Wednesday, December 21, from local Communist authorities in Shanxi province to their appeal to receive back nationalized church properties, Catholic sources said.
The standoff, seen by the Catholic Church as a test case for religious freedom, came just days after about 30 militants used steel bars, sticks and bricks to beat up a group of priests in the provincial capital Tianjin where they tried to settle property disputes, Catholic news agency AsiaNews reported.
Police reportedly intervened during the December 16 violence, but failed to arrest the attackers and instead detained the clergymen at a local police station, denying them access to hospital care, the news agency said.
CONFISCATED BUILDINGS
The group of 48 priests and two nuns had reportedly arrived in Tianjin last week from the Taiyuan region to ask for the return of several buildings which belong to their diocese.
These Western-style buildings, apparently confiscated during the Mao era, were, according to Chinese law, to have been returned to the diocese in 1979, Catholic news media said.
However the Religious Affairs Bureau has apparently used them as its headquarters and allegedly decided to hand them over to a construction company to restore and commercialize them.
SEEKING PROPERTIES
The diocese has been seeking their return since 1993, but never received any response from the government. Chinese officials were not immediately available for comment.
The latest tensions came on the heels of a previous reported attack against nuns in the town of Xi’an where "30 uniformed young men" entered the church premises at 6pm on November 22, "with wooden sticks in their hands," said religious rights watchdog China Aid Association (CAA).
Two hours later, a bulldozer started tearing down the Catholic church, CAA said, although it was unclear whether the uniformed men were part of the Chinese security apparatus.
VATICAN CONCERNED
The destruction was briefly interrupted by resumed by "the evening of November 23" when about "40 uniformed young men armed with sticks started beating the nuns who were defending the church building," CAA told BosNewsLife. 16 nuns reportedly suffered "eye injuries and/or broken legs," the group claimed. In addition sic priests were arrested in Zhengding province on November 18, several sources said.
The Vatican strongly condemned the reported beating up of the nuns and priests in China. Chief Vatican spokesman Joaquin Navarro-Valls said "the violence used in Xian against defenseless nuns can only be condemned in the strongest of terms."
China does not allow its Catholics to recognize the authority of the Pope and forces them to be part of the government-controlled Catholic Patriotic Association. Most of China’s estimated 80-million Christians, including Catholics, worship outside the official churches, human rights groups claim. (With BosNewsLife Research and reports from China).
