God Is Red - Liao Yiwu [81]
Liu: In the past fifty years, many Christians have died because of state oppression and persecution. Since the government controls the media, we don’t hear about most of these martyrs. You and other people learned about Cardinal Gong because he was singled out by the Party paper as a target for condemnation. That was how I heard of Father Zhang. The People’s Daily carried a story about him to show how “harmful” religion was to people. “Eliminate superstition and change old customs and traditions,” it said. The reporter was very sarcastic. The report went something like this [Liu recites]:
A pandemic hit the region lately and many people became sick. Some bad people used the opportunity to spread rumors, saying the pandemic was the result of people’s rejection of God. One day, after midnight, locals claimed to have seen a glowing halo on top of what used to be the grave of a foreign missionary. Inside the halo was a figure of Jesus holding a cross. A former Catholic priest immediately gathered a small group of villagers who were backward in their political thinking. He poisoned people’s minds with what amounts to demagoguery. He was quoted as saying, “This will be the last time that the Lord will appear to you. God is asking his strayed sheep to return to the right path.” This former priest even proclaimed himself to be Jesus’s disciple Peter. Moreover, some local people also spread false tales about how this former criminal scooped up water from a stinky ditch near where he stood and then drank it. Within seconds, the ditch turned into a running stream of clean water.
As a result, many sick people heard about the tales and flocked to the spot where the halo had appeared and drank water from the stream of clean water nearby. They were immediately cured and their health had never been better. This myth has deceived the masses, and every day people swarmed to Zhangerce Village, thinking that they had discovered a panacea for their illnesses. When the reporter visited the area for this article, he found that the dirty ditch was still there and there was no trace of the clean stream. There was no sign of the holy apparition there.
At the end of the article, the reporter warned people not to believe in superstition and admonished them to report to the public health department if there was a pandemic. The reporter also advised people to “be vigilant against those who spread rumors and report bad people to the police.”
That former priest was Father Zhang Gangyi. I don’t know if the claims of the halo and the clean stream were true or not. They might have been made up by the Party paper to smear Father Zhang, or maybe something did happen and the local people have embellished it; you know how people are. That “negative” story made Father Zhang and Zhangerce Village famous across the nation. Christians poured in from all over, some with that very article in their hands. They came to pray and sought Father Zhang’s blessing. Father Zhang helped revive Catholicism in the region. Until he was arrested in late 1989, he held a big Mass in the local church every Easter.
Liao: What have you learned about him?
Liu: Father Zhang Gangyi was born in 1907, to a Catholic family in Xincheng Village, Xiyang Township. It’s in today’s Sanyuan County, Shaanxi province. At the age of eighteen he joined the Tongyuanfang Monastery. Then, he was transferred to a monastery in the Ankang diocese in southern Shaanxi province. In 1930, he was chosen to join the Franciscan Order, one of the best known religious orders within the Catholic Church. The Franciscans sponsored his study at its headquarters in Rome. He became a novice in 1932 and was ordained a priest on August 15, 1937.
When World War II broke out, Pope Pius XII sent Father Zhang to work as a chaplain at a prisoner-of-war camp in northern Italy. Thousands of allied soldiers were held there. Italy under Mussolini was like a big military camp. There were checkpoints everywhere. According to a popular version of his story, Father Zhang was arrested and, during interrogation, said