By AsiaNews
TAIWAN – The Church in China is mourning the death in Taiwan of Jesuit Fr Matthew Chu Li-teh, 91, a great figure of faithfulness to the Gospel in the hardest years of persecution.
Originally from Shanghai, he was arrested when he was still a seminarian in 1955 in the great raid during which the communists jailed over a thousand Catholics (including Bishop Ignatius Gong Pin-mei himself) in the city that represents the heart of Chinese Catholicism. From that day on, he spent a total of 27 years in prison and forced labour. On Jan 9 1994, at the age of 61, he was ordained a priest with the Jesuit order in Taipei (Taiwan).
What makes the story of this Chinese priest singular is that his family was well known in Shanghai’s Catholic community. On Sep 8 1955, he and five of his brothers were arrested, including the one who was already a priest, Francis Xavier Chu Shu-de, also a Jesuit who later died in prison in 1983.
His mother Martina, a widow, found herself shuttling between six different prisons where her sons were locked up. In Shanghai people called her “the sorrowful one”; for almost three years, she went to visit them walking kilometres to save the little money that allowed her to bring some small things (clothes and food) to her boys in prison.
“She was regularly insulted for being the mother of six counterrevolutionaries, yet she never gave up,” her children said. “At every visit, she encouraged each to go forward, to accept suffering willingly, to maintain trust in God.” She did this until each was sent to a labour camp in distant provinces: Heilongjiang, Guangxi, Zhejiang, Gansu and Anhui. She never saw them again for the next 20 years.
Although he was released in 1984, Fr Matthew could never become a priest in China because of his refusal to join the Patriotic Association. In 1988 he was allowed to travel to the United States with Bishop Gong Pin-mei in what was to all intents and purposes an exile.
A year later, the bishop, to whom had been close in that first period of great weakness after his long incarceration, pushed him to leave for Taiwan to resume his novitiate in the Society of Jesus. His mother Martina was able to attend his historic ordination in 1994.
That year he also spoke to our editor-in-chief, Fr Gianni Criveller, and the interview was published by PIME magazine Mondo e Missione (World and Mission). In it, he recounted the hardship of life in detention.
“I had moments of great fatigue: phases of deep trust in the Lord alternated with others of prostration. My prayers often turned into a laments: ‘Why, Lord, have you given me such a heavy cross?’”
“I asked myself countless times if I was really, in those conditions, still called to offer my life to Him. In all this, remembering the words and example of my mother, I simply and obstinately asked the Lord every day for the grace to be faithful to the gift of his call.”
“There is joy and peace in my heart,” Fr Chu said in the interview with Mondo e Missione in 1994. “Together with many of my brothers and sisters in the faith, I too know that I have done nothing against God or against my country, which I love intensely. We were sent to concentration camps only because we wanted to keep intact the faith received and to do the will of God who wants us to be real people.”
Even in his final years, until his last days, Fr Matthew continued to serve the faithful with a devout heart. Often, 20 minutes before daily and Sunday Masses, it was possible to find him in the small room outside the Church of the Sacred Heart of Jesus in Guting District, where he welcomed the faithful for the sacrament of reconciliation. – Asia News
