Fifty years ago this month Chairman Mao launched the tidal wave of suffering known as the Cultural Revolution. His “May 16 Notification” declared war on the internal enemies of the Communist Party. The Chinese refer to the decade that followed as “the 10-year catastrophe”. Millions were killed as officials cracked down on the so-called Four Old Things: old customs, old culture, old habits and old ideas. Rarely has a culture so dramatically torn up its own roots as China did between 1966 and 1976.
Religion, of course, was an “old thing” and therefore persecuted ferociously. According to the scholars Vincent Goossaert and David Palmer, “the Cultural Revolution produced the most thorough destruction of all forms of religious life in Chinese and, perhaps, human history”.
For English Catholics, the all-out assault on the Church evokes the horrors of the Reformation. Paramilitaries ransacked churches, ripped out tabernacles, forced faithful to apostatise and buried priests alive. A few black-and-white photographs of the destruction exist today. One, taken outside Beijing’s South Church in 1966, shows grinning Red Guards smashing a life-sized figure of Christ crucified with sledgehammers.
But the onslaught is not, on the whole, well documented. Official records from the period remain classified. Countless martyrs died in obscurity, their heroism known only to a few. The Cultural Revolution ought to grip the global Catholic imagination; yet so far it has failed to.
Fifty years on, China no longer insists on conformity to “Mao Zedong Thought”, but Catholics do not enjoy full freedom. During a recent upsurge in persecution, officials demolished churches, tore down crosses and imprisoned anyone who dared to protest. Some Chinese Christians say the campaign is the worst since the Cultural Revolution.
Yet the latest anti-religious drive is arguably a sign of weakness. For the first time, there are said to be more Christians than Communist Party members in China and the country has more practising Catholics than Italy. Last month Chinese clergy made a Year of Mercy pilgrimage to Rome. That would have been unthinkable 50 years ago. If recent Chinese history tells us anything, it is that the brutal repression of Christianity only makes the Church stronger, while undermining the state’s legitimacy.
We should mark the grim anniversary of the Cultural Revolution by learning more about the Chinese faithful, supporting them in prayer and helping them financially. Pope Francis often says that the future of the Church is in Asia. Perhaps before the century is out a Successor of Peter will come from the land of Chairman Mao.
Unholy war
In a recent address to military personnel at a memorial to the Great Patriotic War (as World War II is known in Russia), Patriarch Kirill of Moscow called the war on terrorism, which Russia is waging in Syria, “a holy war”. This wording echoed a previous statement in September 2015, when Russia first intervened in Syria.
This use of the term “holy war” is regrettable. First, it aligns the Russian Orthodox Church with Russian foreign policy, and risks reducing the Church to the role of cheerleader for Mr Putin’s foreign adventurism. The Russian Church, in doing this, abdicates its responsibility both to be a critical friend to the Russian government and to show moral leadership.
Secondly, Russia’s intervention in Syria has resulted in numerous civilian deaths and has by no means been exclusively targeted at ISIS. Only wishful thinking can call this a holy war. Moral decisions have to take account of the facts. To call Putin’s war on terror a holy war is to abandon reason and to indulge in moral and theological fantasy.
Thirdly, talk of a holy war only gives further ammunition to enemies such as ISIS who are ever eager to portray themselves as victims of a Christian “crusade”: the terrorists’ desire to indulge in moral and theological fantasies of their own must not be encouraged.
Finally, while this talk of holy war may find an appreciative audience among Russian nationalists, outside Russia it will do damage to the name of Christianity. People will rightly wonder how war can be holy, and some may need little encouragement to see Patriarch Kirill as a warmonger (along with the wider Christian Church).
The tendency of the Russian Church to identify itself with the aims of state and nation has been rightly (though discreetly) condemned by Patriarch Bartholomew of Constantinople, who in a speech in the Netherlands in April 2014 observed: “Whenever an Orthodox Church succumbs to nationalist rhetoric and lends support to racial tendencies, it loses sight of the authentic theological principles and gives in to a fallen mindset, totally alien to the core of Orthodoxy.”
His words carry weight, in sad contrast to those of his Russian confrère.
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