Why Be Impatient or Rush, When We Have Eternity in Front of Us?

Perhaps, just perhaps, American politicians should be required to visit Zhalan Cemetery and pray for the courage of six monks buried there – men driven to their knees and murdered but never broken.

More than four-hundred-and-twenty years after he became the first European to enter the Middle Kingdom’s Forbidden City, Matteo Ricci still enjoys a place of honor in the pantheon of Chinese science. 

Arriving at the Portuguese trading post of Macau in the South China Sea in1582, the accomplished mathematician and cartographer became the first Western scholar to master Chinese script and Classical Chinese – a mind-blowing feat – and, with fellow Jesuit Michele Ruggieri, began developing a system for transcribing Chinese words into a Latin alphabet. 

Having impressed the imperial court with his ability to predict solar eclipses – significant events in the Chinese world, Ricci was invited to Beijing, with access to the Forbidden City and a stipend from the Wanli Emperor. In Beijing, he oversaw the construction of astronomic observatories and instruments for celestial observation – fascinating the emperor, who was also an astronomy enthusiast – and established the Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception.

Ricci formed close bonds with Beijing’s literati, adopting their style of dress, explaining that Christianity was the completion of their Confucian beliefs, describing the God of Abraham as Tianzhu – Lord of Heaven, and translating some of the Confucian classics to Latin. Able to scan a list of five-hundred Chinese characters and repeat them – forward and backward – from memory, he authored a number of widely popular books – in Chinese – “On Friendship” and “Ten Discourses of a Strange Man” and a translation of Euclid’s “Geometry,” 

When “the Master from the West” died at age fifty-eight in 1610, Ming Dynasty policy required foreigners who died in China to be buried in Macau. Nonetheless, the Jesuits petitioned Emperor Wanli for Ricci to be interred in Beijing; he responded with one word - “Possible” – and designated a Buddhist temple, which had been appropriated from a court eunuch, for the purpose. Over time, chapels were built in the area and other Jesuit, Franciscan and Dominican missioners were buried in Zhalan.

Today, tourists rarely pay the entrance fee (or bribe to the “caretaker”) to visit the graves of Ricci and more than sixty missioners of different nationalities in Zhalan Cemetery, a garden-like space in the Beijing Administrative College – once called the Beijing Communist Party School. Those who do, seek out the grave of a man still recognized as one of China’s greatest scientific and literary minds.

Few know the story of six Trappist martyrs also buried in Zhalan. 

Located in the shadow of the West Soul Mountain and seventy-five-plus miles northwest of Beijing, the Abbey of Our Lady of Consolation traced its history to the arrival of European Trappists (Order of Cistercians of the Strict Observance) in the mid-1880. Renowned American Trappist author Thomas Merton wrote that in the Summer of 1947 it was “one of the great monasteries of the Order, in point of numbers and fame... [with] a large abbatial church… a large community, consisting of about a hundred, mostly Chinese, with a few volunteers from European monasteries” and a “daughter” monastery – Our Lady of Joy, which had already become large enough for the monks there to consider opening another monastery on the fringes of Mongolia. (When a monastery grows up, it becomes an abbey; abbeys have daughters – monasteries. It’s a Catholic thing.)

In a foretaste of the disaster not yet on the horizon, Communist officials first visited the Abbey Community on October 15, 1939, grabbing Father Antonius Fin, roping him over his chest and under his arms, which they tied behind his back, and stringing him dangling from a tree and barely able to breathe for three hours before cutting him loose. 

Recognizing the threat, the Community began to send its younger members – postulants and novices in groups of five to twenty-five – to Our lady of Joy and other Catholic communities across China, lessening political pressure for almost six years.   

The first thunder-warning of the impending cataclysm came in 1946 with the brief arrest of the French abbot of Consolation and a Chinese monk. In the summer of 1947, the great lies began. The new, antireligious regime repeatedly accused the monks of “cruel exploitation” of the local peasants.  

Fathers Seraphin and Chrysostom were subjected to public trials, accused of having “oppressed the poor” and siding with “the Nationalists” in China’s civil war.

In Merton’s words (a prelude to American political rhetoric more than sixty-five years later):

The “cruel exploitation” of the peasants by the “capitalist pro-Japanese imperialist Christian monks” was proclaimed with such insistence in so many meetings that people were able to forget, at least in part, the great services the monks had done them for sixty years past… fed them in years of famine - including the time when the “scorched earth” tactics of the Red army had left them without a harvest or anything else to live on?

On July 8, 1947, as the monks completed their last 4:00 a.m. masses and consumed all the consecrated hosts in the tabernacle, leaving the doors open, the attacks began in earnest. On August 29, after a series of show trials, the entire community was force- marched from their home on a journey toward martyrdom, covering 20 miles the first night.

