Two Chinese Priests Detained

http://apnews.excite.com/article/20051031/D8DIMM0G0.html ^ | 10/30/05 | AP

[Valin]

ROME (AP) - Two priests from China's underground Catholic Church have been detained, a Vatican-affiliated missionary news agency reported. The two had reportedly just given a rare interview to a foreign journalist.

The AsiaNews missionary agency said Friday that the Revs. Shao Zhumin and Paul Jiang Sunian, from the underground church in Wenzhou on China's southeast coast, were detained Thursday after celebrating Mass.

The report said the detentions were unusual because the situation of underground priests in Wenzhou had been "calm" for some time.

On Friday, however, the Italian newsweekly Espresso published a two-page article in which it said it had interviewed the two priests, as well as a third, and that they had "risked arrest" by speaking to a foreign journalist.

The article said that two days after the interview was conducted, Chinese police followed the reporter and took her interpreter to the police station.

In the interview, the priests spoke of previous detentions, with Shao saying he had been asked after his Sept. 7, 1999, detention to make a declaration "to evaluate whether I had become patriotic."

China allows worship in government-controlled churches and appoints its own priests and bishops. Chinese Catholics who meet outside the sanctioned churches are frequently harassed by authorities.

Pope Benedict XVI has been reaching out to the Beijing government in hopes of restoring diplomatic relations and bringing all of China's estimated 12 million Catholics under Rome's wing.

[TheCrusader]

The Chinese government persecutes Christians and forces them to worship undergound, and they force abortions on their women. They pirate Western CDs and DVDs to the tune of billions of dollars in copywrite violations, and they smuggle thousands of weapons into America for who-knows-what purpose, and they build their military and menace the democratic Taiwan.

In return we decide to reward them with "Most Favored Nation" trade status which energizes their economy and helps them build their military so they can also menace us. Then they thank us by flooding our markets with their garbage while restricting what America can sell to their markets, which creates a massive trade defecit in the U.S.

You've just gotta wonder what our leadership is really thinking underneath it all.

[Malcolm]

The Chinese discriminate against everyone that refuses to submit to their direct control--more so with protestants than anyone else. In time, the commies will be forced out of office, and that, along with Fidel Castro's death, will usher out the last remnants of socialism. Good riddance...