FRONT ROYAL, VA — “New reports out of China indicate that the persecution of the Underground Church is intensifying,” says Steven W. Mosher, President of the Population Research Institute and author of The Devil and Communist China.
A new Human Rights Watch report finds that Chinese authorities are escalating pressure on underground Catholics to submit to the state-controlled Patriotic Association, tightening ideological control, surveillance, and travel restrictions on Catholics in China. Underground bishops and priests who refuse to pledge allegiance to the Communist Party have been detained, forcibly disappeared, and placed under house arrest — among them Bishop James Su Zhimin, 94, who remains disappeared.
Priests must now submit their sermons and teachings to government censors, children are increasingly barred from attending church, and there are credible reports that parents are being forbidden to teach the faith to their own children at home. The report concludes that the 2018 Vatican-China agreement on bishops has facilitated this repression — one underground Catholic interviewed called the agreement a weapon used to legally destroy the Underground Church.
“Communists always target believers, Catholics especially,” said Steven Mosher. “Xi Jinping, like every Communist dictator before him, cannot tolerate any allegiance higher than the Party. That’s why the faithful of the Underground Church, loyal to Christ and His Vicar are being singled out for destruction. But the blood of the martyrs is the seed of the Church.”
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