A few days ago we received our annual newsletter in the mail from the Cardinal Kung Foundation, who we financially support to aid the underground Church in China. For those unaware, the Church has been illegal and persecuted in China for the past sixty years. "Since October 2016, anyone in China under age 18 may not be baptized, enter a church, attend a Mass, or receive religious instructions." The Communist government created a Church under the control of Chinese Catholic Patriotic Association in 1957 in an attempt to replace the Roman Catholic Church in China and transferred almost all the properties of the Roman Catholic Church in China to the Communist founded Patriotic Association Church, leaving the "illegal" but loyal-to-Pope underground Catholic Church in poverty.
The Patriotic Church is an "approved" but sham puppet Church which pledges its loyalty to the CCP. Meanwhile, the true Church in China loyal to the Pope and dedicated to preserving the true faith, is the illegal "underground Church" and being starved and fined out of existence. According to the Foundation, "The Vatican has not consecrated new bishops when an underground bishop retired or died. Many diocese are now managed by Diocesan Administrators. Many bishops are elderly. Even without medical care or proper living conditions, with God's blessings these elderly bishops work in their 80s. Due to frequent arrests, the health of these elderly bishops deteriorated."
The underground Church is staying loyal, but the Vatican is not making it easy to keep the faith. "With the signing of the Vatican-China Provisional Agreement, [the] Vatican gave recognition to all the Patriotic Bishops, including forgiveness to eight excommunicated Bishops. [The] Vatican even "requested" two legitimately consecrated underground bishops to step aside for two excommunicated bishops. With such extraordinary concessions to the government and the Independent church, the Vatican failed to obtain the freedom of one of its own bishop who is 89 years old and had already been jailed for 44 years."
In this case, to be a true Catholic in China, you must join and be loyal to the underground Church, which is hidden, persecuted, and left hung out to dry by it's own leaders in Rome.
There is also another tale from the East--in this case Japan--of a persecuted minority of Catholic Christians that had been forced underground during extended years of persecution from the 16th century onward. The Kakure Kirishitan, or "hidden Christians" never really emerged from the underground, and as a result the Faith--fiercely loyal to the ritualism but deformed by degrees over the years a--became almost unrecognizable to the true Faith. It became....something else. From CERC:
"Missionaries were banned from Japan for 200 years until the middle of the 19th century when the French reintroduced Catholicism to the country. At this time, some of the Hidden Christians came forth and rejoined the Catholic Church. Others did not recognize the French Catholicism as the faith of their ancestors. Centuries of concealment and isolation had changed their faith into something unique with secrecy an integral part of its doctrine.
The Hidden Christians worshiped and prayed together and offered each other mutual support. But because the initial introduction to Christianity lasted barely one generation, their education in the faith was somewhat rudimentary. Nevertheless, they turned their inadequate instruction into a practice that developed its own hereditary priesthood, observed holy days and administered the sacrament of Baptism."
When an anthropologist sought out these Kakure Kirishitan practitioners in 1995, she discovered that there were only two "priests" left.
"This is the only thing they have the ceremony," Whelan said. "That becomes their dogma. You have to do it right, you have to say the prayers right, or it won't have power. In the absence of other things that most other traditions have, this becomes the thing you've got to be true to."
"I do think that they are religious men in their own way," she said, that their prayers are directed toward God.
A tiny Catholic Church on Narushima attracts a small congregation, but the Kakure Kirishitan priests are not interested in joining it. Although they probably understand intellectually the relationship between Kakure Kirishitan and the Catholic Church, Catholicism to them remains foreign and removed.
Whelan, herself a former Catholic turned Buddhist, saw reflected in the last two priests the universal religious struggle between the conservative and the liberal. One priest, in being correct to the past, is blind to the realities around him. The other, attempting to make the ritual relevant to those who don't truly understand the tradition, makes compromises that dilute the best of what had been preserved.
Whelan considers the two old men on Narushima as among the only living authentic practitioners of the Kakure Kirishitan. "
Because we have been under quarantine as a family for the past week, we missed Mass last Sunday, Christmas Eve/Day, and this morning, so the five of us had to make due with a Missa Sicca ("Dry Mass") and family rosary, which I led. The Dry Mass is a stop-gap, not intended to the long-term. Last year, during COVID when Masses were suspended temporarily, I had converted our shed to a chapel in the off-chance event we needed a place to have private masses said. We have not had to use it for such purposes, as the churches were not closed for long.
I know many traditionalists tout this kind of "underground TLM" movement but I think it's a short-term solution that makes them feel like persecuted torch-bearers in their minds but neglects the unforeseen dangers of "whisper down the lane" mutations were these ghettoizations to go on for years or decades. The underground Church in China is under real persecution, their bishops are being starved out of existence, but God has not abandoned them.
And yet, for us, the danger of losing perspective were traditionalism to go "underground" is ever-present. I have to say, on the other hand, though, we have some older parishioners from our parish who did just this before Summa Pontificum was promulgated, who were assisting Masses in basements and keeping the flame of Tradition alive for future generations to be enjoyed in a more mainstream fashion today. If the mainstream TLM was being enjoyed, if the trajectory coming out of the Vatican is accurate, it may have been a short-lived luxury. If it is not the CCP, but our own supreme Pontiff, that is relegating us to the underground, how do we stay true to the faith and it's authentic expression in worship while keeping such deformities (seen in the KK communities) at bay?
Personally, I'm conflicted about the "underground Trad" movement. I'm not averse to sacrifices and hardship for the faith and will gladly endure what we need to. Not that it is necessarily inevitable, but I fear a potential insular radicalization and spirit of malcontent should we be further ghettoized. Years, decades later, will the distance between those who remain in the liturgical New Rite and those stay loyal to Tradition in the Old intensify to the point where the traditionalist "old believers" emerge and find the Church of the Novus Ordo "unrecognizable" and refuse to join it? If the Vatican refuses to ordain bishops in the Old rite, how many generations can we truly survive without becoming illicit? Is this a new eve of nuevo-Lefebrism?
For those who attend the Novus Ordo regularly, they may question what the big deal is with any of this, be unfazed or undisturbed by what is coming down from Rome. But for those of us faced with the decisions of what to do on Sundays and beyond moving forward should this come to fruition, our faith and loyalties are in many ways being tried and tested. What does it mean to be faithful? To be loyal? To be Catholic? To sell out? To resist? To let the flame of religion be snuffed out?
One thing I know for sure--our Lord never said it would be easy. “Make every effort to enter through the narrow door, because many, I tell you, will try to enter and will not be able to" (Lk 13:24)
“Awake, sword, against my shepherd, against the man who is close to me!” declares the LORD Almighty. “Strike the shepherd, and the sheep will be scattered, and I will turn my hand against the little ones. (Zech 13:7)
See also: Subversion
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