The Seven Sorrows of China, Part VII

The Seventh Sorrow: The Western Response to China’s Plight

Upon my return, an extended family member asked me, "So how was your trip to China?" I responded, "Intense." She then asked, "Will you give me some details?" I began to describe to her the First Sorrow, with Yi Wei, and informed her of the common practice of a woman going to the hospital nine months pregnant, ready to deliver, only to have her abdomen injected with a lethal poison that killed the baby.

My family member immediately responded, "That must be propaganda." I was aghast as she continued, "Human rights activists and the U.N. would never allow such a gross violation of human rights."

My heart felt pierced as I came into direct contact with one of the reasons why the gross violations of the Chinese people and of the Chinese Church continues. Much of the West has rationalized this away as simply "propaganda," and in this way have allowed what are truly gross violations of human rights to continue.

Later that day the family member came to me and said, "I owe you an apology. I wasn’t ready for that. I was looking forward to hearing about something like an excursion to the Forbidden City. I just wasn’t ready to hear that things like that are still going on. I’m sorry."

In truth, things like this will continue to go on unless our consciences convince us to do something about it.

And that is the Seventh Sorrow of China, the response, or lack thereof, from the West. While babies die and new martyrs are made, we grant them Most Favored Nation trade status. We fill our closets and cupboards with clothes and dishes made by the hands of women forced to abort their children, and we send corporate executives to investigate new business opportunities in cities where bishops are beaten and imprisoned.

When South Africa denied its black citizens their dignity and their rights, the U.S. cut off the flow of American cash into that country. There was no investment. There was no Most Favored Nation trading status. There was no trade period.

And when Castro’s Communist regime took over Cuba, we opened our doors wide to Cuban refugees, banned Cuban sugar and cigars, and denied our Southern neighbor every advantage on the international scene.

But today, while China commits offenses just as, if not more, egregious than South Africa, Cuba, or any one of the dozens of nations who have suffered economically for violating the dignity of their citizens, we do nothing.

We used to put our money where our conscience was. That no longer seems to be the case. The Western response to Beijing is now guided almost entirely by economic considerations, with barely a hat tip to moral or ethical concerns. What has changed in the past 25 years? What kind of people have we become? And what suffering in China could be ended if we valued the lives of all those lost little ones, poisoned in their mothers’ wombs, more than cheap goods and wide profit margins?

So much more could be said about the horrific way in which the government treats its people, but this is not a political essay. It is an account of a noble race, imprinted with a transcendent dignity, who deserve precisely the same dignity, respect, and rights that we ourselves demand and exercise daily. That’s why, in telling that story, in hearing that story, we can’t ignore our own role in their suffering.

We can’t ignore that the soulless pursuit of pleasure and wealth that suffocates the faith in China is, in part, a Western import. We also can’t ignore that their government aborts, abuses, and murders its people, while we do nothing. And we can’t ignore that we have let money, not morals, guide our relations with the Chinese government.

As a people, we have to hold our government to a higher standard. We have to protest the policies now determining our relations with China and call for a return to the nobler policies of yesterday.

And as individuals, we need to hold ourselves to a higher standard. We need to not ignore or dismiss the plight of Chinese Catholics, but rather pray for them, sacrifice for them. Through little acts of penance and love, Christians in the West need to do what we can to atone for the callous indifference to China’s sufferings shown by so many others in the West, including governments. That indifference has added even more sorrow to a country already bearing an unimaginable weight of pain. In whatever ways we can, we must look to lighten their load.

Certainly not all of the West is indifferent to the contemporary woes of China. Little remnants of prayer and action issue from occidental sources. The Order of the Sacred and Immaculate Hearts of Jesus and Mary, a small contemplative Order outside Steubenville, Ohio, spend seven hours a day in Eucharistic Adoration. From their beautiful wooden chapel, they spiritually transport to the other side of the world through their daily prayers and sacrifices for "the conversion of China through the intercession of the Hearts of Jesus and Mary, that Communism may fall throughout the world." In a manner similar to St. Therese of Lisieux, whom the Church named the co-patroness of the Church’s missionary activity (though she never passed beyond the walls of her cloister), these priests, nuns, brothers and laity have made their own consecration of China to the Hearts of Jesus and Mary for the Christian re-evangelization of China and for its eventual peace and freedom.

The Cardinal Kung Foundation continues to be a courageous media mouthpiece and moral conscience to the world press for the underground Church and for the rights of the Chinese people. In ways antithetical to many mainstream news sources, who prefer to avoid publicizing the present ubiquitous human and religious rights violations by the Government, the Cardinal Kung Foundation faithfully releases dispatch after dispatch which document the ongoing and increasing religious persecution that Chinese Catholics and other Christians face right now from the Government.

But each of us, in our own way, must join in a global prayer leading to a global action that the killings and the persecutions which threaten the honorable Chinese people come to an end.

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The day after I returned from my brief stay in China, I found out that the Chinese government shut down all Web sites in China that carried Pope Benedict’s letter. Those who suggest that all we need for solving the problem with the Chinese government is a new trusting openness in dialogue and engagement must examine facts like these and the others contained in this book. Little, if anything, in terms of respect for the transcendent dignity of every human person and its authentic implementation in forms of religious and personal freedoms, has changed in what remains Communist China.

I believe the underground bishop summed it up best when he said that victory in China will only come through the powerful intercession of Mary, the Mother of Jesus, in her spiritual battle against the Red Dragon, which is taking placing in China in its most climactic dimension. He also warned us, in his fire-tried wisdom, that the greatest danger China, and by extension the entire world, faces today, even beyond a Communist assault from the outside, is the spiritual assault of secularism, hedonism, and egoism on the inside.

Pray for China. Help China. Suffer with China. When you do so, you join with the Hearts of Jesus and Mary, whose hearts are mystically pierced anew by the untold suffering their Chinese children encounter day after day.

The Triumph of the Immaculate Heart of Mary—prophesied in the July 13, 1917, Fatima apparition message—will take place in China. Help it to happen sooner through your own prayers for China, your own sacrifices for China, your own love for China.

This article was excerpted from The Seven Sorrows of China, Queenship, September 2007, and is available from Queenship Publishing at 1-800-647-9882, www.queenship.org., or P.O. Box 220, Goleta, California, 93116, U.S.A.