Merton records:

It was the old monks and brothers that died first, from exposure and starvation and fatigue. Laden with chains or handcuffed with wire that cut their wrists to the bone, they tramped into the bleak hills. The young monks carried the old and weak in litters. It was cold, and an icy rain fell hour after hour, day after day. They had practically no food, no shelter. When they were allowed to stop, they fell down and slept among the stones. Occasionally they would stop over at a village, and the monks were put on show in another “trial.”

Their treatment became more brutal from day to day. Many monks, their hands permanently bound behind their backs, had to lap up their food from bowls like dogs. If anyone was caught moving his lips in prayer, he was beaten: for the Reds thought the Trappists had learned to communicate with one another by lip reading. And all along the way the soldiers taunted them:

“You believe in God! If your God exists, why doesn’t He help you? Why doesn’t He get you out of here? You say that God made you! God can’t make anything because He doesn’t exist....”

Monks began to die along the way: Fathers William, Stephen and Alphonse, their bodies hastily buried by the Trappists in the shallowest of graves and consumed by wolves in the dark of night. Some were sent away by the Communists – with threats about what would happen if they entered a seminary or joined a Catholic community. 

Repeatedly beaten, Father Seraphinus, who was supposed to become the first native Chinese abbot, incurred particular wrath for refusing to accept the Communists’ lies and apostatize. Theresa Narie Moreau, author of Blood of the Martyrs: Trappist Monks in Communist China reported:

His hands were bound behind his back by tying his thumbs together with wire, then his big toes were bound together with wire, and, finally, his legs were pulled behind him so that his toes and thumbs were joined by a short wire, so short that he could only kneel or lie on his side at all times. He remained hogtied for several weeks, and the beatings continued.

Fathers Alphonsus and Emilius were quickly followed in death by four Chinese Brothers before the Chinese officer in charge began sending lay and choir Brothers off to their homes or relatives with the threat “Do not make the mistake of entering another monastery or seminary, and don’t get yourselves made into priests… We have photos and your fingerprints.” Others were systematically poisoned or died of gangrene caused by their beatings and the wires with which they were bound. 

Father Aelredus Drost, one of four boys from his family to become a priest (two Trappists) and the last European survivor of the Consolation Death March, died on December 5, followed almost daily by other Consolation priests and Brothers. 

On January 20, Father Chrysostomus Chang - known for the admonition “Why be impatient or rush, when we have eternity in front of us?” – and five others were brought before a “People’s Court” in Pan Pu, a village in the Mongolian mountains and near the Consolation Abbey. On January 28, 1948, the six monks of Our Lady of Consolation were sentenced to death. “We are going to die for God. Let us lift our hearts one more time, in offering our total beings,” Father Chrysostomus encouraged his confreres as villagers began beating them and before Chinese soldiers fired life-ending rifle shots. Their bodies were dumped in a heap in a nearby sewage ditch to be savaged by wild dogs. 

Catholic faithful retrieved ravaged bodies and hid them for two years, until they could be delivered to Father Macarius Fu, who, in April 1950, carried them in an inconspicuous piece of luggage from the Mongolian mountains to a small remnant from Our Lady of Joy in Beijing. There, Parisian Father Robert Cartier, dressed in his Mao “costume,” crossed the city with a satchel of the martyr’s remains strapped to his bicycle rack, headed for the Marist Brothers’ Provincial House and the Cemetery of Zhalan.

In the cemetery originally designated by Emperor Wanli in 1610 for the Italian Jesuit Matteo Ricci, the tombstone – in Latin and Chinese – of the six martyrs of Our Lady of Consolation reads simply “Six Religious Shot, January 28, 1948.”

Our Lady of Consolation disappeared. Of the seventy-seven monks taken prisoner, only forty-four survived the Death March of the Martyrs.

The tragic lesson taught by the monks of Our Lady of Consolation is that Truth does not change and political “leaders” – like those who lied overtly as they planned the Abbey’s destruction and those who, today, claim voting fraud in the absence of any proof other than their assertions or lie covertly by their silence in the face of Great Lies and small – are, ultimately, agents of death.

When Fathers Seraphinus, Albertus and Michaelus and Brothers Basilius and Marcus and the other monks of Consolation said “We will walk with you,” they walked, they accompanied and suffered with their companions, giving their lives for a sublime Truth. We must wonder what the monks of the Consolation Abbey Death March would say of the American politician who pledged “We will walk with you to the Capitol” and then hid behind Secret Service and Marine guards and watched TV. 

[The Trappist Haven of Tai Shui Hang was established in 1956 on the northeastern part of Lantau Island, Hong Kong by survivors of the communities of Our Lady of Consolation and Our Lady of Joy. In 2000, the name Our Lady of Joy Abbey was officially adopted.]