"Fake Pope! Fake Pope!"

One of this site’s readers, a man who is fluid in various Chinese dialects, sent me an email a few days ago to provide me a link to the follow story about a courageous Catholic priest, Father Anthony Zhang Gangyi, in Red China who resisted the so-called Chinese Patriotic Catholic Association (CPCA) and suffered greatly as a consequence.

Father Zhang, who was imprisoned by the Chicoms from 1959 to 1979, traveled to the Occupied Vatican on the West Bank of the Tiber River in 1988 and 1992. According to my reader, who has many contacts within the underground church after having spent a considerable amount of time in Red China and listened to the stories about Father Zhang told by underground Catholics who were not sedevacantists, Karol Joszef Wojtyla/John Paul sent an unnamed “cardinal,” presumably Angelo Sodano or Josef Tomko, to tell him that he, Father Zhang, should consider joining the Chinese Communist rump church, the CPCA.

By way of reply to the unnamed “cardinal,” Father Zhang is alleged to have said, “Fake pope! Fake pope!”, at which point after Wojtyla/John Paul II embraced Zhang, who was very devoted to Our Lady and led underground Catholics in her Most Holy Rosary, whereupon Zhang again said “Fake pope! Fake pope!” before “Pope Saint John Paul II” embraced him a second time. Father Zhang had been outraged by the unnamed “cardinal’s: suggestion to join the rump church that was condemned by Pope Pius XII in Ad Princips Apostoloroum, June 29, 1958.

However, the conciliar “cardinal’s” “suggestion” to Father Zhang came four years after “Saint John Paul II” began the process that resulted in Jorge Mario Bergoglio’s betrayal of the underground Chinese Catholics to their torturers, jailers, and executioners, the Chinese Communist Party’s Chinese Patriotic Catholic Association. It was in 1988 that the conciliar Vatican already issued a set of "directives" that would lead to the sorry fate that the faithful Catholics was dealt by their supposed spiritual father.

Here are the terms of those guidelines, which were issued by Josef "Cardinal" Tomko, then the Prefect of the conciliar Congregation for the Evangelization of Peoples and the Propagation of the Faith, issued on September 3, 1988, a series of "eight guidelines" for "contact" between faithful Catholics and the Chinese Patriotic Catholic Association:

As the contacts among members of the Episcopate, priests and faithful, with exponents of the Catholic Church in China are becoming ever more frequent, this Dicastery, in accord with the Council for the Public Affairs of the Church, considers it opportune to give the Episcopal Conferences the following indications:

1. The contacts in question could be a good occasion to reaffirm with clarity the Catholic Doctrine on the communion which must unite the Bishops with the Successor of Peter and, through him, among themselves (L. G. 14 & 18). In this regard, one could have recourse to the doctrinal principles of the Vatican Councils I and II.

2. In the light of the Vatican Council II one could also explain to them how the Church realizes in her own life self-government, self-propagation and self-financing: it is normal today that Bishops be chosen from among the local clergy; evangelization is, in the first place, to be realized by the local churches, even if in many cases the collaboration of the missionaries still remains necessary, but in a subordinate position; that it is evident that the Church be financially supported by the offerings of the faithful in the locality.

3. Mention could also be made to them of the various forms of collegiality which are being developed in the Church, particularly since Vatican Council II, both on the national and regional levels through the Episcopal Conferences, and on the universal level through the presence and collaboration of the Episcopates of the various countries in the central government of the Church, as, for example, their presence in the Roman Dicasteries, and their collaboration in the Synod of Bishops.

4. In the course of various encounters, care must be taken to avoid attitudes which could wound the sensibility of the ‘silent’ majority of those Catholics who have suffered and are suffering for their fidelity to the Holy Father.

There is also need of avoiding that the visits in question do not become instrumental in obtaining recognition and the legitimization of a position which cannot in any way be acceptable either on the doctrinal level or disciplinary and canonical levels.

5 Another rather delicate point is the question of the liturgical celebrations. In fact all 'communicatio in sacris' is to be avoided. The ‘patriotic’ bishops and priests are not to be invited or even allowed to celebrate religious functions in public, either in the churches or in the oratories of the various religious institutes.

6. The necessary clarity regarding the ecclesial aspects of the visits and the attitude to be adopted, which must be respected by all, do not imply that there is to be a lack of fraternal charity, which should be expressed in the cordiality of the welcome given to the guests and in the manner in which they are treated.

It is hoped that all this will assist them in understanding, in the light of the Spirit, the incoherence of their position and induce them to a change of attitude.

7. Care must also be taken that those who are responsible for the organization of the visits of the above-mentioned delegations be persons of sound doctrine, faithful to the Magisterium of the Church and capable of acting with great prudence.

8. It is to be foreseen that such events will not fail to arouse reactions in the local and international press. It will be necessary, therefore, to foresee how to assist the means of social communication, utilizing the orientations mentioned above, which clarify the position of the Church and may foster the comprehension of the diverse and complex problems closely connected with this position. (As found at Cardinal Kung Foundation.)

I first learned of the conciliar Vatican intentions with respect to selling out the faithful, suffering Catholics of Red China when attending what I thought was Holy Mass at the Church of Saint Francis of Assisi on West 31st Street in the Borough of Manhattan, City of New York, New York, in the 1990s when a highly effeminate Franciscan presbyter announced before the beginning of the Protestant and Judeo-Masonic Novus Ordo liturgical weekday service that his "concelebrant" was a "priest" from China who was studying at Saint Joseph's Seminary, Dunwoodie, Yonkers, New York. "Ah," I said to myself, "China? Red China? The underground church? The 'Patriotic Association'?"

Well, I began to get a clearer idea of what "Saint John Paul II" and his chief lieutenants, Joseph Alois "Cardinal" Ratzinger, the prefect of the misnamed Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, and Angelo "Cardinal" Sodano, the Vatican's Secretary of State, were planning with respect to Red China when I stopped by one occasion in 1999, I believe, to spend some time in prayer before what I believed to be the Real Presence of Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ in the Most Blessed Sacrament at Holy Trinity Retreat House in Larchmont, New York. It was as I was leaving that I encountered Father Benedict Groeschel as he was taking a stroll on the grounds. Father Benedict told me that the Vatican was supporting the training of seminarians for the Chinese Patriotic Catholic Association (CPCA) in American seminaries, including Saint Joseph's Seminary in Yonkers, New York.

Father Benedict told me that this was all "hush, hush," as he termed it, and that the situation in Red China was very complex, full of double and triple agents. Father Groeschel said that the training of the CPCA priests at Saint Joseph's had the approval, at some level or another, of the Vatican. The hope was to "integrate" CPCA priests, who had to support the government's anti-life policies, into the life of the underground Church when a "reconciliation" could occur at some point in the future. We can see how well that worked out over the course of time.

Indeed, Wojtyla/John Paul II laid the groundwork for "Pope Benedict's" betrayal of the faithful Catholics in Red China, which helped to prepare what can be called the "shining path" for an admirer of the late Chicom murderer known as Zhou Enlai, who was the Premier of the so-called People's Republic of China from May 1, 1949, to the time of death on January 8, 1976, Jorge Mario Bergoglio, to finish off the suffering Catholics of Red China once and all.

Wojtyla/John Paul II waited before approving the directives issued on September 3, 1988, until after Bishop Ignatius Kung, had been freed in 1986 from his thirty years of imprisonment and then left for exile to the United States of America in 1988, to implement his own version of Giovanni Battista Enrico Antonio Maria/Paul VI’s Ostpolitik to effect a rapprochement with the Red Chinese authorities. (Readers will call that Paul VI, sold out the Primate of Hungary, Joszef Cardinal Mindszenty, by tricking him into leaving the American Embassy in Budapest, Hungary, in 1966, ten years after he took refuge there following the collapse of the Hungarian Revolution, on the pretext of being able to resume his position while knowing full well that is was his, Montini/Paul VI’s, plan to get Mindszenty out of Hungary in order to replace him with a bishop who was acceptable to the Soviet puppets in Budapest. A summary of these facts can be found in the appendix below.)

Bergoglio Praises His Surrender of Faithful Chinese Catholics

It is no accident that Jorge Mario Bergoglio has praised his still secret “accord” with the totalitarian government of the so-called “People’s Republic of China” and its so-called Chinese Patriotic Catholic Association while Catholics who have belonged to the underground church in the belief that they were being “faithful” to a true and legitimate Successor of Saint Peter continue to suffer all manner of persecutions, including the arrest and torture of priests/presbyters and members of laity by citing the example of the conciliar sect’s Secretary of State under both Montini/Paul VI and Wojtyla/John Paul, Agostino Casaroli, who was the architect of Montini/Paul VI’s Ostopolitik surrender of the independence and liberty of what they thought was the Catholic Church to Soviet stooges in the various countries of the Warsaw Pact (East Germany, Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria, and Romania). Those Soviet stooges were given the authority to recommend and/or to veto various candidates for the conciliar hierarchy, precisely to prevent another “triumphalist” along the lines of Joseph Cardinal Mindszenty from driving a wedge between a local Communist party and the conciliar Vatican. Jorge Mario Bergoglio, however, takes inspiration from Casaroli’s diabolical precedents:

Pope Francis has defended the Vatican deal with China's communist government on the appointment of Catholic bishops, saying an uneasy dialogue is better than no dialogue at all.

In an interview with Spanish radio network COPE broadcast on Wednesday, Francis compared the Vatican's dialogue with China to those with East European countries during the Cold War which eventually resulted in many freedoms for the Church there.

"China is not easy, but I am convinced that we should not give up dialogue," he said in some of his most comprehensive comments to date on the issue.

Last September, the Vatican renewed a 2018 accord with Beijing that gives the pope final say over the appointment of Chinese bishops. The deal established a formal dialogue with Beijing after decades during which Chinese Catholics faithful to the pope were driven underground.

Critics, including the administration of former U.S. president Donald Trump, tried to convince the Vatican to abandon the pact, saying it compromised the pope's moral authority.

Comments by former U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo last September, which the Vatican saw as meddling in its sovereign affairs, sparked a minor diplomatic crisis.

"You can be deceived in dialogue, you can make mistakes, all that ... but it is the way. Closed-mindedness is never the way," the pope said of the China deal, which has been particularly opposed by conservative Catholic groups.

"What has been achieved so far in China was at least dialogue ... some concrete things like the appointment of new bishops, slowly ... but these are also steps that can be questionable," he said.

Francis likened relations with Beijing to the "small steps" policy carried out by Cardinal Agostino Casaroli, a renowned Vatican diplomat, with Soviet Bloc countries in Eastern Europe, staring in the 1960s.

Casaroli, who served under three popes, reached agreements with communist countries that gave the Church some breathing space, sowing the seeds for full relations after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. Those deals were also criticised.

"Slowly, slowly, slowly, he (Casaroli) was achieving reserves of diplomatic relations which in the end meant appointing new bishops and taking care of God's faithful people," Francis said. (Jorge defends deal with China, says dialogue necessary.)

Jorge Mario Bergoglio can say this with a straight face even while a Chinese Catholic, Jimmy Lai, who fled to Hong Kong, then a British Crown Colony, after Mao Zedong’s forces overthrew the legitimate government of President Chiang Kai-shek in 1949, remains imprisoned in Red China:

The ordeal of Hong Kong businessman and Catholic convert Jimmy Lai continues as he awaits trial on trumped-up charges of violating China's national security. As faithful lay Catholics, we urge the Holy See to break its silence on this matter by demanding Mr. Lai’s immediate release.

Mr. Lai’s international legal team has submitted an urgent appeal to the United Nations Special Rapporteur on torture. It claims that the 76-year-old publisher has been in solitary confinement, often in his cell for 23 hours and 10 minutes a day, since late 2020; that he is diabetic, but has been denied access to independent medical care; and that the facility where he has been held is infamous for subjecting prisoners in solitary confinement to intolerable round-the-clock lighting and extreme temperatures. Mr. Lai is a convert to Catholicism; although he has been permitted occasional visits from priests, prison officials have banned them from bringing him Holy Communion.

Not even the most infamous criminals are subjected to this level of mistreatment in the United States. Why has the Holy See not condemned such cruelty?

Jimmy Lai was one of seven pro-democracy advocates arrested, convicted, and then exonerated for organizing a demonstration following the 2019 bid by the Hong Kong government to pass legislation that would have allowed political detainees to be deported to mainland China to face trial. But the saga didn’t end there. Mr. Lai now faces a potential life sentence in prison for violating the special region’s new “National Security Law.” His trial, which began in December 2023, is expected to resume in November. In the meantime he is wasting away in jail.

Amnesty International has declared Mr. Lai’s trial a “sham” and a blatant attack on the freedom of the press promised when Britain handed the territory back to China in 1997. Both the U.S. and British governments have called for his immediate release. Ten members of the Catholic Church’s hierarchy, including New York’s Cardinal Timothy Dolan and Sydney’s Archbishop Anthony Fisher, signed a petition “calling on the government of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region to immediately and unconditionally release Jimmy Lai.”

As for the Vatican? Crickets. Pope Francis has not once mentioned Jimmy Lai’s name in public.

Since his conversion in 1997, Mr. Lai has lived an earnest commitment to his Catholic faith and to its free exercise. In the Church’s Declaration on Religious Freedom, Dignitatis Humanae, the Second Vatican Council stated that “the right of man to religious freedom has its foundation in the dignity of the person.” The Declaration continues by asserting that “the Church should enjoy that full measure of freedom which her care for the salvation of men requires.” Prohibiting Mr. Lai from receiving Holy Communion denies his religious liberty and gravely interferes with the Church’s own legitimate autonomy. The Holy See must protest about this grave offence against religious freedom, and indeed the countless other assaults on the rights of Catholics and other Christians.

Prior to Hong Kong’s democracy protests, Mr. Lai was most well known as a successful entrepreneur. Having fled from Mao’s China with nothing, Mr. Lai built a large business. He thereby created wealth, delivered goods and services to his customers, employed hundreds of people. Indeed, Mr. Lai’s life reflects his living out of what Pope John Paul II called “the right of economic initiative”—another theme stressed in Catholic social teaching from Vatican II onwards, including by Pope Francis who has often referred to the “noble vocation” of business. Beijing, however, has crushed Mr. Lai’s economic freedom, violated his property rights, and undermined his businesses as part of its overall assault on his liberty.

As an advocate of democracy, Jimmy Lai believes in the promises of the Catholic Church’s social teaching. As John Paul II explained in his encyclical Centesimus Annus, democratic systems are valuable when they “guarantee to the governed the possibility both of electing and holding accountable those who govern them, and of replacing them through peaceful means.”

Mr. Lai, founder of the pro-democracy newspaper Apple Daily, also took to heart Pope Francis’s counsel that being a journalist is not about choosing a profession but embarking on a mission "to study and work to cure evil in the world." He listened to the words of John Paul II, who described the work of a journalist as “building a society based on solidarity, justice and love.” His reward for protecting these very principles in his home of Hong Kong is solitary confinement in a notoriously brutal jail.

What explains the Vatican’s apparent reticence to say anything about Beijing’s systematic violation of Mr. Lai’s freedom? A charitable explanation is that it reflects misguided diplomacy on Rome’s part.

