Fraternal visit and study trip in China

Sheshan Catholic seminary

Mgr Joseph Xing Wenzhi, auxiliary bishop of Shanghai

To bishop Jin and his unwearying ministry in guiding the Shanghai diocese is due the “rebirth” of the local Church, whose origins go back four centuries, to the times of Matteo Ricci (1552–1610), and which had developed a flourishing and structured church life in the first half of the twentieth century, but which suffered terrible trials afterwards. Thanks to bishop Jin, in fact, it was possible to reopen for the first time in China a seminary in 1982, to reactivate the prestigious Catholic publishing house Guangqi, and to reorganize pastorally the large Shanghai diocese, which today numbers 150,000 Catholics and is served by about seventy “official” priests, about fifty “clandestine” priests, and around one hundred sisters, many of them young.

Visits to some of these parishes permitted a more direct acquaintance with church life, with the most common problems, and with the most urgent challenges that the social, cultural, and political context places before it. Among these there is the urgent need to transmit the faith to the young generations: how to preserve it in the old Catholic families in which the faith has been passed down for generations and how to reach so many who do not share this tradition and the forms it has assumed?

In this sense the visit to Sheshan in the suburbs of Shanghai was particularly interesting. There stands the largest Marian sanctuary in China and various church structures around it, among them the diocesan major seminary with about sixty students. Here br. Matteo had the chance to get to know the young auxiliary bishop Joseph Xing Wenzhi, who teaches at the seminary and is its rector. Br. Matteo tells about this in another letter: