1966 - Sister Su & Sister Meng

August 1966

Tianjin

Tianjin has been the location of some of the most savage persecution of Christians in China’s history. In 1870 ten foreign nuns and several priests were cruelly murdered in Tianjin, and more killing followed during the Boxer Rebellion of 1900. In 1956 the movement for socialist reform was sweeping through China and the Sisters at the Tianjin Convent were targeted. They were all forced to attend long brainwashing sessions where Communist propaganda was forced into their minds.

They were forbidden from wearing their religious habits and made to wear blue uniforms instead. Despite the strong opposition, the convent was allowed to operate until the start of the Cultural Revolution in 1966. In August of that year, a group of Red Guards terrorized the nuns. They smashed the chapel and mission buildings, and reviled the nuns with lewd threats.

Sister Su was the Mother Superior of the Daughters of Charity, a Franciscan order. She and two other nuns were forced to wear dunce caps and paraded through the streets of the city while holding placards denouncing them as “Counter-revolutionary nuns.” All day they were harassed and humiliated. By night fall Sister Su was exhausted.

She suffered from a pre-existing heart disease, but the ruthless Red Guards refused to allow her any rest. They interrogated the nuns throughout the night, accusing them of murdering infants that had been entrusted to their care—the very same charge that had led to the Tianjin Massacre almost 100 years before. The cruel persecutors finally finished their torture of the elderly Sister Su. When daybreak arrived,

“the Red Guards carried her into the courtyard. It rained all that day and she was left there in the rain with no protection. She had already contracted heart disease and when she died, the Red Guards shouted upstairs: ‘Good news to report! Sister Shu has committed suicide!’”[1]

The following day the rest of the nuns were gathered in the courtyard and given a severe flogging. One of the Red Guards asked Sister Meng, “In whom do you believe?” She replied without hesitation, “I believe in God.” She was savagely struck until she collapsed on the ground. That evening the diabolical men went to Sister Meng’s room and again asked her, “Do you still believe in God?” When she replied in the affirmative,

“they cut off her hair and used red hot chopsticks to brand her scalp, leaving her entire head a mass of blisters…. They used an awl to bore wounds into her shoulder and used a 50 cm [20-inch] long syringe with which to inject evil-smelling liquids into her nostrils—they continued to do this until late at night.”[2]

By sunrise the Red Guards sounded their signal for the nuns to get out of bed. Another day of heartless torture awaited them. Sister Meng did not move. The other nuns noticed her bed was soaked in blood from the injuries inflicted on her the previous night. She was dead.