The pact with China was supposed to recognize the Pope’s authority over the Catholic Church in China while giving the government the right to nominate bishops for his consideration. In a 2022 interview with Jesuit-run America Magazine, Pope Francis asserted that “with China, I have opted for the way of dialogue. It is slow, it has its failures, it has its successes, but I cannot find another way.”

While we are at a loss to identify successes, the failures are far too obvious. Beijing has simply ignored its promise to allow the Pope to have the final say in episcopal appointments. The regime is even pressuring the Church in China to bend its beliefs and liturgical practices to the Chinese Communist Party’s demands. Cardinal Joseph Zen, the retired Bishop of Hong Kong who received Jimmy Lai into the Church, warned that the Church’s “resounding silence [on China’s human rights abuses] will damage the work of evangelization.”

We appreciate that when it comes to diplomatic relations with an authoritarian and Communist regime like China there is no easy solution. This doesn’t mean, however, that the Vatican should remain silent while the secret terms of the “dialogue” are set by China, particularly when it comes to targeting Catholics like Mr. Lai. (Jimmy Lai: A Victim of the Dangerous Silence of Vatican-China Relations.)

Leaving aside all the references to Karol Joszef Wojtyla/John Paul II and his “social teaching, this report is a reminder that Jorge Mario Bergoglio is a heartless, soulless monster who never ceases in his criticism, whether oblique or overt, of Donald John Trump on the issue of illegal immigration but who is studiously silent in cases such as Asia Bibi in Pakistan, who was eventually exonerated of a “blasphemy” charge there and claimed asylum in France, and Jimmy Lai. Bergoglio cares not for the “poor” and the “marginalized. He cares only about indemnifying Marxist and Mohammedan tyrants in the name of “dialogue” and about indemnifying hardened sinners in their lives of perversity according to the dictates of “accompaniment” and following the “synodal” path to hell. As I wrote two years ago and will restate once again, Jorge Mario Bergoglio Would Have Urged Catholics to "Dialogue" with Diocletian.

To quote from what Father Anthony Zhang Gangyi is alleged to have to said to Karol Joszef Wojtyla/John Paul II in 1992, "Fake pope! Fake pope!"

Perhaps it is important to contrast this willing complicity with the Chinese Communist oppressors of faithful Catholics with these stern words about Chicom oppression written by Pope Pius XII in Ad Apostolorum Principis, June 29, 1958:

8. In these days, however, We have to draw attention to the fact that the Church in your lands in recent years has been brought to still worse straits. In the midst of so many great sorrows it brings Us great comfort to note that in the daily attacks which you have met neither unflinching faith nor the most ardent love of the Divine Redeemer and of His Church has been wanting. You have borne witness to this faith and love in innumerable ways, of which only a small part is known to men, but for all of which you will someday receive an eternal reward from God.

9. Nevertheless We regard it as Our duty to declare openly, with a heart filled to its depths with sorrow and anxiety, that affairs in China are, by deceit and cunning endeavor, changing so much for the worse that the false doctrine already condemned by Us seems to be approaching its final stages and to be causing its most serious damage.

10. For by particularly subtle activity an association has been created among you to which has been attached the title of "patriotic," and Catholics are being forced by every means to take part in it. This association - as has often been proclaimed - was formed ostensibly to join the clergy and the faithful in love of their religion and their country, with these objectives in view: that they might foster patriotic sentiments; that they might advance the cause of international peace; that they might accept that species of socialism which has been introduced among you and, having accepted it, support and spread it; that, finally, they might actively cooperate with civil authorities in defending what they describe as political and religious freedom. And yet - despite these sweeping generalizations about defense of peace and the fatherland, which can certainly deceive the unsuspecting - it is perfectly clear that this association is simply an attempt to execute certain well defined and ruinous policies.

11. For under an appearance of patriotism, which in reality is just a fraud, this association aims primarily at making Catholics gradually embrace the tenets of atheistic materialism, by which God Himself is denied and religious principles are rejected.

12. Under the guise of defending peace the same association receives and spreads false rumors and accusations by which many of the clergy, including venerable bishops and even the Holy See itself, are claimed to admit to and promote schemes for earthly domination or to give ready and willing consent to exploitation of the people, as if they, with preconceived opinions, are acting with hostile intent against the Chinese nation.

13. While they declare that it is essential that every kind of freedom exist in religious matters and that this makes mutual relations between the ecclesiastical and civil powers easier, this association in reality aims at setting aside and neglecting the rights of the Church and effecting its complete subjection to civil authorities.

14. Hence all its members are forced to approve those unjust prescriptions by which missionaries are cast into exile, and by which bishops, priests, religious men, nuns, and the faithful in considerable numbers are thrust into prison; to consent to those measures by which the jurisdiction of many legitimate pastors is persistently obstructed; to defend wicked principles totally opposed to the unity, universality, and hierarchical constitution of the Church; to admit those first steps by which the clergy and faithful are undermined in the obedience due to legitimate bishops; and to separate Catholic communities from the Apostolic See.

15. In order to spread these wicked principles more efficiently and to fix them in everyone's mind, this association - which, as We have said, boasts of its patriotism - uses a variety of means including violence and oppression, numerous lengthy publications, and group meetings and congresses.

16. In these meetings, the unwilling are forced to take part by incitement, threats, and deceit. If any bold spirit strives to defend truth, his voice is easily smothered and overcome and he is branded with a mark of infamy as an enemy of his native land and of the new society.

17. There should also be noted those courses of instruction by which pupils are forced to imbibe and embrace this false doctrine. Priests, religious men and women, ecclesiastical students, and faithful of all ages are forced to attend these courses. An almost endless series of lectures and discussions, lasting for weeks and months, so weaken and benumb the strength of mind and will that by a kind of psychic coercion an assent is extracted which contains almost no human element, an assent which is not freely asked for as should be the case.

18. In addition to these there are the methods by which minds are upset - by every device, in private and in public, by traps, deceits, grave fear, by so-called forced confessions, by custody in a place where citizens are forcibly "reeducated," and those "Peoples' Courts" to which even venerable bishops are ignominiously dragged for trial.

19. Against methods of acting such as these, which violate the principal rights of the human person and trample on the sacred liberty of the sons of God, all Christians from every part of the world, indeed all men of good sense cannot refrain from raising their voices with Us in real horror and from uttering a protest deploring the deranged conscience of their fellow men. (Pope Pius XII, Ad Apostolorum Principis, June 29, 1958.)

The conciliar revolutionaries have not ignored these truths, they have actively sought to disparage them by always seeking a “reconciliation” with the enemies of Christ the King and His true Church—and thus the enemies of human salvation—on the enemies’ terms. Always. Unfailingly. This total capitulation to the enemies characterizes false ecumenism as one concession after another is made to Protestant sects and to various schismatic and heretical Orthodox churches, and it particularly characterizes conciliarism’s relations with Talmudists. The lords of conciliarism are only too willing to deny Christ the King before men after having denied his Social Reign over men and their nations both in theory and in practice, and they are ever so eager to avoid “offending” Jews, Mohammedans, Jainists, Taoists, Shintoists, Animists, Buddhists, Hindus, Yazidis, Theosophists and outright atheists by hiding Christian symbolism when in their presence and speaking in Judeo-Masonic terms about “God” while also esteeming their symbols of idolatry and terming their places of devil worship” as “sacred” and “holy.”

Pope Pius XII urged the suffering Catholics in Red China to maintain the Holy Faith unblemished, and what he wrote to them fifty-eight years ago applies to us now. We must maintain the Holy Faith unblemished and without making any compromise with the nonexistent legitimacy of Jorge Mario Bergoglio and his false religious sect, the counterfeit church of conciliarism.

Pope Pius XII was equally firm in his denunciations of Communist aggression against Catholics in Eastern Europe in 1956 during the uprisings again that took place in Poland and Hungary in 1956, writing the following in the immediate aftermath of the Hungarian Revolution's liberation of Josef Cardinal Mindszenty in late-October of 1956:

We are most pleased to learn that the Consecrated Shepherds of the Catholic world and the rest of the clergy and faithful have responded with generosity and enthusiasm to the paternal entreaty of Our recent Encyclical Letter by supplicating Heaven in public prayers. And so We give unceasing thanks to God from Our heart that He has heard so many prayers, especially of innocent boys and girls, and a new dawn of peace based on justice seems to be breaking at long last for the people of Poland and Hungary.

2. With no less joy have We learned that Our beloved sons, Cardinals of the Holy Roman Church, Stefan Wyszynski, Archbishop of Gniezno and Warsaw, and Jozef Mindszenty, Archbishop of Esztergom, who had both been expelled from their Sees, are acknowledged to be innocent men, unjustly accused of crime, and as such have already been restored to their positions of honor and responsibility and welcomed in triumph by rejoicing multitudes.

3. We are confident that this event will prove a happy omen for the restoration and pacification of these two countries on a basis of sounder principle and nobler law, and, above all, with proper respect for God's rights and those of His Church.

4. Wherefore We call again and again upon all the Catholics of those countries to unite themselves about their lawful shepherds with massed force and drawn ranks, and thus apply themselves diligently to the advancement and strengthening of this holy cause. For it is a cause which cannot be abandoned or neglected without making true peace an impossibility.

5. But even while Our heart still fears on this account, We behold the threat of another frightening crisis. As you know, Venerable Brothers, the flames of another war are being fanned menacingly in the Near East, not far from that holy land where angels descended from Heaven and hovered over the crib of the Divine Child, announcing peace to men of good will. (Luke 2. 14).

6. What else can We do, who embrace all peoples with a father's affection, but raise suppliant prayers to the Father of Mercies and God of all comfort (cfr. 11 Cor. 1. 3), and urge all of you to join in them with Us? For "the weapons of our warfare are not carnal, but powerful before God." (11 Cor. 10. 4)

7. We trust solely in Him Who can illuminate the minds of men with His heavenly light and incline their incited wills to those more temperate counsels by which right order among nations may be established, to their common advantage and with certainty that the legitimate rights of all interested parties are being secured.

8. May all men, especially those who hold the destinies of nations in their hands, remember that war brings no lasting benefit, but a host of misfortunes and disasters. Differences among men are not resolved by arms, bloodshed, or destruction, but only by reason, law, prudence, and justice.

9. When wise men who are motivated by a desire for lasting peace meet to discuss such differences, they should certainly feel obliged to enter upon the ways of justice rather than the rash road of violence if they reflect upon the grave dangers of a war which may start as a tiny spark, but can burst into an enormous conflagration.

10. Amidst these dangerous crises We wish especially to convince the heads of governments. We cannot possibly doubt their realization that no other interest motivates Us but the common good and prosperity of all, which can never be achieved by the massacre of one's brothers.

11. And since, as We have said, We place Our hope above all in the providence and mercy of God. We repeatedly, urge you, Venerable Brothers, not to cease encouraging and promoting this zealous crusade of prayer. Through it -- with the intercession of His Mother, the Virgin Mary -- may Almighty God in His goodness grant an end to the threat of war, a happy solution to the conflicting claims of nations, and assurance everywhere, to the common benefit of all, of those rights granted the Church by her Divine Founder. Thus may "the whole human family, which has been rent asunder by sin's wound, be brought under the sway of His most sweet rule." (Prayer for the Feast of Christ the King) (Pope Pius XII, Laetamur Admodum, November 1, 1956.)

Although his joy was quickly turned into sorrow following the Soviet invasion of Hungary after he issued Laetamar Admodum, Pope Pius XII was truly relieved that two imprisoned bishops, Stefan Wyszynski, Archbishop of Gniezno and Warsaw and the Primate of Poland, and Jozef Mindszenty, the Primate of Hungary had been returned to their sees. Bergoglio is now accepting rump "bishops" as legitimate governors of Catholic sees in Red China, which makes perfect sense if one understands the fact that he thinks that Justin Welby is truly the "archbishop of Canterbury." A true pope, Pope Pius XII, gave no quarter to falsity. A false "pope" embraces falsity with enthusiasm as he believes that the only thing that is "false" is "old-fashioned" Catholicism.

It was only four days afer he issued Laetamar Admodum that Pope Pius XII forcefully condemned the Soviet invasion of Hungary that resulted in Cardinal Mindszenty’s taking refuge in the American Embassy in Budapest for the next decade prior to his betrayal at the hands of Giovanni Battista Enrico Antonio Maria/Paul the Sick:

Venerable Brethren, Greetings and Apostolic Benediction.

In the Encyclical Letter which We recently wrote you, Consecrated Shepherds of the Catholic world, We expressed Our hope that a new day of peace based on justice and liberty might be dawning upon the noble people of Hungary. For conditions in that country seemed to be improving.

2. But tidings have reached Us lately which fill Our heart with pain and sorrow. There is being shed again in the cities, towns, and villages of Hungary the blood of citizens who long with all their hearts for their rightful freedom. National institutions which had just been restored have been overthrown again and violently destroyed. A blood-drenched people have been reduced once more to slavery by the armed might of foreigners.

3. We cannot help but deplore and condemn (for so Our consciousness of Our office bids Us) these unhappy events which fill all Catholics and all free peoples with deepest sorrow and indignation. May those whose commands have caused these tragic events come to realize that the rightful freedom of a people cannot be extinguished by the shedding of human blood..

4. We who watch over all peoples with a father's concern assert that any violence and any bloodshed which anyone unjustly causes is never to be tolerated. On the contrary, We exhort all people and all classes of society to that peace which finds its basis and nurture in justice, liberty, and love.

5. The words which "the Lord said to Cain. . . 'The voice of thy brother's blood crieth to me from the earth'," (Gen. 4, 10) are relevant today. For so the blood of the Hungarian people cries out to God. And even though God often punishes private individuals for their sins only after death, nonetheless, as history teaches, He occasionally punishes in this mortal life rulers of people and their nations when they have dealt unjustly with others. For He is a just judge.

6. May our merciful Redeemer, We suppliantly pray, move the hearts of those upon whose decisions these matters depend, that an end may be put to injustice and a finish to violence, that all nations, being at peace with one another, may be united in peaceful and tranquil harmony.

7. Meanwhile, We implore a most merciful God on behalf especially of all those who have been tragically slain in the course of these unhappy events. May they find eternal life and unending peace in heaven. We desire that all Christians join Us in praying to God for them.

8. And as We address these words to you, We lovingly impart Our Apostolic Benediction to each and every one of you, Venerable Brethren, and to your flocks, and in a very special way to Our beloved Hungarian people. May it be a pledge of heavenly graces and a witness to Our paternal love. (Pope Pius XII, Datis Nuperimme, November 5, 1956.)

No, true popes never speak like leftists. True popes speak as Catholics, and there has not been a true pope on the Throne of Saint Peter, since the death of Pope Pius XII on October 9, 1958. No true pope has ever sought a modus vivendi with Communist regimes, no less to praise those religions for nonexistent commitment to “peace” and “dialogue.”

Joseph “Cardinal” Zen’s Role in Betraying Underground Catholics to the Conciliar Religion

There has been no one within the conciliar hierarchy in his opposition to Bergoglio’s rapprochement with the Chinese Communists than Joseph “Cardinal” Zen, the conciliar “archbishop” emeritus, who has even traveled to Rome to bring his complaints to his “pope,” only to be rebuffed by the conciliar authorities who live in the security and comfort. While he did have a “warm” meeting with “Pope Francis” on January 7, 2023, two days after the latter had the conciliar “Mass of Christian Burial” for Joseph Alois Ratzinger/Benedict XVI on January 5, 2023, it was a year later that Zen bitterly criticized Fiducia Supplicans (December 21, 2023), and came close to calling for the resignation of Victor Manuel Fernandez, the prefect of the so-called Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith (see Zen Contends ‘Fiducia Supplicans’ ‘Creates Confusion’ and Suggests Fernández Should Resign.)

