China is not to be won for Christ by quiet ease-loving men and women.
— James Hudson Taylor (1832-1905)
Scattered about Christendom are any number of cathedrals dedicated to Saint Paul the Apostle, the most famous of which is surely the Cathedral Church of St Paul the Apostle in London, though we might also mention the soaring Mosan Gothic Cathédrale Saint-Paul in Liège, the imposing St.-Paulus-Dom in Münster, the charming Mannerist Catedral de São Paulo in the Prazeres freguesia of Lisbon, and the ruined granite facade of what remains of the Igreja de São Paulo in Macau. And then there is one of the most remarkable, if rather more obscure, cathedrals to bear such a name — the Wēnzhōu Shèng Bǎo Lù Táng (温州圣保禄堂), or St. Paul’s Cathedral in Wenzhou, a city in the coastal Zhejiang province known as “China’s Jerusalem,” where somewhere between 10 and 20 percent of the population is Christian.
The cathedral, located on Zhouzhai Lane in the city’s downtown Lucheng District, was constructed between 1886 and 1891, based on a design by the Catholic bishop and missionary Paul-Marie Reynaud. Once the tallest structure in Wenzhou, it is now overshadowed and hemmed in by the surrounding high-rise apartment towers, but it remains one of the most attractive buildings in the city, its Romanesque exterior adorned with delicate brickwork and subtle Chinese decorative motifs, its whitewashed interior unfailingly harmonious. Saint Paul’s rose from the ashes of a fire that consumed its predecessor during the Sino-French War of 1884, and was itself badly damaged during the Second Sino-Japanese War, when it was used as an air-raid shelter, but it was the Cultural Revolution that inflicted the most damage on the building and the institution it housed. As it did in so many places throughout China during that nightmarish period, the Red Guard desecrated the cathedral, destroyed its religious texts, archives, and artworks, and converted the building into a manufacturing complex.
The Catholic faithful of Wenzhou — clergy and laity alike — likewise suffered at the hands of the communist authorities. In 1955, more than a decade before the Cultural Revolution began in earnest, Bishop James Lin Xili, Wenzhou’s diocesan administrator, was already being accused of various “counter-revolutionary crimes,” and was given a sentence of 16 years in jail, while most of the 30 priests attending to the spiritual needs of the 40,000 Catholics of Wenzhou would also find themselves imprisoned in the years to come. Released at the end of his prison term, Bishop Lin dedicated himself to restoring the tumbledown churches in his diocese and establishing new ones in parishes like Cangnan, Ruian, Yueging, and Yongqiang. He never paid obeisance to the Chinese Catholic Patriotic Association, however, and while he was ordained by the Vatican as the first bishop of the Wenzhou diocese on October 4, 1992, he would spend the rest of his life either in hiding or under house arrest.
When Bishop Lin passed away on October 4, 2009, exactly 17 years after his episcopal ordination, he could look back on a heroic life well spent, marked by achievements made under almost impossible circumstances. Shun-hing Chan, a professor of religion at Hong Kong Baptist University, estimated in a 2011 study that “there were 110,000 Catholics in Wenzhou diocese, including 70,000 in the open church and 40,000 in the underground church,” with many in the government-sanctioned church adopting a “middle path” — “part of the open church in organizational structure, but the priests and lay Catholics of the parish have built friendly relationships with the underground church.” New waves of repression would crash over the Christian communities over the years, the most notorious coming in 2002, when 400 unregistered Catholic and Protestant churches were closed down in Wenzhou during the Christmas holidays, and in 2014, when 200 “illegal churches” were demolished and 2,000 crosses pulled down, but the Church would survive, and even grow, above and below ground, like a weather-beaten tree with deep and persistent roots. Saint Paul’s Cathedral, meanwhile, was returned to the Wenzhou Catholic Patriotic Association in 1982, and though it remained in a dilapidated state until 2011, subsequent renovations have returned it to something approaching its former fin-de-siècle glory.
The ongoing persecution of the Catholics of Wenzhou is not as violent as it was during the dark days of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, but it is proving equally insistent. Rather than bring about spectacular displays of mass martyrdom, the communist regime prefers the age-old policy of lingchi, the infamous “death by a thousand cuts.” Members of the National Security Office and the Department of Religious Affairs will deny permits for religious pilgrimages, and the National Security Office will physically prevent priests from celebrating Mass in underground churches. Schools and businesses are warned not to observe any Christian festivities, in order “to resist the corrosion of Western religious culture.” The publication of religious texts will be heavily monitored and severely restricted. Bowdlerized versions of the Bible will be disseminated to better reflect “core socialist values.” Religious regulations will demand socialist indoctrination in place of religious conversion, instruction, and formation. Plainclothes police officers will lurk outside humble neighborhood churches and soaring cathedrals like Saint Paul’s, always on the lookout for children and adolescents who might try to attend religious services, since Chinese children under the age of 18 are constitutionally barred from formal religious affiliations, are not allowed to receive any kind of religious education, and in many cities are completely prohibited from participating in public worship.
