Religion: Catholics in China

Each day a knot of government men, Red Cross representatives, and journalists gather at the Hong Kong border of Red China to watch for freed prisoners who straggle across from the tiny Chinese border town of Shumchun. By now, the watchers are accustomed to the look left by long imprisonment and hammering interrogation, the attrition of hunger, worry and disease. But they were still shocked by one figure that came from behind the barbed wire. Dressed in a black Chinese gown and tattered brown cap, Roman Catholic Bishop Alfonso Maria Corrado Ferroni looked dazedly out at the free world with eyes that seemed set in a skull.

Two men rushed forward to carry him, and their burden was light; Bishop Ferroni had wasted from 150 Ibs. to only 70 Ibs. In the hospital, the 63-year-old Italian Franciscan, who first came to China in 1922, was too weak to tell a coherent story. “Communist radio,” he mumbled. “Lamps and loudspeakers . . . for days and nights.” His body told more. The bishop’s beard had been partly plucked out; there were blood clots under the skin on his hands, and his wrists bore the marks of manacles. “I told them, ‘My thoughts are my own, and you will not change them,’ ” he whispered later. “They failed. I would never change my mind.”

According to Spanish Jesuit Father Louis R. Bolumburn, also deported last week on his 22nd anniversary in China, the Communists have launched a new drive against the Roman Catholic Church. Arrested three weeks ago with three of his Chinese priests, Father Bolumburn heard that at least 23 Chinese priests and some 300 leading Catholic laymen had been jailed in the Shanghai area alone in a single week as counterrevolutionaries. Catholic congregations in Shanghai, he said, have attended church as faithfully as ever, “not because there is religious freedom in Communist China, but because the Catholics are courageous.”