What is generally unknown, however, is the fact that Father Zen was chosen in 1989 by Karol Josef Wojtyla/John Paul II to introduce the conciliar liturgical books to both the “Chinese Patriotic Catholic Association,” in whose seminaries he was permitted to lecture on occasion between 1989 and 1996 prior to his appointment as the conciliar coadjutor “archbishop” of Hong Kong, and to the clergy of the underground church to implement part of Wojtyla/John Paul II’s 1988 directives, discussed earlier in this commentary, which including “updating” theology and the liturgy in light of the conciliar “renewal.

The unreformed Immemorial Mass of Tradition was celebrated in both the CPCA and the underground church prior to Father Zen’s introducing the conciliar books to the “official church” and to the underground clergy, and, as has happened throughout the world, a lot was lost in the translation of the editio typica of the Novus Ordo liturgical travesty, that is, of course, invalid on its very face (see G.I.R.M. Warfare: The Conciliar Church's Unremitting Warfare Against Catholic Faith and Worship), including the following translations from the Chinese into English as provided to me by the reader who gave me the information about Father Anthony Zhang Gangyi:

From "I baptize you" to "I give/perform baptism to you"
From "Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name" to "Our Father, who art in heaven, honored be thy name.”
From "Blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus" to "Blessed is thy son, Jesus". They deleted "the fruit of thy womb", thus altering the original hailing words of St Elizazbeth.
From "enter under my roof…" to "enter into my heart…"

There is no need to belabor the fact that if the translation of the formula of baptism listed above is correct, then all baptisms performed with that formula are null and void.

To be sure, the translation of the Roman editio typica into vernacular has been fraught with controversy since the early 1970s. As a battle-scarred veteran of the "translaton wars" at several annual meetings of the then named National Conference of Catholic Bishops in Washington, District of Columba, in 1990s who spilled a lot of unnessary ink about the "proper" translations, there might be some other way to render the words from the Chinese ino the English language. As the person who translated the words, though, is certain of his translation, it would mean that Chinese Catholics have had no valid baptisms since the 1990s unless they were performed in the traditional rite or unless a priest/presbyter used the words "I baptize thee."

Perhaps it is also relevant to note that, although the Latin editio typica of the Protestant and Judeo-Masonic Novus Ordo liturgical abomination has always been Domine non sum dignus, ut intres sub tectcum meum sed tantum dic verbo et sanabitur anima mea. (Lord, I am not worthy that Thou shouldst comest under my roof, but only say the Word and my soul shall be healed). For over four decades, however, it had been rendered into English as “Lord, I am not worthy to receive you, but only the say the word and I shall be healed. Although the late Joseph Alois Ratzinger/Benedict XVI authorized a more faithful translation of the Latin into the vernacular languages, including English, even a faithful translation of the Novus Ordo ordinary does not make it valid, only mor aesthetically please as happens, say, when a high Anglican stages his false liturgy in Latin. As a former friend of mine within the conciliar structures said over three decades ago, “You can dress this thing [Novus Ordo] up, but you’re still stuck with the same rotten mess.”

Insofar as the Ave Maria is concerned, the “official” translation of Holy Writ here in the United States of America is the “New American Bible,” which until 2002 had translated the words of Saint Gabriel the Archangel to Our Lady at the Annunciation (Ave Maria, gratia plena) as “Hail, O highly favored daughter,” which is an implicit denial of Our Lady’s Immaculate Conception. This mistranslation was replaced in 2002 with an even worse mistranslation, “Hail, favored one.” As the late Jack Harold Paar was wont to say, “I kid you not”:

In the sixth month, the angel Gabriel was sent from God to a town of Galilee called Nazareth, to a virgin betrothed to a man named Joseph, of the house of David, and the virgin's name was Mary.

And coming to her, he said, "Hail, favored one! The Lord is with you." (Luke 1: 27-28. The New American Bible)

This wretched, gender-neutral mistranslation appears in what is called the New American Bible, Revised Edition, which was printed in 2012, noting that the proper translation is found in the Revised Standard Version, Catholic Edition, which some priests/presbyters within the conciliar structures here in the United States of America have chosen to use rather than what are called the Sacramentary and Lectionary containing the ordinary and the readings in the Novus Ordo liturgy, which consists of a two year cycle (I-II) for Sundays and a three-year cycle for weekdays (A, B, C). It's just a mess.

No matter whether in English, French, German, Italian, Spanish, or Chinese, the Novus Ordo is offensive to the Most Holy Trinity and incapable of sanctifying the souls for whom Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ shed every single drop of His Most Precious Blood to redeem.

Yes, I noted in February of 2018 seven months before Jorge Mario Bergoglio’s original “secret” agreement with the Chinese Communists (see Bergoglio the Red Surrenders Faithful Catholics to Their Persecutors and Neville Bergoglio's Appeasement of the Chicom Monsters) that was renewed in 2021 and then again just this very month in 2024, the suffering Catholics in the underground have been Doubly Betrayed by Jorge and His False Church, first by these long-suffering Catholics’ fealty to the Holy See to convince them to submit to false religion with its false and sacramentally invalid liturgical rites as they “resisted” the rump church with its anti-life policies dictated by the Chicoms; and second, as they were betrayed by their “pope” to their very persecutors in the name of “dialogue” and while their persecution at the hands of the Chicoms continued even in spite—or, as is likely, because—of their “pope’s” secret accords.

Although Appendix B, below, reviews the essential role played by Joseph Alois Ratzinger/Benedict XVI in this betrayal of underground Catholics to the Chinese Communists and their “Chinese Catholic Patriotic Association, it should never be forgotten that “Saint John Paul II” started the process in the first place, and it was with a prophetic insight that Father Anthony Zhang Gangyi exclaimed “Fake pope! Fake pope!” when he met with Wojtyla/John Paul II. To that can we can all say, "Fake Popes, Fake Popes. Each and every one. Fake popes!"

As we continue to pray for the suffering and betrayed Catholics of Red China, we must continue our prayers to Our Lady, especially through her Most Holy Rosary, that all this fake popery will come to an end and a true and legitimate pope is restored to the Throne of Saint Peter.

Our Lady of the Rosary, pray for us.

Saint Joseph, pray for us.

Saints Peter and Paul, pray for us.

Saint John the Baptist, pray for us.

Saint John the Evangelist, pray for us.

Saint Michael the Archangel, pray for us.

Saint Gabriel the Archangel, pray for us.

Saint Raphael the Archangel, pray for us.

Saints Joachim and Anne, pray for us.

Saints Caspar, Melchior, and Balthasar, pray for us.

Saint Wenceslaus, pray for us.

Appendix A

Bishop Ignatius Kung’s Arrest, Trial, and Imprisonment

It is often the case in the history of Holy Mother Church during times of persecutions that her martyrs suffer together. Such continues to be the case in Red China today just as much as it was sixty-two years ago during the Chicom show trials that sentenced Bishops James Edward Walsh and Ignatius Kung to prison. How sad it is the evangelizing efforts and sufferings of these two great Catholic heroes have been considered by Joseph Alois Ratzinger/Benedict XVI and Jorge Mario Bergoglio as part of a “memory of the past” that needs to be “purified.”

The official biography of Bishop Ignatius Kung found on the Cardinal Kung Foundation website provides us with a glimpse of the sort of Catholic heroism that means nothing to Jorge Mario Bergoglio:

Bishop Kung had been Bishop of Shanghai and Apostolic Administrator of two other dioceses for only five years before he was arrested by the Chinese government. In just 5 short years, Bishop Kung became one of the most feared enemies of the Chinese Communists - a man who commanded both the attention and devotion of the country's then three million Roman Catholics and the highest respect of his brother bishops in China, and inspired thousands to offer their lives up to God. In defiance of the communist created and sanctioned Chinese Catholic Patriotic Association, Bishop Kung personally supervised the Legion of Mary, a religious organization of the laity dedicated to the veneration of the Blessed Mother Mary. As the result, many members of the Legion of Mary chose to risk arrest in the name of their God, of their Church and of their bishop. Hundreds of Legion of Mary members, including many students, were arrested and sentenced to 10, 15, or 20 years or more of hard labor.

In the midst of persecutions, Bishop Kung declared 1952 the Marian Year in Shanghai. During that year, there was to be uninterrupted 24 hours-daily recitation of the rosary in front of a statue of Our Lady of Fatima, which toured all the parishes of Shanghai. The Holy Statue finally arrived at Christ the King Church where a major arrest of the priests had just taken place only a month ago. Bishop Kung visited that church and personally led the rosary while hundreds of the armed police looked on. At the end of the rosary, leading the congregation, Bishop Kung prayed: "Holy Mother, we do not ask you for a miracle. We do not beg you to stop the persecutions. But we beg you to support us who are very weak."

Knowing that he and his priests would soon be arrested, Bishop Kung trained hundreds of catechists to pass on the Roman Catholic faith in the diocese to future generations.

The heroic efforts of these catechists, their martyrdom and that of many faithful and clergy contributed to the vibrant underground Roman Catholic Church in China today. Bishop Kung's place in the hearts of his parishioners was very well summed up by the Shanghai youth group in a 1953 New Year youth rally when they said: "Bishop Kung, in darkness, you light up our path. You guide us on our treacherous journey. You sustain our faith and the traditions of the Church. You are the foundation rock of our Church in Shanghai."

On September 8, 1955, the press around the world reported in shock the overnight arrest of Bishop Kung along with more than 200 priests and Church leaders in Shanghai. Months after his arrest, he was taken out to a mob "struggle session" in the old Dog Racing stadium in Shanghai. Thousands were ordered to attend and to hear the Bishop's public confession of his "crimes." With his hands tied behind his back, wearing a Chinese pajama suit, the 5-foot tall bishop was pushed forward to the microphone to confess. To the shock of the security police, they heard a righteous loud cry of "Long live Christ the King, Long live the Pope" from the Bishop. The crowd responded immediately, "Long live Christ the King, Long live Bishop Kung". Bishop Kung was quickly dragged away to the police car and disappeared from the world until he was brought to trial in 1960. Bishop Kung was sentenced to life imprisonment.

The night before he was brought to trial, the Chief Prosecutor asked once again for his cooperation to lead the independent church movement and to establish the Chinese Patriotic Association. His answer was: "I am a Roman Catholic Bishop. If I denounce the Holy Father, not only would I not be a Bishop, I would not even be a Catholic. You can cut off my head, but you can never take away my duties."

Bishop Kung vanished behind bars for thirty years. During those thirty years, he spent many long periods in isolation. Numerous requests to visit Bishop Kung in prison by international religious and human rights organizations and senior foreign government officials were rejected. He was not permitted to receive visitors, including his relatives, letters, or money to buy essentials, which are rights of other prisoners.

The efforts for his release by his family, led by his nephew, Joseph Kung, by human rights organizations, including Amnesty International, Red Cross, and the United States Government, never ceased. In 1985, he was released from jail to serve another term of 10 years of house arrest under the custody of those Patriotic Association bishops who betrayed him and betrayed the Pope and who usurped his diocese. In an article immediately after his release from jail, the New York Times said that the ambiguous wording of the Chinese news agency suggested that the authorities, not the bishop, might have relented. After two and one-half years of house arrest, he was officially released. However, his charge of being a counterrevolutionary was never exonerated. In 1988, his nephew, Joseph Kung, went to China twice and obtained permission to escort him to America for receiving proper medical care.

Shortly before Bishop Kung was released from jail, he was permitted to join a banquet organized by the Shanghai government to welcome His eminence Cardinal Jaime Sin, Archbishop of Manila, Philippines on a friendship visit. This was the first time that Bishop Kung had met a visiting bishop from the universal Church since his imprisonment. Cardinal Sin and Bishop Kung were seated on opposite ends of the table separated by more than 20 Communists, and had no chance to exchange words privately. During the dinner, Cardinal Sin suggested that each person should sing a song to celebrate. When the time came for Bishop Kung to sing, in the presence of the Chinese government officials and the Patriotic Association bishops, he looked directly at Cardinal Sin and sang "Tu es Petrus et super hanc petram aedificabo Ecclesiam" (You are Peter and upon this rock I will build my Church), a song of faith proclaiming the supreme authority of the Pope. Bishop Kung conveyed to Cardinal Sin that in all his years of captivity he remained faithful to God, to his Church and to the Pope.

After the banquet, Aloysius Jin, the Chinese Catholic Patriotic Association's Bishop of Shanghai, rebuked Cardinal Kung, "What are you trying to do? Showing your position?" Cardinal Kung quietly answered, "It is not necessary to show my position. My position has never changed."

Cardinal Sin immediately carried Cardinal Kung's message to the Holy Father and announced to the world: this man of God never faltered in his love for his Church or his people despite unimaginable suffering, isolation and pain. (Biography of Cardinal Kung.)

Bishop Kung's nephew, Joseph Kung, who died on February 21, 2023, at ninety years of age, was kind enough to have invited us to a luncheon at his house in Stamford, Connecticut, in June of 2003, I believe, and he showed us the room where his courageous uncle had died. Joseph also showed us a diary in which Bishop Kung wrote the Ordinary of the Immemorial Mass of Tradition while in prison in Red China. His jailers kept taking away the book from him, but Bishop Kung always seemed to find the paper that he needed to write the Ordinary of the Mass in exquisite handwriting. Bishop Kung won this contest of wills as he was aided by Our Lady's intercession in his behalf. The jailers finally relented and let him continue his work without any further efforts to confiscate it. Bishop Kung was dedicated to the Roman Rite of the Catholic Church that Jorge Mario Bergoglio is always mocking, including in a children's book in 2016 (see Jorge's Wall of Unbelief.)

Now, leaving aside the fact that the late Jaimie Sin was no "cardinal," Bishop Ignatius Kung suffered for his fealty to the Throne of Saint Peter. He had no way of knowing that a revolution that had much in common with Marxism had created a counter church with false liturgical rites as he was imprisoned, and he was so grateful to the third in the current line of antipopes that he never understood what had happened while he was held incommunicado for over thirty years. Bishop Kung, however, was courageous in his steadfast defense of the Catholic Faith and of Papal Primacy in the face of vicious Communist persecution against him. He lived for Christ the King just as much as had Padre Miguel Agustin Pro, S.J., and the Cristeros in Mexico (as well as the Spanish Cristeros who died at the hands of Communists, many of whom had the support of American celebrities, including author Ernest Hemmingway, between 1936 and 1939). He did not accord the schismatic and heretical rump church created by the Red Chinese government, the so-called Chinese Catholic Patriotic Association, as having any legitimacy whatsoever. He was a true son of Holy Mother Church who always denounced falsehood when he saw it, never failing to call it by its proper name.

A “reconciliation” with the Red Chinese butchers, however, has been a goal of the conciliar revolutionaries for over fifty years now.

