Many cases in a Province proliferating with “House Churches”, which are connected to the global evangelical galaxy, along with apocalyptic cults which dream of the collapse of the Chinese system as the historical fulfillment of messianic expectations.
Chinese Catholics are celebrating the month dedicated to Mary with usual devotion. Pilgrimages, rosaries, Eucharistic worshipping, confirmations and communions, priestly ordinations see in every diocese the participation of thousands of faithful. In the many photos posted and shared on the sites of dioceses and parishes, you can always see myriads of children and adolescents taking part in Marian celebrations and feasts. And yet, for weeks, there have been reports of restrictive measures being taken by local authorities in some Chinese villages and towns to ban minors from accessing to churches and parish activities, along with other repressive measures such as the closure of a kindergarten run by Catholics.
The cases of forbidden access to churches for minors, reported by - often anonymous - local witness, are concentrated in the Chinese province of Henan. In that central region of China, a note issued on 8 April last - bearing the stamps of the provincial sections of the Patriotic Association of Chinese Catholics and the Commission for the Affairs of the Church (bodies for the transmission of governmental religious policy) - has effectively called for banning minors from entering church and participating in activities organized by ecclesial communities. Yet, allegations that such a ban is in place and is gradually being implemented throughout China appear unfounded at this stage. And it is precisely the circumscribed area in which minors have been banned from accessing churches that is an important element for grasping in objective - rather than fragmentary - terms, what is happening to Chinese Catholics in that particular area of the country. First of all by recognizing that, for those involved in religious politics in Beijing, Henan is a province unlike any other.
The escalation of the “House Churches”
In recent decades, Henan has become the epicenter of the exponential growing network of evangelical Christian communities, usually referred to as “house Churches”, which has pulled itself out of the so-called “three autonomies” apparatus, imposed by the government as instruments of control of the Chinese Christian communities of evangelical-protestant descent. In Henan, since the ’eighties, the main networks of Chinese House Churches began to grow, such as the Fangcheng Fellowship and the Tanghe Fellowship, also known as China Gospel Fellowship. The network of “House Churches” claims to have in Henan alone thousands of places of worship and meeting places, and about ten million followers, which according to their calculation method, include many not baptized in “spiritual search”, who are involved in moments of preaching and fundraising.
Henan’s thousands of “House Churches” appear to be increasingly connected to the evangelical, Pentecostal and charismatic galaxy that has been expanding for decades in vast areas of the world. In past years, Chinese apparatuses have recurrently restricted Henan’s “House Churches”’s activities considered illegal, leading to the arrest of evangelical preachers from the US - such as Chinese-US John Chao, arrested in China in March 2017 on charges of illegally crossing the border with Myanmar to carry out his preaching activities - and from other countries, including Russia. In June 2017, what alerted the Chinese apparatus on the activism of the “House Churches”, was the story of Lee Zing Yang (24) and Meng Li Si (26), a couple of young Chinese Christians kidnapped and killed by a jihadist cell in Pakistan, where the two, using their working visas, had followed the Korean leaders of their evangelical group and carried out proselytism among the local Muslim population. The double murder alarmed the large Chinese community in Pakistan and raised alarms within the central Chinese government, in front of the “bogeyman” of foreign groups and intelligence agencies capable of recruiting young Chinese to then involve in risky proselytizing jobs outside the border, thus putting at risk the diplomatic and commercial relations between Beijing and neighboring countries involved in the “New Silk Road” (China’s major strategic initiative for improving relations and economic collaboration with 60 nations in Asia, Europe and Africa).
Apocalyptic infiltrators and human sacrifices
In recent decades, heterodox and sectarian religious movements have also taken root in Henan’s villages and countryside. For years the province has been the logistical base of the sect known as Eastern Lightning, or as The Church of Almighty God, which has had devastating effects on local Catholic and Evangelical communities, reaping followers even among priests, religious and pastors. The founder of the sect claims to have received a new, final and definitive revelation, while the followers accuse the ecclesial communities of betraying the authentic message of Christ. Eastern Lightning’s “missionaries” are used to infiltrating the ecclesial communities, and only after having gained everyone’s trust, they begin to spread their poisonous doctrine. Their methods of plagiarism and also cases of murders of former followers who wanted to leave the sect have been documented - as Father Vito del Prete also wrote on Fides, news agency of the Pontifical Missionary Works.
