In 1971, I was able to contact Padre Mario Francesco, the last of the Pengpu mission’s superiors. He was living in Rome, and through Paul Hofmann, the Times bureau chief there, I received a letter from him with this account of what happened to Pengpu and the Jesuits after the Communists occupied the town in January 1949:
When the Communists first came, they preached freedom. For the first year, the people kept quiet because they believed them. Then the Communists made everyone sign statements asking if they had cooperated with the old government. Worse, everyone was asked to write his own autobiography many times and answer three terrible questions: One: What do you think of Communism? Two: Give the names of your friends and enemies. Three: What evil deeds have you done to the people? Then there began the wave of denunciations and executions of the so-called “enemies of the people.”
The mission did not escape this process. The Communists didn’t want to expel the missionaries outright but were determined to find “evidence” of their wrongdoings so that the people would denounce them or they would leave of their own accord. It was a process to try to break down the missionaries, and it was this continual harassment that in the end killed the Bishop. The Communists would come in day and night and ask for the mission’s accounts. They had already frozen the mission’s money in the banks. They first came to the mission on January 19, 1950, asking for one room, to put their agent in to report everything that went on in the mission. Later they took over the whole second floor of the mission headquarters to house foreign guests, such as a group of Russian engineers who came in to rebuild the bridge which had been blown up by the Nationalists. When there were foreign guests in the building, the priests were confined to their quarters and only allowed out for a short time when it was certain that they would not meet with other foreigners. Once there was a delegation from the Italian Communist Party—but there were no contacts allowed.
One evening a Chinese priest arrived at the mission by river boat without official permission. The police agent reported his visit and the Bishop had to spend three nights in jail as punishment. Worse, the Bishop was forced to buy an advertisement in the local paper to say he had been wrong to receive a visitor without authorization and that the Communists were good because they had kept him in prison only three days. There was no limit to the charity of the Bishop. When the Communists came, they took everything he had, and when he had nothing more to give, he died. He died in the mission, sitting upright in his room with his breviary in his hands, on June 13, 1951.
Things got worse when the Bishop died. The Communists tried to say that the Bishop had committed suicide, taken too much opium. But the missionaries were able to get a statement from the doctors that he had died of a heart attack. When the Bishop died the Communists closed the church, defaced its facade to make it look like a bank, removed Gothic decorations and turned it into a theater. The priests were forced to move out of their residence and went to the nunnery. The Bishop was buried in an area south of the compound near the seminary. Some 2,000 Chinese Catholics came to his funeral. The Communists asked for their names. It was at this point that the mission decided to burn all its records. At this time, too, the Communists banned baptism, but the priests did not heed this ruling. They opened two new chapels in the nunnery and received more Chinese Catholics than before. When the Communists took over the mission schools, I went to teach in the seminary.
The Communist line to the missionaries was: “We protect the mission, but the people want you to leave.” At least 1,000 meetings were held with the people to try to get them to denounce the “foreign dogs.” But the people, who had been cared for by the mission hospital and whose sons had gone to their school, steadfastly refused to denounce the missionaries.
Then the Communists tried intimidation. They called in one of the 40 Chinese nurses and told her that her father was to be shot but she could save his life. She was asked to testify that I had done some fault, to give the names of the best Catholics of the mission and admit that there was a section of the Legion of Mary (which to Chinese minds sounded paramilitary) in the mission, which wasn’t true. She finally agreed so as to save her father, and was told to bring her photo and not to tell anyone about the police pressure. But she came to me crying and told me everything. I counseled her to tell the police that everything she has said was false—which she did. She was then forced to report to the police daily, but nothing happened to her father.
Finally, the police picked on a former seminary student who had been a soldier in the Nationalist Army and was working at the mission and took pictures of him with me, holding a Latin grammar book and next to a crucifix. To me the police pointed out Article 12 of the Chinese State Constitution that says those who keep traitors must suffer the same punishment as traitors. This was intended to frighten me and make me leave of my own free will. But I only laughed and gave the police my written answer: “If I have gone against Chinese laws, I must do penance in China.” The police were very angry. Then they said that if I did not sign a statement saying, “I leave China freely,” five Chinese would be put in jail. Only then did I agree to sign, but the five Chinese were put in jail anyway. This happened in January 1953. I was the last of the superiors in the Pengpu Mission.*