Wuhan, From One Viral Danger to Another

Wuhan, May 12, 2020. Ten years before the virus SARS-CoV-2, which would sweep like a murderous wave over a world whose dogmas are now called materialism, hedonism, science, and technical progress, a 90-year-old bishop -Monsignor Bernardin Dong – was unplugged in the hospital. He had had lung cancer for several years.

Bernardin Dong was born on April 1, 1917. He entered the Franciscans in 1934, he was ordained a priest in 1942. A few years later, his bishop was expelled. It was the bishop of Hankou, Monsignor Maurice Rosa, an Italian Franciscan who had to leave a China which had become communist on Oct. 2, 1952.

Fr. Dong was therefore, like the entire Catholic clergy, subjected to persecution by the Chinese Communist Part (CCP), which led in 1957 to the creation of the Patriotic Association of Chinese Catholics.

Bernard Dong submitted to the directives of the CCP. He took part in the National Congress of Chinese Catholics organized for the occasion in Beijing, and a year later, on April 13, 1958, he became one of the first two schismatic bishops ordained against the will of Rome, in the city of Wuhan itself.

Nearly 30 years later, in the early 1990s, when a very relative relaxation took hold in the Middle Kingdom, under the rule of Deng Ziaoping, Bishop Bernardin Dong was “reconciled” in the presence of two bishops of the underground Church, recognized by Rome: Monsignor Petrus Zhang Boren, bishop of Hanyang, and Monsignor Odoric Liu Hede, Bishop of Hankou, both Franciscan religious like Bernardin Dong.

If Rome had eventually recognized the episcopal character of Monsignor Bernardin Dong, the latter, very weak and almost bedridden, was used by the Chinese authorities until the end of his life. Thus, on April 30, 2006, from his wheelchair, assisted by eight schismatic bishops, he presided at the ceremony of the episcopal ordination of Joseph Ma Yinglin. Having taken place in Kunming, this act was schismatic, because the sovereign pontiff refused to grant his pontifical mandate.  

The schism virus initiated in Wuhan in 1958, and which claims to attack the unity of the Church, that comforting note which is like the vital breath of the Bride of Christ, was succeeded 60 years later by a coronavirus which now attacks the lungs of mortals. What a wonder, since men have forgotten prayer which is the true respiration of the soul?