The millenarian mark is also found in other religious congregations present in Henan, always ready to disseminate in their delirious doctrines elements taken from Christianity. Groups such as the Church of Elijah, or the Three Grades of Servants Movement, whose leader, after having announced several times the return of Christ, was condemned to death in 2006 on charges of killing about twenty followers of the Eastern Lightning, the other cult.
The geo-politics of the millenarianism
Henan’s syncretistic millenarian cults share in many ways the same substratum and dynamics with many evangelical groups of local “reborn Christians”: mass conversions in the villages and countryside, the propagandistic use of miraculous healings and prodigious events, ostentation of hidden powers and mysterious knowledge. To bind them, in many cases, there is also the apocalyptic tinge of their common aversion to the Chinese communist government, seen as evil, as a diabolical system whose end is hoped for. For many of their followers, having contact with the Chinese political apparatus is like “dealing with the devil”.
In their millenarian symbolism, Chinese power is identified with the “Beast Coming from the Sea” or with the Dragon mentioned in the book of Revelation. They believe the eventual collapse of the Chinese system to be the historical fulfilment of the messianic wait. In this horizon, the imagery of many Chinese “reborn Christians” and of the followers of the Chinese syncretists cults, often appears consonant with the apocalyptic readings that the US-religious-right applies to geo-political dynamics. An affinity well present even at the core of the neo-conservative thought, accustomed to the political use of religion. The neo-conservative ideologists who wish for the expansion of the Chinese Christian evangelical groups so to transform the political order of the People’s China - and possibly overthrow the Communist Party’s hegemony - in the coming decades, are obviously aware of all this.
Limitations for all
The religious dynamics taking place in Henan seem to have been specifically tailored to confirm the prejudices and alarmisms of the Chinese power towards religious groups, starting from the “unregistered” ones, operating outside the bodies and procedures of the Party’s religious policy. Certain cults and certain Christian community networks are perceived by local officials as subversive fanatic realities, “religious products” of Western origin to be infiltrated among the population in order to politically destabilize China. The geo-political exploitation of religious extremism, exercised in recent decades by regional and global powers, confirms the apprehensions of the Chinese apparatus.
In Henan, the alleged “tolerance” with which officials of the local apparatus witnessed the cult, as well as the House Churches’ escalation, has ended under the fire of the political bodies. There have been recent changes at the top of the local structure of the Party, and the newcomers want everyone to see the change of pace: removals of preachers, closures of places of worship, forced cancellation of social initiatives. The new strategy of the Chinese apparatus, in several cases, is not able to make proper distinctions ending up shooting in the pile, by applying the “restrictions” even to Catholics and forcing the hand in an arbitrary manner. Henan’s new limitation policy to keep minors away from Catholic churches in that province finds no ground within the Chinese Constitution, which in words, guarantees freedom of religion and opposes practices of religious plagiarism and pressing proselytism.
Open questions for Chinese Catholics
What is known about Henan’s ban on minors from entering church challenges also the Holy See. There are those who imagine - or perhaps hope for - that the reported episodes may hinder if not block the delicate negotiations taking place between Pope Francis’s collaborators and Chinese officials over the problems and anomalies endured by the Catholic Church in China. In reality, it is precisely the channels of contact opened between the Chinese government and the Vatican palaces that can serve to untie knots, to overcome misunderstandings about individual events, showing even to the local peripheral apparatus that Catholic communities are not sucked into the millenarian drift of the Chinese apocalyptic cults, and possess the necessary and effective antibodies capable of immunizing them from superstitious miracle-based creeds and politically brainwashing messianism.
The whirlwind expansion of Chinese Christian cults and communities with an evangelical-pentecostal imprint also fatally challenges the future path of the Catholic Church in China, calling into question its apostolic and sacramental nature. It raises the question of whether the style of Christian presence and proclamation of the spreading evangelical networks is the “unique model” to which Chinese Catholics are in some way called to assimilate themselves.
Bishops, clergy and faithful of the Catholic Church in China are called to choose whether it is necessary or appropriate to assimilate themselves in an indistinct manner to the magmatic evangelical galaxy (as the visionary and apocalyptic movements of some local Catholic communities seem to indicate), or whether Catholicism in China can find and follow its path towards the future, without conforming to the theoretical and practical schemes imposed by global neo-conservative propaganda. By keep walking in the faith of the Apostles. And also by treasuring, in the given circumstances, an ecclesial Tradition that has always “given Caesar what is Caesar’s”, without ever demonizing political power as such. Not even when it was exercised by the Roman Emperors who persecuted the Christians.