Indeed, Giovanni Battista Enrico Antonio Maria Montini/Paul the Sick tried such a ~~reconciliation~~ surrender as early as January 6, 1967, the Feast of the Epiphany of Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, when used the fortieth anniversary of the consecration of the first bishops to serve China to remind the Chinese people of the Catholic Church’s love for them. While he took note generally of the sufferings of the faithful Catholics in Red China, he also made it clear that he wanted to extend his Ostpolitik that made the Catholic hierarchy of Eastern Europe answerable to their Communist minders all the way to Red China itself. What follows is a computer translation of the relevant passages Montini/Paul VI’s sermon dealing with China:

Yes, you know. We have chosen this moment, this place, this assembly and this feast to remember, with celebratory joy and with antiseptic hope, a double anniversary: that of the consecration of the first six Chinese bishops, which took place forty years ago, on October 28, 1926, in this same basilica, by the hand of Our predecessor of venerated and great memory, Pius XI, and that of the canonical institution, normal of the sacred Hierarchy in China, decreed twenty years ago, in 1946, by another Our no less venerated and great predecessor, Pius XII.

Why celebrate these anniversaries? Because the two facts, which We want to remember with religious and collected solemnity, are great facts, they are historical facts, they are facts full of human and spiritual significance, and because they are facts that postulate their regular and happy following, which instead meets in these last few years have had serious and painful difficulties. The facts are known to you. Religious freedom in mainland China faces serious obstacles; Our communications are completely prevented; the Ecumenical Council did not see any member of that Hierarchy present; all the Missionaries were expelled; the Catholic Church, this same Apostolic See is accused of being contrary to the Chinese people. Now all this has no reason to exist; and we could prove it with many arguments. The Catholic Church, everyone knows, he has always looked upon China with immense sympathy; a long and dramatic history of her relations with the Chinese people says with what esteem, with what dedication she wished to know him, without any temporal interest of her own; she wished to serve him, trying to help him develop his intrinsic moral riches and offering the best she possesses to contribute to the education, assistance and prestige of the people themselves. It is well known how in that resurgent country Catholic life - especially by virtue of the events we are commemorating - has completely renounced being and appearing a paracolonial phenomenon, and how it is and wants to be an authentic expression of the Chinese soul, which he can find in the Christian faith the respect for his noble traditions and the fullness of his deep spiritual aspirations.

What then would we want? We say it simply: resume contacts, as we already maintain them with that portion of the Chinese people with whom we have friendly relations. Indeed, we must recognize that among the many Chinese residing outside the continental state, the Catholic Church is pleased to include, in the Far East and in every part of the world, many excellent and faithful children, and fervent and thriving communities, well assisted by Chinese Bishops and Clergy. Chinese; the Chinese students present at this rite, like the other Chinese Catholics, who also attend it, are for us a dear sign of the persistent vitality of the Chinese Church and are a source of great comfort and great hope.

However, we would now like to resume contact with the Chinese people of the continent; contacts not interrupted voluntarily by Us, to tell all those Chinese Catholics, who have remained faithful to the Catholic Church, that We have never forgotten them, and that we will never give up the hope of rebirth, indeed of the development of the Catholic religion in that Nation. Reconnect to let the Chinese youth know with what trepidation and affection We consider your present exaltation towards the ideals of a new, industrious, prosperous and concordant life. And we would also like to discuss peace with those who preside over Chinese life today on the Continent, knowing how this supreme human and civil ideal is intimately congenial with the spirit of the Chinese people.

These are Our wishes, Our vows. But we know the difficulties of the present hour. However, they do not prevent us from making Our thoughts for China particularly vigilant, loving and caring. And that's what we're doing. If anything, it is practically not given to us to do this, not only is it allowed to us, but it is more strongly imposed on us: to remember and pray. This is what we are doing: we remember and pray. This is why we are gathered here to commemorate two facts in the religious history of China, which seem symbolic and decisive to us. And all present We invite, indeed all those who are in communion with Us, to remember and pray. ("Homily" of Giovanni Battista Enrico Antonio Maria/Paul VI, January 6, 1967.)

Montini/Paul VI made it clear that he did not consider the Communist regime of Red China to be illegitimate and welcomed the opportunity to establish “friendly” relations in the name of “peace.” However, the only kind of “peace” that Communists desire is total capitulation to whatever they want at any given time. As I told my students during my college teaching days, “The Soviets say they want peace, which is true. They want a piece of Virginia, a piece of New York, a piece of California, etc.” Peace for Communist regimes means total surrender.

Contrast Montini/Paul VI’s with Pope Pius XI’s absolute ban of cooperating with Communist regimes, a prohibition that was reaffirmed by the Holy Office in 1949 under Pope Pius XII:

See to it, Venerable Brethren, that the Faithful do not allow themselves to be deceived! Communism is intrinsically wrong, and no one who would save Christian civilization may collaborate with it in any undertaking whatsoever. Those who permit themselves to be deceived into lending their aid towards the triumph of Communism in their own country, will be the first to fall victims of their error. And the greater the antiquity and grandeur of the Christian civilization in the regions where Communism successfully penetrates, so much more devastating will be the hatred displayed by the godless. (Pope Pius XI, Divini Redemptoris, March 19, 1937.)

This Sacred Supreme Congregation has been asked:

1. whether it is lawful to join Communist Parties or to favour them;
2. whether it is lawful to publish, disseminate, or read books, periodicals, newspapers or leaflets which support the teaching or action of Communists, or to write in them;
3. whether the faithful who knowingly and freely perform the acts specified in questions 1 and 2 may be admitted to the Sacraments;
4. whether the faithful who profess the materialistic and anti-Christian doctrine of the Communists, and particularly those who defend or propagate this doctrine, contract ipso facto excommunication specially reserved to the Apostolic See as apostates from the Catholic faith.

The Most Eminent and Most Reverend Fathers entrusted with the supervision of matters concerning the safeguarding of Faith and morals, having previously heard the opinion of the Reverend Lords Consultors, decreed in the plenary session held on Tuesday (instead of Wednesday), June 28, 1949, that the answers should be as follows:

To 1. in the negative: because Communism is materialistic and anti-Christian; and the leaders of the Communists, although they sometimes profess in words that they do not oppose religion, do in fact show themselves, both in their teaching and in their actions, to be the enemies of God, of the true religion and of the Church of Christ; to 2. in the negative: they are prohibited ipso iure (cf. Can. 1399 of the Codex Iuris Canonici); to 3. in the negative, in accordance with the ordinary principles concerning the refusal of the Sacraments to those who are not disposed; to 4. in the affirmative.

And the following Thursday, on the 30th day of the same month and year, Our Most Holy Lord Pius XII, Pope by the Divine Providence, in the ordinary audience, granted to the Most Eminent and Most Reverend Assessor of the Sacred Office, approved of the decision of the Most Eminent Fathers which had been reported to Him, and ordered the same to be promulgated officially in the Acta Apostolicae Sedis.

Given at Rome, on July 1st, 1949. (As found at Decree Against Communism.)

Appendix B

Joseph Alois Ratzinger’s Betrayal of Faithful Catholics in Red China

True to his subjectivist self, the late Joseph Alois Ratzinger/Benedict XVI used the situation in Red China as a grand "workshop" to "perfect" a "communion" among the "particular churches" in China without requiring members of the rump church to renounce their errors publicly and while he strongly "encouraged" those who have suffered in the underground Church to cooperate with the Communist officials there so that the "suffering" of the past can be overcome by means of a supposed “spiritual reconciliation," which must necessarily precede the "difficulties" of differences of Faith. This is how he phrased things in his Letter to Bishops, Priests, Consecrated Persons and Lay Faithful of Red China, which was released on June 30, 2007, the Commemoration of Saint Paul

Addressing the whole Church in his Apostolic Letter Novo Millennio Ineunte, my venerable predecessor Pope John Paul II, stated that an "important area in which there has to be commitment and planning on the part of the universal Church and the particular Churches [is] the domain of communion (koinonia), which embodies and reveals the very essence of the mystery of the Church. Communion is the fruit and demonstration of that love which springs from the heart of the Eternal Father and is poured out upon us through the Spirit whom Jesus gives us (cf. Rom 5:5), to make us all 'one heart and one soul' (Acts 4:32). It is in building this communion of love that the Church appears as 'sacrament', as the 'sign and instrument of intimate union with God and of the unity of the human race.' The Lord's words on this point are too precise for us to diminish their import. Many things are necessary for the Church's journey through history, not least in this new century; but without charity (agape) all will be in vain. It is again the Apostle Paul who in his hymn to love reminds us: even if we speak the tongues of men and of angels, and if we have faith 'to move mountains', but are without love, all will come to 'nothing' (cf. 1 Cor 13:2). Love is truly the 'heart' of the Church"

These matters, which concern the very nature of the universal Church, have a particular significance for the Church which is in China. Indeed you are aware of the problems that she is seeking to overcome – within herself and in her relations with Chinese civil society – tensions, divisions and recriminations.

In this regard, last year, while speaking of the nascent Church, I had occasion to recall that "from the start the community of the disciples has known not only the joy of the Holy Spirit, the grace of truth and love, but also trials that are constituted above all by disagreements about the truths of faith, with the consequent wounds to communion. Just as the fellowship of love has existed since the outset and will continue to the end (cf. 1 Jn 1:1ff.), so also, from the start, division unfortunately arose. We should not be surprised that it still exists today ... Thus, in the events of the world but also in the weaknesses of the Church, there is always a risk of losing faith, hence, also love and brotherhood. Consequently it is a specific duty of those who believe in the Church of love and want to live in her to recognize this danger too"

The history of the Church teaches us, then, that authentic communion is not expressed without arduous efforts at reconciliation . Indeed, the purification of memory, the pardoning of wrong-doers, the forgetting of injustices suffered and the loving restoration to serenity of troubled hearts, all to be accomplished in the name of Jesus crucified and risen, can require moving beyond personal positions or viewpoints, born of painful or difficult experiences. These are urgent steps that must be taken if the bonds of communion between the faithful and the Pastors of the Church in China are to grow and be made visible. (Letter to Bishops, Priests, Consecrated Persons and Lay Faithful of Red China)

In other words, Ratzinger/Benedict told the members of the underground Church in Red China nine years ago that it was up to them to make "visible" a "communion" with the "pastors" of the rump church that supports the Communist regime's "population control" policies. "Communion" depended upon them being willing to forgive past—and present!—injustices as well as to forget the inconvenient truth that the most of the leaders of the rump church defect from several of the Church's defined teachings on Faith and Morals, placing them totally outside of the pale of the Catholic Church, as Pope Leo XIII noted in Satis Cognitum, June 29, 1896.

Ratzinger/Benedict was telling the long-suffering Catholics in the underground Church in Red China that their suffering was appreciated and noted. It was time, however, to "move on" and purify "memories" so that a "reconciliation" based on a deliberate and calculated overlooking of defections from Faith and Morals on the part of the rump church in China could take place, leaving to a later date—perhaps—“discussions" on the more "delicate" matters that might seem to the Communist authorities to be an "interference" in their "internal affairs." Just be quiet, therefore, don't complain about the government's "population control policies," be good citizens and be content that you have the sacraments and are in "communion" with your fellow Chinese Catholics.

An unfair reading of Ratzinger/Benedict's June 30, 2007, letter?

Read this footnote from the Compendium that was released by the conciliar Vatican on May 24, 2009, to “clarify” his original letter, which caused great confusion among the "bishops," priests/presbyters and members of the laity in Red China, and then decide for yourselves:

We can see that the Holy Father is talking about a spiritual reconciliation, which can and must take place now, even before a structural merger of official and unofficial Catholic communities takes place. As a matter of fact, the Holy Father seems to make a distinction between “a spiritual reconciliation” and “a structural merger”. He recognizes that the reconciliation is like a journey that “cannot be accomplished overnight” (6.6): however, he emphasizes that the steps to be taken on the way are necessary and urgent, and cannot therefore be postponed because - or on the pretext that - they are difficult since they require the overcoming of personal positions or views. Times and ways may vary according to local situations, but the commitment to reconciliation cannot be abandoned. This path of reconciliation, furthermore, cannot be limited to the spiritual realm of prayer alone but must also be expressed through practical steps of effective ecclesial communion (exchange of experiences, sharing of pastoral projects, common initiatives, etc.). Finally, it should not be forgotten that all without exception are invited to engage in these steps: Bishops, priests, religious and lay faithful. It is by means of practical steps that spiritual reconciliation, including visible reconciliation, will gradually occur, which will culminate one day in the complete structural unity of every diocesan community around its one Bishop and of every diocesan community with each other and with the universal Church. In this context, it is licit and fitting to encourage clergy and lay faithful to make gestures of forgiveness and reconciliation in this direction. (Footnote 2, Compendium, pp. 8-9.)

This footnote reflects entirely Joseph Ratzinger's abject rejection of the "ecumenism of the return." Ratzinger/Benedict believes that people are gradually "absorbed" into the Church by means of "perfecting" their "communion" with other Christians. This is heretical. This is condemned by the authority of the Catholic Church. Yet it is of the essence of Ratzinger/Benedict's theology, which is reflected so completely in his June 30, 2007, Letter to Bishops, Priests, Consecrated Persons and Lay Faithful of Red China and in the Compendium released on May 24, 2009.

After all, it is "reconciliation" and "love" that matters the most, although Catholics understand that true love of God can never sanction anything that is offensive to Him, making, therefore, Ratzinger's appeal for a "reconciliation" with authorities of a rump church who support (or are silent about) government polices contrary to Faith and Morals nothing other than an exercise in pure subjectivism.

Ratzinger/Benedict's subjectivism was further displayed when he vitiated his earlier affirmation of Papal Primacy by excusing Catholics who seek out the sacraments from "pastors" who are not in "communion" with the Roman Pontiff, who he believed himself to be at the time.

In not a few situations, then, you have faced the problem of concelebration of the Eucharist. In this regard, I remind you that this presupposes, as conditions, profession of the same faith and hierarchical communion with the Pope and with the universal Church. Therefore it is licit to concelebrate with Bishops and with priests who are in communion with the Pope, even if they are recognized by the civil authorities and maintain a relationship with entities desired by the State and extraneous to the structure of the Church, provided – as was said earlier (cf. section 7 above, paragraph 8) – that this recognition and this relationship do not entail the denial of unrenounceable principles of the faith and of ecclesiastical communion.

The lay faithful too, who are animated by a sincere love for Christ and for the Church, must not hesitate to participate in the Eucharist celebrated by Bishops and by priests who are in full communion with the Successor of Peter and are recognized by the civil authorities. The same applies for all the other sacraments.

Concerning Bishops whose consecrations took place without the pontifical mandate yet respecting the Catholic rite of episcopal ordination, the resulting problems must always be resolved in the light of the principles of Catholic doctrine. Their ordination – as I have already said (cf. section 8 above, paragraph 12) – is illegitimate but valid, just as priestly ordinations conferred by them are valid, and sacraments administered by such Bishops and priests are likewise valid. Therefore the faithful, taking this into account, where the eucharistic celebration and the other sacraments are concerned, must, within the limits of the possible, seek Bishops and priests who are in communion with the Pope: nevertheless, where this cannot be achieved without grave inconvenience, they may, for the sake of their spiritual good, turn also to those who are not in communion with the Pope. (Letter to Bishops, Priests, Consecrated Persons and Lay Faithful of Red China.)

