Fraternal visit and study trip in China
.jpg "China Christian Council (elder Fu Xianwei and pastor Abraham Chan)")
“Bishop Xing, very hospitable and vivacious, as well as curious to know about me and about the community, invited me for a coffee, and we spoke for half an hour. Among other things, he told me that this year, on account of restrictions imposed by the government, there are no longer any foreign instructors at the seminary and that in May, which usually is the time when the largest number of people come, pilgrims to the Marian sanctuary of Sheshan were very few. Afterwards there was a good meeting with the seminarians. I showed them some photos of the community and described to them our life in Bose. I was surprised by the many questions they asked at the end, which showed intelligence and curiosity about monastic life, about which they, by the way, know very little."
Very poignant was also the meeting with the elderly sisters in the rest home of the diocese. Their faces expressed the joy of perseverance in their vocation, which we know was “tried as by fire” (1Pt 1,7), through the tormented history of the Church in China in the past decades.
A precious occasion of knowing the Protestant Churches of Shanghai were several visits made together with pastor Abraham Chan of the Center of Spirituality Tao Fong Shan of Hong Kong, whom we got to know last year in Bose and who has become an affectionate friend of the monastery. The young pastor Antony Guo Feng of Shanghai, an efficient and cordial guide, always at their disposition, accompanied them in these visits and successfully planned meetings with some leaders of the Chinese Protestant Church, among them with the president of the Shanghai section of the Council of Chinese Christian Churches, the organization that groups together the various Chinese Protestant Churches, and with the elderly Fu Xianwei, president of the Three-Self Patriotic Movement of the Chinese Protestant Churches, who turned out to be a very open, acute, and accessible person.