 years in a forced labor camp, by most accounts. While he was incarcerated, the government announced he was no longer Bishop of Baoding, but did not fill the post with anyone else.
He was released in 1979. And he stayed out of jail for a little while, getting down to the business of leading his diocese.
But then in the early ‘80s, under a special indult permitting episcopal ordination in the Chinese underground Church, Bishop Fan consecrated three bishops — without government approval — and he ordained priests, who had not registered with the patriotic association.
For that, he was arrested in 1982, sentenced to a decade’s hard labor, and put in prison. He was in his 70s by then. Most of his episcopate had been spent in labor camps.
In 1988, he was released amid international protest, kept under house arrest, and ferreted from place to place. Few bishops or priests could meet with him without risking arrest themselves.
But his very presence — that he was even alive — was an encouragement to the underground Church. From house to house, and person to person, he was quietly prayed for as a hero, a confessor of the faith, as in the days of the early Church.
In November 1989, the bishops of the Chinese underground Church met clandestinely in Shaanxi. They formed a secret episcopal conference, in defiance of the state-mandated one. They unanimously named Bishop Fan their honorary president.
And then those bishops began to be arrested, or disappeared. Nine bishops in the next few months were taken into custody, along with three dozen priests. Some were released, others kept indefinitely.
And in 1990, Bishop Fan was disappeared. There was no official record of his jailing, there were no charges filed. No one who loved him knew where he was, until his body was dumped outside his family home. No one knew what torture he faced.
But if he had recanted — rebuked the name of Jesus or the nature of the Church — the authorities would have announced it, as a major propaganda victory. That victory never came.
Instead, Bishop Fan seemingly had a different victory. A silent victory. The victory of the resurrection itself.
He was 84 when he died. He had spent more than 34 years incarcerated. He has not been declared a martyr, but that’s what he was. Thirty thousand people came to his funeral, despite government warnings to stay away. His grave was honored as a shrine by Chinese Catholics, until the government razed it. Then the spot where his grave had stood was honored just the same.
Owing to the politics of the moment, he will not likely be canonized soon.
But I suspect he is now in the fullness of the beatific vision. He died for faith in the gift of the Church — he died for obedience to the Roman Pontiff, and for his faith in the Petrine Office itself.
This week, I suspect he is praying for Pope Leo XIV. We ought to do the same.
The news
If you haven’t read about the pontiff’s first homily — in which he laid out a vision for his papal ministry, you really should.
I was struck by this:
“Today, there are many settings in which the Christian faith is considered absurd, meant for the weak and unintelligent. Settings where other securities are preferred, like technology, money, success, power, or pleasure.”
Ahead of his election, a friend asked me if I thought the College of Cardinals appreciated the extraordinary pace of cultural, social, and economic changes unleashed on the world in the last decade — and the limited degree to which ecclesiastical leaders have seemed to engage with them. I said, that, no, I didn’t think that was a major factor in their deliberations, and, indeed, I still don’t think it was.
But I think in Leo, they got a pope who has a keen sense of the challenges of the moment, and a sense of the Church’s call to respond to them.
The Church should be, he said, “a beacon that illumines the dark nights of this world” … “not so much through the magnificence of her structures or the grandeur of her buildings … but rather through the holiness of her members.”
Again, if you’ve not read it, you ought.
It was a very strong address, which you can read about here.
And to answer your question, I can’t say if the pontiff is a Pillar reader in a good way, unless he decides to say so himself. I mean, if he were a subscriber, it would be wrong to disclose information from our subscriber database just to sate your curiosity, we take reader privacy seriously.
And if he weren’t, well, I wouldn’t get much traction out of saying that either.
I know The Pillar was widely read at the Dicastery for Bishops during his tenure, and that several cardinals have publicly said they are. And I know that some of the most discerning clerics worldwide choose The Pillar.
If the pontiff is among them — salve, as the Romans say.
The Pillar is going to Rome! Join Ed and JD this December for a Jubilee Year Pilgrimage, focused on the sites sacred to Pope Leo XIV. Sign up before it’s too late!
Because Leo has to date expressed a vision of his papacy that’s not so much about the man as about the office. And more important — about Jesus of Nazareth.
My analysis on Prevost and Leo, right here.
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And as the pope begins his new responsibilities, we’re launching a new series of analysis here at The Pillar, which we’re calling On Leo’s Desk.
Over the next few weeks, we’ll try to run through the pressing issues awaiting decisions or attention from the pope, and give a state of the question — for those watching at home, and for the pontiff himself, if he should find it helpful.
In the first of the series: Vatican finances.
The good news is the pope has the chance to think big, act fast, and capitalize on enthusiasm in the first days of his reign. The bad news is that time is short.
The Americanist controversy? What was that?
As Michelle La Rosa reports, the May 6 bombing of an adoration chapel left it severely damaged. Police say they’re not sure what motivated Kyle Kuczynski, the man arrested for the crime, to allegedly walk into the chapel and place a homemade bomb on the altar.
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And as India and Pakistan teeter on the edge of war, Bishop Samson Shukardin, the president of Pakistan’s bishops’ conference, has been calling for “dialogue,” rather than violence.
Here’s the latest from the ground, in a region on the brink of all out warfare.
Leo’s looming German test
No one can say how long Pope Leo XIV’s global honeymoon will last, but for the moment, the pope seems to be enjoying a kind of near-universal acclaim that comes unexpectedly — and as a great relief for many people — after the deep ecclesial divisions of the Francis papacy.
This is a pope being celebrated by charismatics and traditionalists, by those who loved Francis, and those who felt hurt by his papacy.
There is a widespread expectation within curial circles that the new pope will restore fidelity to the rule of law in the Roman curia and the Church’s life, and have the energy to tackle a most dire cash and credit crunch facing the Vatican.
Bishops seem to believe he will not insist on over-centralization, while addressing issues which need universal governance, rather than handling on the local level.
In America, the sense that the pope is “one of us” is palpable — and energizing in a way I could not have predicted. I suspect the same thing is true in Peru, though until I go to Chiclayo (maybe soon), it’s hard for me to say.
But here in the U.S., the pope is being celebrated for his White Sox fandom, being feted with pizzas named for him, and seeing American Catholics ecstatic to identify even a tangential connection to his early years and priesthood in the Chicagoland area.
Even the pontiff’s colorfully MAGA Florida brother has proved a point of commonality, as nearly every American family has Facebook-happy relatives just like that guy.
Because the pope is an American man in his 60s, I must admit I’ve been surprised that while everyone asks about the Cubs and the White Sox, no one has seen fit to inquire whether he’s a Led Zeppelin man, or prefers the prog-rock tunes of Pink Floyd.
(Ed, claiming hometown insight, insists he must be an Alan Parsons Project fan, but I expect more of the pontiff.)
In any case, I’m willing to bet that eventually a photo will emerge of a young mutton-chopped or mustachioed Prevost at a ‘70s rock concert — and I am here for it.
Apparently after some internal deliberation on the subject, the Vatican announced this morning that the pontiff will continue using official “Pontifex” social media channels, as did his predecessors, and while I would have voted against the indignity of popes stepping foot on the soil of the “digital continent,” I’m sure that will continue to endear people to him.
I know a lot of people who were initially skeptical of the Leonine papacy, and have grown enthusiastic over these past five days.
In fact, at present, I see two groups raising substantial criticisms of Pope Leo XIV
The first are victims of clerical sexual abuse and their advocates, who have raised questions about the pope’s record on safeguarding, both in the U.S. and in Peru. Those concerns merit their own serious and sober treatment, which I’ll aim to bring to you later this week.
The second group concerned about Leo?
In particular, ze German bishops’ conference.