Never mind the fact that the rump church in Red China is a tool of the government. Never mind that there might be some "differences" between the teachings of the rump church in Red China and the Catholic Church. These differences did not matter to Ratzinger/Benedict unless they involved a "denial of unrenounceable principles of the faith and of ecclesiastical communion," although there is not one article of the Faith that is "renounceable." For if it is permissible to participate in the liturgical services of heretics who defect from the Catholic Faith, then Pope Saint Pius V was himself wrong when he told English Catholics, many of whom did not look forward to heavy fines or the confiscation of their properties or imprisonment or martyrdom—or all of those things, not to assist at the liturgies of the heretical and schismatic Anglican Church.

Or, my friends, was that what Joseph Ratzinger/Benedict XVI was saying thirteen and one-half years ago?

Was he saying, as he made reference to in his Explanatory Letter on "Summorum Pontificum, which was issued on June 7, 2007, just a week after his letter to Chinese Catholics, that he was doing then what others did not do in the past, that is, being willing to "bend" a little bit on some points in order to effect a "reconciliation" which comes at the price of truth itself?

What an affront to the witness of the martyrs over the history of the Church, including the martyrs of the underground Church in Red China in the past sixty-seven years, who refused to make one compromise with error or heresy or any interference at all on the part of the civil state with the life and mission of the Catholic Church.

There is, you see, quite a bit of logic involved in requesting the Catholics of the underground church in Red China to join up with the rump church that promotes some of the very evils that are support by "Catholics" in the counterfeit church of conciliarism without forfeiting their place in the One World Church of Ecumenism born of the new ecclesiology. All that Jorge Mario Bergoglio is doing at this time is follow through on what the late Joseph Alois Ratzinger/Benedict helped to make more possible seventeen years, three months ago.

Appendix C

Flushing the Memory of the Catholic Martyrs of Communist Regimes Down the Orwellian Memory Hole

Countless have been the numbers of Catholics who have suffered at the hands of Communist regimes in the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics and its Warsaw Pact puppets (Poland, Romania, East Germany, Hungary, Czechoslovakia), Yugoslavia, Albania, Cuba, Red China, Vietnam, North Korea and Nicaragua) since the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, the Soviet takeover of Eastern Europe, courtesy of Franklin Roosevelt Yalta Agreements, after World War II, the Maoist takeover of China in 1949, the Castroist takeover of Cuba in 1959, and the Sandinista revolution that imposed totalitarianism upon Nicaragua in 1979. The lords of conciliarism care nothing for the sufferings of Catholic martyrs, and they despise the evangelizing efforts of the original Maryknoll Fathers who sought to convert the Chinese before many of their number were imprisoned and tortured at the hands of the Chicom monsters.

Mr. Ray Kerrison, who died on December 19, 2022, at ninety-two years of age, was Australian journalist who had emigrated to the United States of America and was recruited eventually by Rupert Murdoch to write for the New York Post in 1976 and for which he wrote until his retirement in 1999. Mr. Kerrison wrote a biography of Bishop James Edward Walsh, that was published in 1960 and provided a poignant, detailed account of what happened to Catholic missionaries in China as the Maoists were about to take over and the persecution that began shortly thereafter. Mr. Kerrison wrote hundreds of columns in the New York Post that dealt mostly with politics and culture, although he was also the newspaper’s premier horse racing expert. One of those thousands of columns was about my own primary race for the senatorial nomination of the State of New York on the Right to Life Party line against United States Senator Alfonse M. D’Amato in 1998. He wrote many columns against abortion, including one that was republished as an appendix by Human Life Review, which was published by the National Review in 1994: Human Life Review.]

The following excerpts from Bishop Walsh of Maryknoll: Prisoner of Red China provide quite a sharp and exacting contrast with conciliarism’s refusal to seek converts to the Catholic Faith and its refusal to condemn Communist dictatorships as they continue to persecute believing Catholics even as the proverbial ink on the conciliar Vatican’s renewal of its agreement with Xi Jinping is still wet. I will let the text of Mr. Kerrison’s book speak for itself before making some overall comments.

But soon Bishop Wash saw there was no hope or China. Late in 1948, he wrote:

“The problem is how to help these good people. Here they are with six-million so called solders, the only air force in China, the only navy, American help of every sort including expert military advice and supplies, yet for three years they have let a handful of Commies push them all over the place and take away the whole country right under their eyes.

“The Chinese lack discipline, efficiency, and organization.

“Just now they are talking peace, which means they are arranging for a few little concessions that will save their face. China, however, is already lost. The only thing to do now is to find a way of life, if possible, under the new regime.”

On May 25, 1949, Shanghai, encircled by Communist troops and evacuated by the Nationalists, capitulated with hardly a shot being fired. It had become the largest Communist city in the world.

Two days later, bishop Lane received a cable, WELL. EVERYTHING GRAND. NOTIFY FAMILY. WALSH.

Although able to continue his work for months after, Bishop Walsh knew it was only a matter of time before the Communists moved against him and the men working alongside him.

“I'm like the Irishman, who said as he was falling past the twenty-first floor – everything is okay.” he said.

The Reds always followed a set pattern after conquest. Start working on laymen, and at the bottom of the clerical ladder confiscate every building and institution, label Catholicism a “foreign influence,” never denounce it as a religion but as a political system, form a national church independent of Rome, expel or imprison the foreign hierarchy and execute the domestic ones.

So the purge of religion, Catholic and Protestant, began.

Kongmoon, the mission Bishop Walsh had founded, was the first on Maryknoll's to undergo the Red treatment. At the end of 1949, the Communists gathered in the Chinese priests and beat and tortured them. They were exhibited in public in stocks and chains, and bracelets hung about their necks tagged them as “running dogs” of Americans. Mission building and institutions were seized, and priests and Sisters imprisoned.

After nearly two years, when they felt they were strong enough, the Communists moved against Bishop Adolph Paschang, who had succeeded Bishop Walsh at Kongmoon. They squeezed him for taxes, urged him to leave and then held him for $40,000 ransom. When these measures failed, they dragged him to public trial and bashed and kicked and spat on him to force a confession of crimes against the state.

They paraded him through the streets, yanking him along by a noose about his neck. Men struck him on the back of the neck and women smote him in the eyes until they were black.

The little bishop, who once cut up his episcopal garments to make dresses and coats for orphans, clung to his innocence. Then, the Reds took him to the border of Macao and shoved him to freedom, glad to be rid of him.

Maryknoll's first martyr in this new was Bishop Byrne, named Apostolic Delegate to South Korea in 1949. when the North Korean communists, who had wiped out ten thousand Catholics, crossed the 38^th parallel and most missionaries were evacuated, Bishop Byrne and his Maryknoll secretary, Father William Booth, stayed behind in Seoul.

They were taken prisoner, jailed, and starved. After nine days, they were marched north to Pyongyang, the mission Bishop Byrne had pioneered and directed. In September of 1950, they were thrown into crowded boxcars and freighted north to the Yalu River. A month later, as American troops pressed forward with their attack, the priests were marched over the snow-covered mountains, with hundreds of other prisoners, American soldiers, Carmelite Sisters, and an Anglican nun who collapsed on the trail were shot on the spot and their bodies pushed to one side. After eight days and one hundred victims, the march ended.

In temperatures below freezing the prisoners were ordered to strip and perform calisthenics. Bishop Byrne, bone-thin and exhausted contracted pneumonia. On November 25^th he died.

The next victim was Bishop Francis Ford. His mission in Kaying, China, was occupied for twelve months before the Communists arrested him. Their press, from Peking to Moscow's Pravda, denounced him as head of a U.S. Spy ring, saboteur and enemy of the people. Bishop Ford and his secretary, Sister Joan Marie were dragged through the streets. The bishop's hands were bound behind his back and a rope, looped around his neck was tied to them.

In Kaying and six other towns, the pair were subjected to the frenzy and hatred of mobs. Paraded through the streets they were cursed and stoned, tripped and beaten, spat upon and pelted with garbage.

In one town, the Communists threaded a rope through a hole at the top of Bishop Ford's garment and brought it out through another below to look like a monkey's tail. The crowds howled with laughter.

In Canton prison, Bishop Ford and Sister Joan Marie for two months underwent a systematic brainwashing of twelve hours daily, each session bitter with hysteria and denunciations.

By 1952, Bishop Ford's hair was white, and he was so emaciated and feeble he could not walk. He was carried about the prison by guards who would prop him up and taunt him “Come on, Walk!” and then they would laugh.

On February 21, his starved body unable to bear the brutality any longer, Bishop Ford died.

The news of his death sped to every corner of the globe to sadden and inspire men who prized freedom and courage, the dignity and nobility of man and the love of God.

But in one small room in Shanghai, Bishop Ford's martyrdom evoked a special mourning and a special pride. Bishop Walsh said he was a “foundation stone, strong and beautiful, that will inspire the sons of Maryknoll from generation to generation. Here was a man who knew the mission method. Condolere: to co-suffer with our good people, to feel for, and to feel with them. That was his secret.”

Later, when the Communists closed the Catholic Central Bureau and stripped his room of all but its bare needs, they allowed Bishop Walsh to keep one picture on his desk. It was a small and faded picture of a baby taken fifty years ago. The Communists could never understand the attention the Bishop gave it. But then, they did not know it was a picture of a baby who had been baptized Francis Xavier Ford.

One morning, Bishop Walsh sat on a bench among trees and morning-glories in the garden behind the Bureau when the procurator, Father Charles Meeus, went out to join him.

“How do you like the morning-glories, Bishop?” Father Meeus asked.

“To tell the truth, Father, I hadn't noticed them,” the bishop replied. “I was watching the little children next door. Couldn't we rig up a playground for them, for the neighboring children, Catholics and non-Catholics alike?”

Father Meeus was startled at the suggestion. “Do you think the kids will dare enter the Catholic Central Bureau when it is advertised by the Communists as a “nest of imperialistic running dogs?”

“Father,” the bishop assured him, “knowing our good people the way I do, I bet you, not only the children but even their parents will want to come here and enjoy the garden.”

The pair set to work and fashioned hobbyhorses out of old tree trunks, a trapeze, a swing, even a merry-go-round from old crates, they spruced them up with coats of red and yellow paint and waited for the invasion.

Within days, as many as five hundred children were running, playing, and squealing in the garden. Their mothers, even their grandparents, came too.

Still Bishop Walsh was not satisfied. He told Father Meeus, “It might be a good idea to set up some statues and holy images to give the kids a chance to get acquainted with Our Blessed Mother and the saints.

“I'm sure the Communists will find a way to close the playground if we start preaching or giving catechism to the kids, but they can't object to the statues.”

“After all,” he smiled, 'there is “freedom of religion' in China, isn't there?”

Statues, pictures of Saint Therese, of the Child Jesus, Saint Joseph, and the Guardian Angel with a pair of wings were erected. Bishop Walsh ran his eyes over them. “The Stations of the Cross. That is what will interest them the most, Father. Try to set them up along the wall in the open air.”

Stations coming up Bishop,” said Father Meeus.

Thereafter, Bishop Walsh never tired of watching boys and pigtailed girls sidle from station to station, pointing their tiny grubby-fingers to the sufferings of Our Lord.

“I noticed they even let the butterflies fly past them without trying to catch them,” observed the bishop. “They are that fascinated by the Passion of Our Lord. But then, who wouldn't be in china today? Are they not all, Catholic and pagan alike enduring the Passion and the intrigued of the Communist Pharisees?”

Bishop Walsh saw that the grandmothers reserved their stoutest disapproval for the picture of Pontius Pilate washing his hands. “No wonder, Father,” he said, “for Pilate was the Great Compromiser. And our good people despise those who today want to compromise with the Reds.”

A few days later, the bishop called in Father Meeus and asked him to erect another swing in the playground. “One swing just isn't enough,” he explained. “They've got to wait in line so long.”

“But where are we going to get the money?” asked the practical Father Meeus.

Bishop Walsh pulled 100,000 local dollars (about four U.S. Dollars) from a pocket. “This should do it,” he said.

“Where did you get that?”

“I gave up smoking a few weeks ago and I've been saving the pennies. We'll smoke all we want in Heaven. Lots of people give up smoking back home for the missions, you know.”

Under the Communist regime, supplies of food and clothing became so short that they were rationed on a ticket system. The tickets were picked up once a month a police stations and jails. Most foreigners in Shanghai sent their servants to perform the menial task but each month Bishop Walsh appeared at the local jail.

He would salute the armed guard and join the long line to collect his rations. After they were jabbed at, rather that handed to him, he would thank the officials and then present to another soldier to prove he was neither “an undesirable begged no a menace to public security.”

His Chinese friends pleaded with him not to collect tickets personally. “Let us go in your place,” they urged. “it hurts us to see a man of your prominence go there and have to act like a coolie.”

“Thank you,” answered the bishop, “but I want to be in on this just as you are. This is nothing compared with the suffering of most other Catholics in this land today/”

Although the freedom to carry out his priestly functions was restricted, Bishop Walsh maintained his zeal for souls. An American woman named Julia Ross lay dying in a hospital. She was not a Catholic but when the bishop heard of her plight, he hurried over to try to help her through her lonely last hours.

The hospital corridor swarmed with creditors and Red informers who tried to keep him out. When they finally allowed him in, his offer of help was spurned.

Bishop Walsh returned to his room and started some “knee action,” as he called prayer. He sent a nun to Miss Ross's bedside with a Green Scapular, famous for its conversion powers. It was placed under Miss Ross's pillow.

But still she refused to see the bishop. More “knee action.” One night a friend phoned from the hospital that the woman was asking to be baptized a Catholic. Bishop Walsh hurried to the hospital and received her into the Church. She died the next night.

Bishop Walsh's charity won him the title among his friends of Shanghai as their “Saint Vincent de Paul.” With the small sum he received monthly from the British Consulate and some other money from city businessmen, he bought clothes and food and medicines for refugee priest and nuns. He never turned back an appeal for help. To make his pittance go further, he gave up buying razor blades which cost thirty U.S. Cents each. For five years, he shaved daily with five blades which he resharpened inside a water glass. Hardly a morning passed that he did not appear at Mass with his face bleeding from nicks. Even in these circumstances, he could not bring himself to grow a beard !

With little to do, Bishop Walsh began writing. He wrote a book titled Mary, Mother of Mankind and a series of articles of Chinese children and smuggled each chapter and article to Maryknoll's house in Hong Kong. Some of his pieces on the children never reached their destination, but others were later assembled into a book, The Young Ones. He studied Mandarin so he could speak to children. But at his age a new language came hard. He was chatting in Mandarin to a youngster one day about the goldfishes in the pond.

“That is a Shakespill quotation, isn't it?” the boy asked.

He had thought the bishop was speaking English to him.

The authorities sometimes questioned the bishop in his Bureau room and sometimes on their premises. Armed with a smattering of his conversations, picked up by snoopers, they would accuse him, “When you said you hoped the Brooklyn Dodgers would not win, you really meant you hoped that China would not be admitted to the United Nations. That is right isn't it?” and then, “Do you deny that the serpent under the feet of the Blessed virgin is communism?”

One night, when they hauled him to police headquarters for interrogation, an official said to him, “Do you know that all the trouble and resistance we are having from the Legion of Mary and Catholics of Shanghai is due to you?”

“I am very glad to hear that,” Bishop Walsh replied.

