He died at the age of 91. Originally from Shanghai, he was imprisoned in the 1955 Catholic roundup along with five brothers, and his mother traveled from one prison to another. When he was finally released, he was ordained a priest in Taipei in 1994. He told World and Mission: “There is joy and peace in my heart because I know that I have done nothing against God or against my country.”
Taiwan () – The Church in China is mourning the death in Taiwan of the Jesuit priest Matteo Chu Li-teh, aged 91, a great figure of fidelity to the Gospel in the harshest years of persecution. Originally from Shanghai, while he was still a seminarian he was arrested in the great raid of 1955 when the communists put more than a thousand Catholics behind bars (including Bishop Ignazio Gong Pigmei himself) in the city that is the heart of Chinese Catholicism. Since then, Father Chu spent a total of 27 years in prison and forced labor. Until only on January 9, 1994, at the age of 61, he was able to be ordained a Jesuit priest in Taipei.
What makes the story of this Chinese priest special is also the story of his entire family, well-known in the Catholic community of Shanghai. In the raid on September 8, 1955, they arrested six brothers, including one who was already a priest, Francisco Javier Chu Shu-de, also a Jesuit, who died in prison in 1983. His widowed mother, Martina, came and went among the six different prisons where his children were locked up. The inhabitants of Shanghai called her “the sorrowful one”; For almost three years he visited them, traveling kilometers on foot to save even those few cents that allowed him to bring some small things (clothes and food) to his children in prison. “They regularly insulted her for being the mother of six counterrevolutionaries, but she never gave up – her children remember -. On each visit, he never failed to encourage each of us to move forward, to willingly accept suffering and to maintain trust in God.” Until they were all sent to labor camps in distant provinces: Heilongjiang, Guangxi, Zhejiang , Gansu and Anhui. For more than 20 years he could not see them again.
When he regained freedom in 1984, Father Matteo could never have been a priest in China due to his refusal to join the Patriotic Association. In 1988 he then obtained permission to embark for the United States with Bishop Gong Pingmei, in what was for all intents and purposes an exile. A year later, the same bishop who had supported him in that first period of great weakness after his long imprisonment, encouraged him to leave for Taiwan to resume his novitiate in the Society of Jesus. Until the historic ordination of 1994, in which his mother Martina was able to be present.
That year – in an interview with our editorial director, Fr. Gianni Criveller, which was published in the PIME missionaries’ magazine World and Mission – had told about the hardness of life in prison. “I had moments of great exhaustion – he said – Moments of deep trust in the Lord alternated with others of prostration. My prayer many times turned into lament: ‘Why, Lord, have you given me such a heavy cross?’ I asked myself countless times if really, under those conditions, I was still called to offer my life to him. But I always remembered the words and example of my mother, and simply and stubbornly asked the Lord every day for the grace to be faithful to the gift of his calling.”
“There is joy and peace in my heart – Fr. Chu also said in the interview with World and Mission in 1994 -. Along with many of my brothers and sisters in faith, I also know that I have done nothing against God or against my country, which I love deeply. “We were sent to concentration camps only because we wanted to keep intact the faith we received and fulfill the will of God, who wants us to be authentic people.”
During his years in Taiwan and until his last days, Father Matteo continued to serve the faithful with a devoted heart. “Many times – the Jesuits of the Chinese province recall on their website – 20 minutes before the daily and Sunday masses he could be found in the small room on the side of the church of the Sacred Heart of Jesus, in the Guting neighborhood. , where he received the faithful for the sacrament of reconciliation”.
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