To understand just how insidious this ongoing campaign of repression is, we need only examine the case of Peter Shao Zhumin, who in 2007 received the episcopacy with a papal mandate, was consecrated in 2011, and became Bishop of the Roman Catholic Diocese of Wenzhou in 2016 upon the death of Bishop Lin’s successor, Vincent Zhu Wei-Fang. It did not take long for Bishop Shao, who, like his forerunners, has refused to join the Chinese Catholic Patriotic Association, to run afoul of the authorities. With the bishop having been arrested numerous times, repeatedly disappeared, and taken on “trips” by the police to prevent him from attending the funerals of underground priests, his treatment by the communist regime has become something of a sick running joke, with AsiaNews reporting that “the kidnappings of Bishop Shao are almost scientific. They always occur on the eve of important periods in the life of the Catholic communities: Christmas, Easter, the Assumption and now November, the month of prayer for the dead (in Chinese tradition, Qingming, the remembrance of the ancestors, is instead celebrated in spring).”
Bishop Shao’s most recent arrest by agents of China’s National Security Office, occurring on March 6, 2025, came after he celebrated an allegedly “illegal” Mass marking the beginning of the Holy Jubilee Year. Deemed to have been a violation of Article 71 of the Religious Affairs Regulations (2017), the arrest was accompanied by a fine of 200,000 yuan, the maximum allowable by law, on the grounds that the bishop’s behavior constituted a “serious crime.” Other bishops, including Vincent Guo Xijin, Augustine Cui Tai, Julius Jia Zhiguo, Thaddeus Ma Daqin, Melchior Shi Hongzhen, James Su Zhimin, Joseph Xing Wenzhi, Joseph Zen Ze-kiun, and Joseph Zhang Weizhu, have been treated in a similarly unconscionable fashion in recent years, whether because they refuse to join the ersatz Chinese Catholic Patriotic Association or have in some other way resisted efforts to “Sinicize” the Holy Catholic Church.
The first time Bishop Shao was arrested by the Chinese regime, back in 2017, the Vatican issued a statement expressing how “very worried” Pope Francis was about the political prisoner, and “deeply saddened” the Holy See was by his treatment. This did not prevent the signing of the Vatican–China agreement the following year, nor did it hamper repeated renewals of the one-sided pact, notwithstanding China’s crackdown on Christians, poor treatment of Catholic bishops, and too many other human rights crimes to name, affecting tens of millions of Catholics and Protestants, Christians and non-Christians, believers and non-believers alike. And during the recent interregnum between the death of Pope Francis and the election of Pope Leo XIV, when the papacy was in a period of sede vacante and no new bishops could be appointed, the “official” Catholic Church in China provocatively proceeded as if nothing was amiss, installing new loyalist bishops in Shanghai and Xinxiang. Beijing has proven quite proficient in the age-old maximalist strategies of décùnjìnchǐ (得寸进尺) and délǒngwàngshǔ (得陇望蜀) — “win an inch, want a foot” and “the more one gets, the more one wants,” and unfortunately the Vatican has played right into the hands of the cynical policymakers at the Zhongnanhai.
We are told that the newly-elected Pope Leo XIV is a rather cannier operator than his predecessor, and we know that during his time in Peru, he witnessed first-hand the violence wrought by Maoist Shining Path guerrillas, and did not shy away from criticizing the human rights violations committed by the Alberto Fujimori regime. And while we cannot be sure precisely how the new pope will approach relations between the Holy See and Beijing, we can take some solace in his motto, drawn from Saint Augustine — In illo uno unum, “in the One, we are one.” For too long have the Catholics of the “Chinese Jerusalem,” and Catholics throughout China, been separated by force and threat of force into communities that exist above ground and communities that fight for their existence below ground, communities that are subjected to indoctrination in place of religious instruction and communities who are obliged to worship in the shadows, communities that recognize regime apparatchiks illegally appointed as bishops during the time of sede vacante and communities that bravely celebrate Mass in memory of Pope Francis, even when such services have been outlawed by the government in Wenzhou and elsewhere. The situation is increasingly intolerable, amounting to a hostage crisis affecting tens of millions of souls, and it is incumbent upon Pope Leo XIV and the Holy See to confront such a crisis head-on.
READ MORE from Matthew Omolesky:
A Precious Cornerstone: Unearthing Lublin’s Lost Jewish District