The official, expecting the prelate to try to deny the charge, was so confounded by his happy admission he did not know what to say. He turned on his heel and left the room and Bishop Walsh was free to go.

The Bishop's health in the following months began declining sharply. Rheumatism crippled his right hand so badly he was forced to write with the left. He was gaunt and weary. He could not eat. The twenty-fifth anniversary of his elevation to the rank of bishop arrived and departed without celebration. The Shanghai press continued to charge him with being “a representative of Wall Street and a stooge of Cardinal Spellman.”

In early 1954, Bishop Walsh became a close friend of a Chinese doctor, who persuaded him to go to a hospital for treatment. He liked and trusted the doctor so much that he accepted.

After a few weeks, he returned to his room and in a note smuggled to Hong Kong, reported, “I've never felt better in my life. I weigh 145 pounds. I'm eating like a longshoreman. The only thing I miss is a golf course.”

At the end of April, 1956, the only priest left at the Bureau with Bishop Walsh was Father Meeus. They on April 30 he received his summons by telephone.

Next morning, he came downstairs to join the bishop for breakfast, which he expected to be his last at the Bureau.

He put the office keys on the table. “If I don't come back for dinner, Bishop, these keys will open any door that is closed in the house.”

“Any door that is closed,” Bishop Walsh murmured. “They are closing the door of China to the Word of God, Father, I am an old man, and I don't think I will see China being converted from communism to the truth. But, you, Father, you are still young. You will!

The bishop poked at a radish. “It reminds me of our people,” he said red outside, white inside.”

After eating, the two men shook hands.

“Good-by, Bishop.”

“Good-by Father.”

At the door, Father Meeus turned for a last look at his friend. He saw crystal drops quivering at the end of the gray lashes. He closed the door and then he was gone.

In 1956, having repeatedly refused their offers to leave the country without harm, Bishop Walsh was moved by the Communists to the Christ the King rectory on the other side of Shanghai.

If he would not leave and would not co-operate with their schismatic church, then they would use him, The rectory was close by a well-known hotel where the Communists regime booked most visiting foreign delegations. The sight of Bishop Walsh coming and going from the church, the Reds hoped would serve to deceive visitors that they tolerated freedom of religion.

But there was a second and greater advantage for them. The rectory was a nest of confusion. Some of its priests and Brothers had deserted the Church of Rome for the church of Peking. Others acted in such a way that neither Bishop Walsh nor any of the faithful could be sure of where their sympathy lay.

But the Communists were sure that Bishop Walsh by living in a rectory among schismatic priests would confuse Shanghai's Catholics. To bewilder the faithful more, they snapped pictures of him speaking to their priests who were their pawns, and then, published the pictures in their propaganda organs.

The bamboo curtain had confronted Shanghai priests and laity with great moral problems. To preserve the purity of their faith and to maintain loyalty to the Holy Father they needed heroic strength of will and vigilance. What were they to think when they saw Bishop Walsh, a name loved and honored in nearly every Shanghai Catholic household, consorting with the corrupt priests?

Bishop Walsh was acutely aware of the problem. He did his best to counteract it. He refused to say Mass in Christ the King Church because Holy Communion was being distributed there to Communist and pagan alike. He said his Masses in his room.

When he got the chance to speak to visiting delegations, he told them loudly and categorically of the Red deception. He defied his captors and encouraged priests who were wavering between Rome and Peking to maintain their loyalty.

Bishop Walsh was not unduly worried that he might be doing more harm than good.

Maryknoll, however, was worried. Some priests, inside and outside the society, in New York and Hong Kong insisted that Bishop Walsh be ordered to accept the Communists offer of a passage to freedom. An American Jesuit priest who had been arrested and expelled from China wrote a long letter to Maryknoll urge it to withdraw the bishop.

After four years in prison, he was allowed five days of freedom in Shanghai before being escorted to the border. In those five days, he said, “a good number” of Chinese priests and laymen on their own initiative asked me to get Bishop Walsh to leave or to persuade his superiors to recall him.”

The Jesuit said, “No one doubts the goodness of Bishop Walsh's heart, or the nobility of his motives. But the almost unanimous opinion of those with whom I spoke is that his presence is more harmful than helpful to the Church, that enemies from without and misguided or disloyal elements within are using him to confuse visiting delegations from abroad and perplexing Catholics inside China.”

Bishop Lane, Maryknoll's superior-general, was in a dilemma. Bishop Walsh was subject to the society, but as a bishop he was subject only to the Holy Father. Nevertheless, the weight of opinion for withdrawing the bishop was such that he had a letter smuggled to the bishop hinting, rather than ordering, that because of his health and his doubtful worth to the Church under his circumstances, it might be wise to leave.

A few months later, Bishop Lane received a reply.

In asking about my health [wrote Bishop Walsh], do you mean am I tired mentally? Of course, I cannot pronounce on that, but I don't feel any more stupid than I always was.

As to whether I am doing any harm or not, I cannot say but I do think the Jesuit priest knows even less. Consider his means of information – four years on the shelf plus a few days talking with a much-divided family.

I cannot estimate the good I may be doing, apart from the settled missionary rule that kept me here. In any case a priest seldom knows if he is an asset to the Church in his particular place at any time. I encourage some, alarm others, I do little more than say my prayers and walk the streets to show my Roman collar.

As for the harm – I've heard I'm an advertisement for “liberty.” My mere Yankee presence may embarrass some of the clergy and some of the people, but is that enough reason to absent myself? The same was true eight years ago.

The problem really is: are the reasons valid and grave enough to set aside the established principle that a priest ignores adversity and remains at his post? That is for you to decide, not me. I am not pleading. I am only explaining.

It costs me nothing to obey an order. So just tell me what to do.

Send me your decision by mail or wire and if you prefer a code here is a simple one: (1) Your brother John's operation successful making good recovery – remain. (2) Your brother John's silver jubilee this year ask prayers –leave.

Bishop Lane, who had a special affection for his predecessor and deeply admired his stand, now believed he should let Bishop Walsh make his own decision whether to stay or leave.

Two men who agreed spontaneously and wholeheartedly with Bishop Lane were Bishop Walsh's superiors, Cardinal Fumasoni-Biondi and Archbishop Riberi. The cardinal said Bishop Walsh was the best one to decide. The former Papal Internuncio, who had given Bishop Walsh the job in the Bureau and was later expelled, was even more adamant. “I have the utmost faith in Bishop Walsh and believe he should remain in Shanghai,” he said.

With that Bishop Lane cabled Bishop Walsh: YOUR BROTHER JOHN'S OPERATION SUCCESSFUL MAKING GOOD RECOVERY.

Bishop Lane's successor, Father (later Bishop) John Comber elected in 1956, took the same position.

He instructed Maryknoll's Rome office, “We are not going to do anything about Bishop Walsh unless the Church wished to do so. It is up to the Nuncio. We will not order his return or ask for the authority to do so.”

If anyone retained any doubt whether the elderly bishop was help or hindrance to the Church, they had little time to wait for a final, conclusive answer. The Communists, themselves provided it is 1958 by arresting the bishop, holding him in sullen silence for nearly two years, trying him in absentia and then sentencing him to twenty years in prison.

The victory for the bishop was complete. Not being men of the spirit and unable to grasp the depth of his spirituality, the Communists, as Father Albert Nevins declared, gave Bishop Walsh the only thing he wanted – the privilege of being allowed to walk a little closer in his Divine Master's footsteps.

When the Communists judges handed down their verdict in court, Bishop Walsh was confined in a small cell in Ward Road Prison, a sprawling infamous jail for political prisoners considered beyond “reform.” An enormous structure of ten concrete blockhouses, it lies on the outer northeast edge of Shanghai.

He was not allowed to say Mass. His rosary was taken from him. Years ago, the Reds had plucked the stone from his episcopal ring. Bishop Walsh had replaced it with a picture of Our Lady of Guadalupe. Now they confiscated his ring.

When the news of his sentence broke over the world in March 1960, the men of Maryknoll in the United States and Africa, in Latin America and the Far East, filed into their churches as they had done for Bishop Byrne and Bishop For. This time they prayed not for the soul of a martyr but for the grace and Divine sustenance for their “living martyr.”

They could do no more. (Ray Kerrison, Bishop Walsh of Maryknoll: Prisoner of Red China, published originally by G. P. Putnam’s Sons and republished in 1962 by Lancer Books, pp. 242-252.)

Bishop Walsh had no time to waste on the latest news and agitation of the moment. He went about the business of trying to win converts to the Holy Faith even while being watched carefully by his Communist minders, who thought that his dislike for the beloved Dem Bums of Brooklyn, the Brooklyn Dodgers, was some kind of code, which is it was not, course as his remark about wanting the Dodgers to lose the World Series was simply an unfortunate case of bias against a team owned by Walter O’Malley, a Catholic, and featured as one of its stars Gilbert Ray Hodges, later to become and original member of the New York Mets who wound up managing the team to their own improbable World Series victory on Thursday, October 16, 1969. The Chicoms could not recognize that Bishop James Edward Walsh was not a spy who invoked the name of the Brooklyn Dodgers as part of some supposed code but a Catholic bishop who tended after his sheep by seeking more and more ways to reach the pagan Chinese.

More importantly, of course, is the fact that Bishop Walsh used the Legion of Mary to proselytize on behalf of the Holy Faith. He was not content to let the pagans died in their paganism. Unlike most of the Maryknollers today who are busy evangelizing on behalf of “social justice” causes and who have never met a Communist regime they did not want to enable, Bishop Walsh won converts to the Holy Faith and sought to lead not only by his preaching and teaching but also by his good priestly example of true charity rooted in seeking the good of souls upon which his own salvation depended and that is the only foundation of a truly just social order.

Also, quite unlike Jorge Mario Bergoglio, who believes that a genuine civil liberty is an individualistic “ideology” that must be opposed in order to advance “public health” and a redistribution of wealth in support of the lockdown state’s totalitarian plans, Bishop James Edward Walsh saw himself as a champion for the liberty of Chinese people. He even wrote a pamphlet, which is no longer available and which Mr. Kerrison informed me in phone conversation on Thursday, December 10, 2017, that did not have in his own files, that compare the Chinese Patriotic Catholic Association with the Catholic Church to dispel the utter confusion created by the Chicoms’ formation of the rump church despite a firm letter, Ad Sinarum Gentes, October 7, 1954, by Pope Pius XII to defend the Catholic Faith in Red China before the CPCA was formed:

23. We want to repeat here the words that We have written on the same argument in the letter already cited: “The Church does not single out a particular people, an individual nation, but loves all men, whatever be their nation or race, with that supernatural charity of Christ, which should necessarily unite all as brothers, one to the other.

24. “Hence it cannot be affirmed that she serves the interests of any particular power. Nor likewise can she be expected to countenance that particular churches be set up in each nation, thus destroying that unity established by the Divine Founder, and unhappily separating them from this Apostolic See where Peter, the Vicar of Jesus Christ, continues to live in his successors until the end of time.

25. “Whatever Christian community were to do this, would lose its vitality as the branch cut from the vine (Cf. John 15. 6) and could not bring forth salutary fruit” (AAS, 44: p. 135).

26. We earnestly exhort “in the heart of Christ” (Phil. 1. 8) those faithful of whom We have mournfully written above to come back to the path of repentance and salvation. Let them remember that, when it is necessary, one must render to Caesar what is Caesar’s, and with greater reason, one must render to God what is God’s (Cf. Luke 20. 25). When men demand things contrary to the Divine Will, then it is necessary to put into practice the maxim of St. Peter: “We must obey God rather than men” (Acts 5. 29). Let them also remember that it is impossible to serve two masters, if these order things opposed to one another (Cf. Matt. 6. 24). Also at times it is impossible to please both Jesus Christ and men (Cf. Gal. 1. 10). But if it sometimes happens that he who wishes to remain faithful to the Divine Redeemer even unto death must suffer great harm, let him bear it with a strong and serene soul.

27. On the other hand, We wish to congratulate repeatedly those who, suffering severe difficulties, have been outstanding in their loyalty to God and to the Catholic Church, and so have been “counted worthy to suffer disgrace for the name of Jesus” (Acts 5. 41). With a paternal heart We encourage them to continue brave and intrepid along the road they have taken, keeping in mind the words of Jesus Christ: “And do not be afraid of those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul. But rather be afraid of him who is able to destroy both soul and body in hell . . . But as for you, the very hairs of your head are all numbered. Therefore do not be afraid . . . Therefore everyone who acknowledges me before men, I will also acknowledge him before my Father in heaven. But whoever disowns me before men, I in turn will disown him before my Father in heaven” (Matt. 10. 28, 30-33). (Pope Pius XII, Ad Sinarum Gentes, October 7, 1954.)

As can be seen in the passages quoted above from Mr. Kerrison’s Bishop Walsh of Maryknoll: Prisoner of Red China, Bishop James Edward Walsh accepted all that happened to him in a spirit of profound serenity and complete resignation to the will of God. Bishop Walsh sought to do God’s Holy Will in all things, and he chose to remain in Red China to the point of a show trial conducted that was reported upon as follows contemporaneously in the Catholic Advocate:

Bishop Walsh. 68, a native of Cumberland, Md., was charged with leading a campaign to undermine the regime. His sentence was announced Mar. 18, the day after Bishop Kung’s. In Washington, Secretary of State Christian Herter said the U.S. government will make the strongest possible protest to Red China through Jacob D. Beam, Ambassador to Poland. Later in the week State Department spokesman Lincoln White told newsmen that Ambassador Beam had made the protest, but that Red China’s ambassador had only "mouthed the allegations already made” in defense of the arrest.

BISHOP WALSH’S sentence was meted out by the Shanghai Intermediate People’s Court which branded him as “a veteran United States imperialist spy who personally directed (a) traitorous counter - revolutionary clique." A member of the first Mary, knoll band ’ to leave the U.S. for China, Bishop Walsh has been in the country more than 30 years. He was arrested for the second and last time In October,, 1958, after insisting on remaining in the country to give moral support to native Catholics. He was kept under house arrest until last summer, when it was reported that he was taken to a Shanghai hospital under close guard because of a serious illness. Bishop Rung, 58, was arrested in September, 1955, together with 17 priests and a large number of laymen. PEIKING RADIO, reporting of the trials, said as early as 1940 Bishop Walsh made two trips to Japan to participate in talks at which he proposed that China be split up between Japan and America. It charged him with conducting "intrigues” with Cardinal Spellman, who it said “is notorious for his subversive activities,” in 1948. The station described the Catholic Central Bureau founded by Bishop Walsh as a “reactionary organisation” used “as a cover for conducting espionage activities.” Bishop Walsh Was also accused of circulating rumors, advocating aggressive war by the U. S., collecting restricted state information, working to undermine land reform movement, training special agents, storing arms and ammunition, and “maintaining clandestine radio communication with U.S. imperialists.” Bishop Walsh had been arrested for the first time in 1951 and kept under house arrest for years without any charges having been brought against him. Bishop Kung had been ordained in 1930 and served as Bishop of Soochow from 1950 until his transfer to the Shanghai See in 1950. His mother died at 79, three years after he had been Jailed. She had been stripped of all her possessions and was reduced to “living miserably” in Shanghai. The 13 priests sentenced with Bishop Kung were given prison terms ranging from five to 20 years.

