2001 - Matthias Pei Shangde

December 24, 2001

Zhangjiakou, Hebei

Bishop Pei Shangde, an underground Catholic bishop, was born in 1918 at Zhangjiapu in Zhuolu County, Hebei Province. He was one of six children. At the age of 13 Pei entered the seminary of the Congregation of the Lord’s Disciples, an organization founded by Cardinal Celso Contantini, who was the first Apostolic Delegate to Beijing. At his baptism Pei Shangde took the Christian name Matthias, and set his life on a course of wholehearted discipleship to Jesus Christ. Ordained a priest in 1948, Pei moved to Beijing where he taught in the Gengxin Catholic School.

After the Communists came to power in 1949, they set about trying to systematically destroy the Catholic Church throughout China. In 1950 Pei was arrested and sent to a prison labour camp for many years. Most of his time was spent working in a medicine factory, as well as having to endure years of brainwashing and torture. In the 1960s there was some hope that he would be released and allowed to return home, but the mad Cultural Revolution came along and Pei was sentenced to an additional ten years “re-education.” He was finally released in 1980, after 30 years in prison.

The year of 1989 saw Pei’s faithfulness rewarded by the Catholic Church when the Pope secretly appointed him the Bishop of Beijing. Because his appointment was not ordained by the government-sanctioned Catholic Patriotic Association, Pei immediately became a target of the Communist government. The Chinese authorities already had their own Bishop of Beijing—Fu Tieshan. When Fu bravely took part in a secret ordination of underground bishops in January 2000, the government criticized him severely. For many Catholics, Pei Shangde was their real bishop, and Fu’s willingness to go against the government and side with the underground church was interpreted as a confirmation that Bishop Pei Shangde had the greater respect and authority.

Many times during the 1990s Bishop Pei was detained and questioned by the Public Security Bureau. In April 2001 he was again arrested, but because he was already in his 80s they sentenced him to house arrest instead of prison, hoping to prevent him from travelling and overseeing the underground church. A few months after his arrest he suffered kidney failure and he was hospitalized at the Shengxing Hospital in Zhangjiakou, Hebei Province. He died there on Christmas Eve, aged 83, still under arrest some 52 years after his first incarceration.

The police tried to stop outsiders from travelling to Bishop Pei Shangde’s hometown of Zhuolu for the funeral on January 2, 2002. They blocked the roads into Zhuolu and asked the occupants of every vehicle what their purpose was for coming to the town that day. Despite government warnings to stay away, thousands of Catholics attended to pay their last respects. As a final sign of defiance, Matthias Pei Shangde was buried wearing the emblems of a bishop.