Priest Who Survived Labor Camp Recalls Suffering as Gift

Catholic News Agency ^ | 4/2/14 | Elise Harris

[marshmallow]

Monsignor Matthew Koo recounted being detained in a Chinese labor camp for thirty years due to his Marian devotion, noting that although the experience was painful there were also many blessings.

“Oh, I thought that sacrifice is God's gift. People say that 'you suffered a lot,' I said if not to suffer, how could I be here?” the priest said in a March 17 interview with CNA.

Msgr. Koo is originally from Shanghai in mainland China. After entering the seminary in 1953, he was arrested two years later for being an active member of the Legion of Mary – a lay Catholic organization whose voluntary members serve the global Church – and sentenced to serve five years in a labor camp.

Often referred to as “re-education camps,” the labor camps are a system of administrative detentions in the People's Republic of China which are generally used to detain persons for minor crimes, with punishments being administered through the police rather than the judicial system.

Used first by China's communist party in 1955 to punish counter-revolutionaries, the law allowed for police to sentence those deemed as “counter-revolutionaries” or as someone who fostered “anti-socialist” ideas, and was also used as a means of persecuting Christians in the country, who still face great difficulties there today.

When first initiated, prisoners were sentenced without a hearing or trial, and with no judicial review in place until after the punishment was already being enforced.