ACCORDING TO New China News Agency, the public trials were held Mar. 16 and 17, with Bishop Kung accused of collaborating with “the U. S. spy James Edward Walsh” in setting up a “traitorous counterrevolutionary clique.” Bishop Kung and his co-defendants were convicted of numerous military and political acts of treason, all of which were listed in detail in the pattern of the sham trials of missionaries in the early 19505. The news agency said that the prison terms meted out to all, including Bishop Walsh, would date from the day of sentencing, but that the time already spent in "detention” would be deducted. Chinese sources claim that Bishop Walsh "admitted the mass of conclusive evidence of his crimes.” This evidence, they asserted, included “secret codes and a letter in secret writing used in carrying out counter-revolutionary activities.” Meanwhile, a recently arrived refugee from Shanghai disclosed that Bishop Walsh has had to have a doctor visit him almost daily in his place of confinement. The refugee said the Bishop is known to be in poor health, to be very thin and to have a sallow complexion.

In his statement, Secretary Herter said, “I find It difficult to emphasize sufficiently the revulsion that I, personally, and the United States government feel today. I am certain that the rest of the world will join me in condemning this action taken against an innocent citizen of the United States and distinguished member of the Catholic clergy. “His only mission was religion and his personal devotion to the spiritual welfare of his fellow Catholics was so deep as to compel him to remain on the Chinese mainland despite the persecution of his Church by a godless regime.” (As found at Bishop Walsh Released.)

Yes, the great Bishop Ignatius Kung, the Bishop of Shanghai, was accused by the Red Chinese murderers to be have worked for Bishop James Edward Walsh and Francis Cardinal Spellman. Each suffered long prison terms. Bishop Walsh was imprisoned for twelve years and Bishop Kung was imprisoned for over thirty years.

What does this matter to Jorge Mario Bergoglio?

Why, nothing at all, of course. He wants his “bishops” and priests/presbyters to be collaborators with Communist regimes and the lockdown states that have now tasted the blood of a people eager for their own “safety” during the midst of a plandemic whose origins can be traced to the leak of the “gain of function” Wuhan/China/Chinese/Covid-19/Coronavirus at the BSL-4 in Wuhan, Red China, a year ago. Bergoglio is an apologist for everything that Bishop Walsh and Bishop Kung opposed by sacrificing their liberty and against which Bishop Ford gave up his life after being worn out by Communist torturers.

Ray Kerrison’s account of Bishop Walsh’s trial provides us with inspiration to accept all that happens to us as coming, whether good or bad in the human order of things, directly from the hand of God, Who wants us to follow the path of His Divine Son, Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, on the royal road of victory that is the Via Dolorosa, the Way of Sorrows:

On March 18, 1960, five hundred Chinese men and women, garbed in drab blue tunics so similar it was difficult to tell them apart, shuffled into the intermediate People's Court in Shanghai for a trial that was to shock the world.

The courtroom was a study in austerity. Plain hard benches filled the body of the big, bleak room. At its head two long tables, reserved for three judges and their assistants, were mounted on a dais. From the wall behind the tables hung a huge picture of the Chairman of the Chinese Communists Part, Mao Tse-tung, whose pudgy features dominated the room.

But this day, as the harsh Chinese winter breathed its last chilly sighs, the people in the courtroom gave the portrait of Mao no more than a cursory glance. Instead, they gazed at the centerpiece of the drama and farce that was about to unfold before their curious eyes.

This centerpiece was a heavy wood empty chair.

Place squarely in front of the judges' table, it represented the defendant, a “dangerous, veteran United States imperialist spy” who would not appear at the trial.

For the next six hours, a barrage of angry charges swirled about the chair's grotesque shape. Finally, in late afternoon one of the judges rose and solemnly announced. “It is the decision of the Shanghai Intermediate People's Court that the prisoner, James Edward Walsh, has committed grave crimes and instigated serious subversive activities against the People's Republic of China.

“The prisoner has personally directed the counterrevolutionary activities of the traitorous clique headed by one Kung Pinmei and by espionage attempts, tried unsuccessfully to undermine the revolutionary efforts of the Chinese people.”

Then, facing the empty chair sparely, he went on, “James Edward Walsh, despite these crimes to which you have confessed in the face of conclusive evidence, the Chinese People's Republic will show you mercy and spare your life.

“You are sentenced to twenty years' imprisonment. The court benevolently has decided to allow full credit for the period of your preliminary detention. Your sentence, therefore, will be completed on October 15, 1978.

“The court is no longer is session. All participants are dismissed.”

The judges Gathered up their papers, rose to their feet and left the courtroom. The people in the body of the court filed out into the street and silently walked off into the gathering dusk of Shanghai.

If they wondered who this criminal, James Edward Walsh, really was, they gave no evidence of it. They did not know him. They had not heard one word fall from his lips in his defense. They had not even seen him. For ten years, however, they had read about him in their newspapers and heard about him on the radio. They had been informed of his crimes against the state, of his plotting and treachery. Now they knew that justice, --Communist style justice – had been meted out to him.

What they possible could never realize was that a holy man's character and life's work had be maligned. On the Red canvas, James Edward Walsh had been paited as some insidious killer bent of the destruction of the Chinese people.

In truth, he was a gentle, frail servant of Christ.

Forty of his sixty-eight years he had dedicated to the spiritual and temporal welfare of the Chinese, first as a young missioner pioneering the initial band of American Maryknoll priests in the Orient, then as bishop of a hard China mission area, later as superior-general of the Catholic Foreign Mission Society of America and finally in the position of executive secretary of the Catholic Central Bureau in Shanghai.

Bishop Walsh had lived and worked among the Chinese as though he were one of them. He shared their hunger and poverty, their joys and sorrows without complaint. At their side through broiling heat and damp, miserable cold, he suffered exploiting and war, flood, and famine.

He trudged hundreds of miles through muddy rice fields, climbed mountains, rode bicycles, and traveled by mule along dusty paths, swam rivers and risked his life a dozen times in answer to the call made by Christ nearly two thousand years ago to “go forth and teach all nations.”

In forty years, the only weapon he ever carried was the Cross. His only mission in life: to plant it firmly in the hearts and minds of a people largely reluctant to accept it.

The Chinese coined their own name for him. The hundreds who found their way into the Catholic Church: the thousands who were baptized, confirmed, married, and buried by him; the countless thousands who listened to his preaching in flawless Cantonese had knelt at the altar rail to receive Holy Communion from his hands – all these bestowed on him the title of Hwa Li Sze, the Pillar of Truth in China.

The tangible monuments to Bishop Walsh's treachery to the state were everywhere. There were schools and clinics, leprosariums and seminaries, orphanages and chapels, hospitals and mission stations, all erected on a foundation of ceaseless sweat and work, worry and trial.

Now, in one day in a Shanghai court, he had received his reward. Twenty years' imprisonment.

But even this was a lie. The sentence, in reality was condemnation to a slow agonizing death, for Bishop Walsh, at his age and in his feeble health, could not hope to survive twenty rigorous years in a Communists prison.

The only consolation the slender, blue-eyed, American prelate may have been able to draw in the desolation of his cell was the knowledge that the long years that stretched ahead of him like a road without end or bend could hold little more torment that those he had just survived on the outside.

For eleven years immediately preceding his trial, Bishop Walsh lived through what the American Catholic Hierarchy in December, 1958, termed, the “worst persecution' ever hurled at Christianity in all its two thousand years. Throughout China, the hammer and sickle of communism, wielded in a systematic destruction of the Church, raised up more martyrs than all the stones and dogs of Nero or the lions and cauldrons of Trajan. The cockpit of this holocaust was Shanghai.

For years the Communists had subjected Bishop Walsh to waves of terror and a continual was of nerves. They vilified him and abused him. Like devils, in the night, they spirited away to prison all the priests with whom he worked until he alone was left with nothing more than his anguish and a broken body.

These fateful years began in 1948 when the Apostolic Internuncio to China, Archbishop Antonio Riberi, appointed the American bishop to the Catholic Central Bureau, an organization founded by the archbishop at the request of Pope Pius XII and modeled after the National Catholic Welfare conference in the United States. Bishop Walsh's job was to supervise the coordination of all the missionary, cultural, welfare and educational activities of the Catholic Church in china.

But he had been at this desk less than a year before the whole mainland of china fell under the heel of the Red conspirators.

As the most westernized and therefore, in the opinion of the Communists, the “most decadent” of all Chinese cities, Shanghai became the target of a special “counterrevolutionary” campaign whose ferocity rose on a tide of arrest, expulsion, and execution of the clergy and laity. Bishop Walsh and his staff of Chinese, French, Belgian, and Irish priests quickly felt its whiplash.

The principal weapon the Communists used in their attempt to destroy the Church was the formation of a movement known as the Three Autonomies which aimed at setting up an “independent” church, free of any alignment with the Holy Father and, of course, open to domination by the Communist government. The autonomies – self rule, self support, and self propagation – were an attempt to subjugate the Church under the smoke screen of patriotism.

Catholics were not only invited to join the movement headed by a group of forty self-styled Christian leaders, but for months were informed daily by the Communist press that it was their patriotic duty to participate. With this bold challenge cast at the fundamental beliefs of the Chinese Catholics, Bishop Walsh and his staff at the bureau immediately began the wide distribution of a pamphlet which set down in simple language the difference between the true Church and the Schismatic forgery.

From that moment on, the entire Catholic hierarchy and clergy were labeled “imperialists” and the showdown between the forces of Christianity and communism began.

Throughout the length and breadth of China, churches, priests, nuns, and laymen were dragged into courts for mob trials and then expelled, imprisoned or executed. So-called confessions of guilt fro crimes against the state were wrung from the innocent by torture.

In Shanghai, those spared death and expulsion were herded into jails by the hundreds. They were arrested at any hour of the day or night, in the streets, at work and in their homes and often without a formal charge. They were flung into dungeons and cells so overcrowded they count not stretch themselves full length and were forced to take turns in going to sleep.

In these pits, like freezers in winter and ovens in summer, the prisoners were made to sit motionless of the ground all day. It was an offense even to shut their eyes. For days and weeks and months the monotony was broken only by harsh interrogations. Old men and women, young boys and girls, were often made to stand at attention for days. Chains and manacles were strapped their hands and feet and then they were pinioned to the walls lie wild animals.

Bishop Walsh's Bureau was denounced in Communist newspapers at “a tool of the imperialist Riberi,” they stepped up their editorial attacks until June 8, 1951, when they ordered the elderly bishop to close the Bureau. They charged it with “sabotaging” the government's independent church, accused the bishop of turning his organization into a “prominent, anti-Communist stronghold against the people” and finally warned him and his priests to hold themselves ready for a “complete examination.”

the Reds sealed up the Bureau, leaving only the chapel of the ground floor, which could accommodate four hundred worshipers, and a few rooms for Bishop Walsh and his priests to live in.

The nightmare now began in earnest.

They tapped Bishop Walsh's telephone, prowled behind doors, hung close to the confessional and each Sunday appeared in church with notebook and pencil to record every word he preached. They seemed to be waiting for the careless word they could use to incriminate him.

They embarked on a crusade of annoyance. Two policemen on so thin and small, the other so big and fat that they were dubbed Laurel and Hardy, swooped on the Bureau at all hours of the day and night for wearying sessions of insane questioning.

Unable to intimidate the bishop, the Reds, next tried to cripple him financially. Bishop Walsh had maintained nine assistants in his Bureau, but with its closing he had no more work for them. The Communists, however, refused to let the bishop dismiss them. They demanded that he maintain them in his employ, but the ruse fell through when the Chinese, faithful to the end, refused to accept any salary.

The Comm now attempted to force the men to spy on the members of the Bureau but Bishop Walsh and his priests protected both the servants and themselves by conversing entirely in Latin. Whenever, they forgot themselves and spoke in Chinese, the servants would plead, “Please to keep on talking Latin.” The embattled priest even played gin rummy in Latin. Their library had been closed and cards were their only means of realization, after supper. Bishop Walsh would spin a card down the table and announce, “Ego habeo reginam rhomborum.” (I have the queen of clubs.”) The servants when questioned now by the Reds, could truthfully say they understood not a word spoken by the priests.

The lighter moments, however, were but interludes in a climate of rapidly increasing tension. Bishop Walsh would go to bed weary and strained, only to be hauled out at midnight by a platoon of policemen who would rush in, screaming insults and threatening imprisonment. Not one priest in the Bureau was afraid of the thought of going to jail despite the atrocities that surely awaited them. What was so nervewracking was the suspense waiting for the summons, for each knew that it would come one day … or night.

The roundup at gun point of other priests and nuns and laity began to quicken. Families were torn apart with father and mother being marshaled into separate barracks and children handed over to Communist functionaries for indoctrination.

A Chinese priest, Father John Tung, who was formerly on the staff of the Central Bureau, was called upon to denounce Archbishop Riberi and the Church in Chungking in his own diocese. He was ordered to address a huge fathering of Catholics, to call for the expulsion of the archbishop and to rally Catholics to the breakaway church. Instead, Father Tung, delivered an unforgettably beautiful defense of Catholic doctrine.

He began this way: “Gentlemen, I have only one soul and I cannot divide it; I have a body which can be divided. It is best, it seems to offer my soul to God and to the Holy Church and my body to my country. If she is pleased with it, I do not refuse it to her. Good materialists, who deny the existence of the soul, cannot but be satisfied with the offering of my body only. I believe that if the State and the Church could collaborate, the movement for a Triple Autonomy, conformable to Catholic principles, would result both for the State and the Church …

“I beseech the authorities to accept my sacrifice and not to show me, any indulgence. And above all, if it happens that I weaken, I beseech them not to tolerate this weakness. Are not the weak the scourge of society? Therefore, to prevent myself against all weakness, I take this opportunity, while I am perfectly lucid, to solemnly declare that I disavow them and declare them right now null and void ...”

Father Tung was arrested on July 3, 1951, and was never heard from again.

Within a month, the Communists chose another “sacrificial lamb” for their state-sponsored church. He was Father Beda Chang, a Jesuit priest who was formerly rector of Shanghai's famous Saint Ignatius College. The Reds chose Father Chang because he exerted wide influence among Catholic students and was extremely popular. The reds wanted a popular priest to be among their first victims in the hope that his suffering and death would terrorize others into joining their church. Of one thing they were sure: Father Chang would not submit to them. They threw his into prison and he died within three months. His brother, a doctor, went immediately to the prison and found the body so wizened he could scarcely recognize it.

Father Chang's death backfired seriously on the Communists. It struck no fear into the hearts of Catholics, but rather unleashed such a surge of religious enthusiasm that police were rushed from neighboring cities to head off a rebellion, and they ordered the burial to be held at night, attended only by the priest's family. They dared not risk a daylight funeral.

Nuns and brothers and foreign missionaries were being wiped out. Those who did not die of ill-treatment in prisons were executed.

Bishop Walsh now was repeatedly assailed in the Red press on “imperialist spy” charges, the same charge under which he was eventually to be sentences. He believed, indeed he fervently hoped, that his arrest was imminent. He wanted desperately to share the sufferings of his friends. With the calm, undramatic sense of the practical he packed his few belingings into a bag and began waiting for the arrival of the police.

