Beijing – Father Paul Wang, a Lazarist, served between Beijing and Hebei Province during difficult times in the 1970s and 1990s. He traveled on foot from village to village, wearing hand-me-down clothes and using a piece of wood as a walking stick. Ma Mingde, a Franciscan friar, lived a similar life, offering support to Catholics in the northern province of Shaanxi through his faith. Chinese Catholic communities remembered them and many other shining witnesses of Christ’s love in November, a month when the Catholic Church calls on everyone to reflect on the “last things” and remember the deceased.
In Shanghai, Father Vincent Qin Guoliang, who came from a wealthy family, was commemorated.
In the 1950s, he was a young Jesuit seminarian at the Shanghai Seminary. During this turbulent time, he was persecuted and exiled to Delingha in Qinghai. He remained imprisoned for two decades, and after his release, he stayed in the region to preach the Gospel in the land to which his devotion to Christ had unexpectedly led him. In the early 1980s, like other former seminarians, he was finally ordained a priest. In Shanghai, he continued to dedicate his life as a priest to serving the Catholics of Qinghai Province. After his death, he was buried far from his hometown, in the region where he had spent his life as a witness to Jesus with joy and perseverance, traveling through the rural areas and villages in his worn clothes and yellow rubber boots, administering baptisms, hearing confessions, celebrating Mass, and offering comfort to his brothers and sisters in the Lord.
What he received from his wealthy family, as well as the clothing and other items donated by parishioners, he immediately gave to the most needy. Only when he fell ill and was no longer able to make decisions for himself was a nurse able to remove his old, worn-out blue robe and dress him in new ones.
After his illness, the old priest could barely recognize anyone and struggled to form coherent sentences. But when parishioners near him sang the Lord’s Prayer, he joined in, reciting the entire prayer flawlessly in Latin. He had forgotten everything but the prayer that had illuminated and gladdened his poor heart even in the most difficult of times.
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