At 11 p.m. On September 7, 1951, the Communists launched their first direct attack against the Catholic Central Bureau. A squad of policemen with guns drawn burst into the house. With a sigh of gratitude, Bishop Walsh donned his hat and went to meet them. The officer in charge of the troops looked at him quizzically and barked, “Where are you going, Hwa Li Sze?”

“You've come to arrest me, surely?” replied the bishop.

“No,” answered the officer gleefully. “We will leave you here to cry over your good friends, the criminal agents of imperialism.”

In his frustration, Bishop Walsh flung his hat to the ground and hum[ed on it. He then retired to his room and with his eyes misty with tears began saying the Rosary.

Four priests who worked for the Bureau were arrested that night.

The four whose work in China had come to such an abrupt halt were Father Francis Legrand, a Frenchman and head of the Bureau's cultural department, Father Aiden McGrath eventually were expelled.

Father Teng, who underwent long days and nights of physical and mental torture, may still be in prison. Or he may be dead. Father Sen, who was a close friend of bishop Walsh, was a jolly priest who had studied in Rome and Dublin and spoke English with a rich Irish brogue. He pronounced his own name “Sin” and one of his favorite jokes was to introduce himself as “Father Mortal Sin.” Father Sen was thrust into a cell were the floor was constantly flooded with running water. He died within eighteen months.

Three weeks after Bishop Walsh had seen his friends die off, the Communists struck again. This time they scooped up Monsignor Gustave Prevost, head of the seminary department. In succeeding weeks they carried of Father Joseph Matti, head of the liaision department, and Father Joseph Vos, who conducted correspondence courses for converts.

By the end of the year, Bishop Walsh and Father Charles Meeus, the Belgian procurator, were the only foreign priests left at the bureau. Now the noose began to be drawn tighter around the American.

An armed guard was posted at the Bureau and each time Bishop Walsh ventured into the street, police agents dogged his every footstep. But this nerve-jangling round the clock snooping was as nothing compared with the pain he suffered in his “freedom.” china was undergoing its Gethsemane and he longed to be a part of it. To walk a little closer in his Master's footsteps he sought imprisonment, even martyrdom. Instead, he was forced to stand by, powerless, while his holy friends were either thrown out of the country or fed into the furnace of death.

Even worse, Bishop Walsh because a pawn in the Communists propaganda mill. In their subtle tyranny, they pointed him out to visitors and newspaper correspondents as proof of the validity of their claim that the People's Republic permitted religious freedom.

The unremitting strain began taking its toll on Bishop Walsh. A lean slender man even in the best of health, he took on the appearance of a refugee from a concentration camp. He lost more than forty pounds and his emaciated body plunged to ninety-two pounds. He was stricken with such a severe attack on nervous arthritis that he sank to within an eyeglass of death. A pagan doctor, who treated him at the time, exclaimed, “He has a foot in the grave, and his head is already in heaven.”

The bishop's fine, chiseled features were gaunt with fatigue and strain. His snowy-white hair began tinning rapidly and his sky-blue eyes, witness to the rape of the people had had grown to love, receded deep into their sockets. This was the face that once a Chinese Mohammedan painter of great talent to declare, “When I want a model of Saint Peter, the first martyr-leader of the Christian people, I will paint Bishop Hwa Li Sze.”

In 1953 and 1954, while Bishop Walsh was isolated under virtual house arrest, the Communists persecution galvanized into a new frenzy. Month after month the police, following a deliberate pattern of annihilation of the Church, plucked priests from their ministry and bore them off to prison. It was possible to keep a running score of the victims.

March 25, 1953 – two priests

June 15 – four

June 16 – three

July 6 – four

July 10 – one

July 17 – two

July 25 – four

July 26 – five

The dragnet continued in this fashion until September 8, 1954, when the Communists in this one day gathered up twenty-three priests, including Bishop Ignatius Kung of Shanghai, who later was to be tried and sentenced with Bishop Walsh, and almost three hundred laymen. (Ray Kerrison, Bishop Walsh of Maryknoll: Prisoner of Red China, published originally by G. P. Putnam’s Sons and republished in 1962 by Lancer Books, pp. 242-252.)

Giovanni Battista Enrico Antonio Maria Montini/Paul the Sick was even so bold as try his own kind of surrender the Chicoms as early as January 6, 1967, the Feast of the Epiphany of Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, even as Bishop Walsh was still imprisoned. Montini/Paul VI used the fortieth anniversary of the consecration of the first bishops to serve China to remind the Chinese people of the Catholic Church’s love for them. While he took note generally of the sufferings of the faithful Catholics in Red China, he also made it clear that he wanted to extend his Ostpolitik that made the Catholic hierarchy of Eastern Europe answerable to their Communist minders all the way to Red China itself. What follows is a computer translation of the relevant passages Montini/Paul VI’s sermon dealing with China:

Yet it is that Montini/Paul VI’s effort to capitulate to the first generation of Chicom mass murderers was referenced in a July 10, 1970, The New York Times news report that covered “Pope Paul’s” reaction to Bishop Walsh’s release from prison after he had served twelve years of his twenty-year sentence:

ROME, July 12 — Pope Paul VI expressed joy today that Communist China had freed the Most Rev. James Edward Walsh, an American missionary bishop, from prison and said he would like to see in this decision “a sign of better days.”

Addressing a crowd of pilgrims and tourists in St. Peter's Square, the Pontiff, who was speaking from a window in the Vatican's Apostolic Pal ace, stressed the Roman Catholic Church's goodwill toward Communist China.

The Pope's short speech was interpreted by diplomats and other observers here as an overture for contacts between the Vatican and Peking. Earlier papal feelers were rebuffed by Communist China. The Vatican has diplomatic relations with the Chinese Nationalist Government in Taiwan.

In his speech, Pope Paul said that the “good news” of the release of Bishop Walsh, who served 12 years of a 20‐year sentence on espionage charges, had come unexpectedly, the first of its kind to arrive from mainland China.

Better days in that part of the world had long been hoped for, the Pontiff went on, “for the sake of freedom and religion, as well as for the sake of the honor and prosperity of that immense nation [China] which the church has never ceased to love.”

1967 Offer Derided

This recalled an address bull Pope Paul during a Mass in January, 1967, when he declared that the church had always been a friend, never an enemy, of China. The 1967 mass commemorated the 40th anniversary of the consecration) of the first Chinese bishops and the 20th anniversary of the creation of a Roman Catholic hierarchy in China.

The Pope's 1967 speech contained an offer to “discuss peace” with Chinese Communist leaders. It was met by Peking with derision and denunciations of the Vatican as a center of “imperialist” propaganda.

In today's address, Pope Paul said that Bishop Walsh's re lease was good news also because it reawakened memories of “other persons and other countries where freedom is curbed.”

The Vatican today made public the text of a personal message from Pope Paul to the 79‐year‐old Bishop Walsh, who is now in Hong Kong. The papal telegram, which did not criticize the Chinese Communist authorities, conveyed to the American bishop a special apostolic blessing.

Bishop Speaks to Family

HONG KONG, July 12 (Reuters) — Bishop Walsh spoke today to members of his family in Cumberland, Md., for the first time since he was released Friday after spending 12 years in a Shanghai prison.

A spokesman for Maryknoll Hospital, where the bishop has been resting since crossing the border into Hong Kong, said he spoke by telephone to his four sisters and brother for 34 minutes.

He said Bishop Walsh particularly thanked his brother, William, a judge, for visiting him in prison in 1960. (Antipope Montini Rejoices Over Release of Bishop Walsh by Red China.)

Marxist dupe that he was, Montini/Paul VI thought that the release of Bishop James Edward Walsh after he had served twelve years of his twenty-year prison term in Red China meant a thaw was occurring in relations between the conciliar Vatican and the murderous regime of Mao Tse-Tung and Chou En-Lai. No, despite “Pope Paul VI’s” expressions of support for the underground Catholics in Red China, he would have sold them out as quickly as he sold out Jozsef Cardinal Mindszenty and every other Catholic in the Soviet Bloc and as quickly as he sold out priests behind the Iron Curtain when he served under Pope Pius XII after he had been blackmailed by Soviet agents, thus consigning those priests to their executions.

Then again, it should be remembered that the humanism advanced by Giovanni Battista Enrico Antonio Montini/Paul VI tis what Senor Jorge is bringing to its logical conclusions to advance, whether wittingly or unwittingly, the manifestation of Antichrist. Consider what “Saint Paul VI” wrote in Populorum Progressio, March 25, 1967:

42. What must be aimed at is complete humanism.[44] And what is that if not the fully-rounded development of the whole man and of all men? A humanism closed in on itself, and not open to the values of the spirit and to God Who is their source, could achieve apparent success. True, man can organize the world apart from God, but “without God man can organize it in the end only to man’s detriment. An isolated humanism is an inhuman humanism”.[45] There is no true humanism but that which is open to the Absolute and is conscious of a vocation which gives human life its true meaning. Far from being the ultimate measure of all things, man can only realize himself by reaching beyond himself. As Pascal has said so well: “Man infinitely surpasses man“.[46]

43. There can be no progress towards the complete development of man without the simultaneous development of all humanity in the spirit of solidarity. As We said at Bombay: ” Man must meet man, nation meet nation, as brothers and sisters, as children of God. In this mutual understanding and friendship, in this sacred communion, we must also begin to work together to build the common future of the human race“.[47] We also suggested a search for concrete and practical ways of organization and cooperation, so that all available resources be pooled and thus a true communion among all nations be achieved. (Giovanni Montini/Paul VI, Populorum Progressio, March 26, 1967.)

This is completely Judeo-Masonic as it celebrates “man” and his “humanism,” albeit with some generic reference to God without an insistence that Catholicism is the one and only foundation of personal and social order. Giovanni Eugenio Antonio Maria Montini/Paul VI’s false “pontificate” was dedicated to the celebration of “man” and his “progress.” Jorge Mario Bergoglio continues to celebrate the “joy” of the “progress” that has been made in the world and in his false church since the “Second” Vatican Council. God Himself has shown us in very graphic terms what He thinks of the false religion and its abominable liturgical rites.

Moreover, Father Cahill explained in the Irish Ecclesiastical Review that Jews were in the vanguard of de-Christianizing Western nations while supporting the goals of Bolshevism worldwide:

Although during the eighteenth century the number of Jews in the Masonic lodges were few, the prejudice against them was lessened or eliminated as a result of the movement towards Jewish emancipation, which was itself largely due to Liberal and Masonic influence; and since the middle of the nineteenth century the Cabalistic Jewish element has become predominant at least in Continental Freemasonry. Thus, while Jews are still excluded from the so-called ‘Christian’ lodges of Germany, the influence of the latter is now overshadowed by those lodges which admit Jews, and in which the Jewish element more or less prevails. Even in 1900 there were at least 800 such lodges in the German Empire exclusive of the B’ne Berith lodges, which are entirely Jewish. So marked, indeed, is the dominance of the Jewish element in German Freemasonry that the Masonic Journal Latomia (February, 1928) quotes a saying of Ludendorf: ‘The Freemasons are the henchmen of the Jews.’

It was Jews that introduced Freemasonry into the United States of America; and Jews have always been a powerful influence in the American Masonic organizations. Again, the Masonic rite of Mizraim which includes no less than ninety degrees and is, perhaps, the most esoteric and highly elaborated of all the Masonic rites, has been founded by Jews. So also has been the order of B’ne Berith (‘Sons of the Alliance ‘), and several other organizations of a similar type. The Masonic rite of Mizraim belongs mainly to Europe, and some of its lodges are exclusively Jewish. The order of B’ne Berith, which is altogether Jewish, is (or rather was up to some twenty years ago) mainly American, and if not formally and professedly Masonic, bears a striking resemblance to Freemasonry, in its organization and avowed objects, and is in intimate alliance with Masonry.

The indications of a close connexion or working alliance between Freemasonry and important sections of the Jews are innumerable.

Masonry [writes the Jewish Chronicle (October 29, 1889) ] tolerates everything except a narrow clericalism [viz. Catholicisim] and it possesses a special attraction for the Jews. . . . Clericalism has always persecuted Masonry everywhere it can . . . and the spirit of persecution has attracted the Jews towards Masonry by an invisible but potent bond of sympathy. There exists between them a natural alliance against a common enemy, . . . Together they fight, oftentimes with success, against religious fanaticism and racial antipathies. In London there are no less than five Jewish lodges. There are some also at Birmingham, Liverpool and Manchester.

It is nearly half a century ago since a well-known British review called attention to the dominant influence of the Jews, not only in politics, the press, and international finance, but also in the revolutionary outbreaks of the century.

The influence of the Jews at the present time is more noticeable than ever. That they are at the head of European capitalism, we are all aware. … In politics many of the Jews are in the front rank. . . . That their excessive wealth, used as it has been, acts as a solvent influence in modern society cannot be questioned. . . . But while on the one hand the Jews are thus beyond dispute the leaders of the autocracy of Europe . . . another section of the same race form the leaders of that revolutionary propaganda which is making way against that very capitalist class, representing their own fellow Jews. Jews, more than any other men . . . are acting as the leaders in the revolutionary movement which I have endeavoured to trace. (Father E. Cahill, S.J., “Freemasonry: VI: The Jewish Element in Freemasonry, Irish Ecclesiastical Record, 1929.)

Many Western leaders have such a fondness for the goals of Marxism-Leninism and for the Communist dictatorships of the past and those that exist today, especially that of the Red Chinese, precisely because Judeo-Masonry has removed all trace of Our Blessed Lord and Savior Jesus Christ and His true Church from public life that it is now time for the Bamboo Curtain to descend upon us all, and no human force on the face of this earth is going to prevent the persecution that is to come our way and stay here until Our Lord desires in His ineffable Mercy to bring it to an end.

In this regard, therefore, a comment left by a reader on the website of WCBC, a Cumberland, Maryland, on the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of Bishop James Edward Walsh’s release from his prison cell in Red China pretty much summarizes our plight for which Jorge Mario Bergoglio is a front man:

July 10th, 2020 by WCBC Radio

Fifty years ago, on July 10, 1970, Cumberland native Bishop James E. Walsh was released from captivity by the Communist Chinese.

Sentenced to twenty years, Bishop Walsh was surprisingly freed after serving twelve years in isolation, and walked across a footbridge to Hong Kong.

A Maryknoll missionary, Bishop Walsh had initially arrived in China in 1918, and spent most of his life in ministry to the Chinese people. He was eventually jailed for continuing to preach, and during his captivity, a Catholic high school, in Cumberland, was named in his honor.

Following his release, Bishop Walsh had private audiences with Pope Paul VI and President Richard Nixon. He was welcomed home to Cumberland in a huge event that featured a ceremony at City Hall and Mass at the school that bears his name.

Bishop Walsh died of a heart ailment on July 29, 1981 at the age of 90.

One Response to “50 Years Ago: Bishop Walsh Freed From Communist China”

July 10, 2020 at 12:27 pm, Bob said:

Now, 50 years later, we are all held captive or killed by them. (https://www.wcbcradio.com/?archiv=50-years-ago-bishop-walsh-freed-from-communist-china.)

“Now, 50 years later, we are all held captive or killed by them.”

That comment pretty much says it all as many of the world's so-called "democracies" are governed by Marxists of one stripe or another, of which has the full support of the man most people in the world believe is a true and legitimate Successor of Saint Peter but is actually an antipope and a precursor of Antichrist himself.

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