Bishop Matthias Duan Yinmin; Leader Among China’s Catholics

Bishop Matthias Duan Yinmin, the last Chinese bishop officially ordained before the Communist Party seized power in 1949 and forced Catholics loyal to the pope to go underground, has died, his deputy said Thursday. He was 92.

Duan, bishop of Wanxian in southwest China, died early Wednesday morning, said Bishop Joseph Xu Zhixuan. Duan had been suffering from heart and lung problems, high blood pressure and diabetes, Xu said in a telephone interview from the diocese.

Duan, who studied theology in Rome, was ordained a priest in 1937 and elevated to bishop on June 9, 1949, four months before the Communists declared the founding of the People’s Republic. Wanxian, 800 miles south of Beijing, did not come under Communist control until two months later, said Xu.

Communist leaders expelled papal representatives and set up a government-controlled Catholic Church in the 1950s. Many priests who refused to surrender their allegiance to Rome were imprisoned.

Duan was sent to work on cotton plantations and factories from 1954 to 1966 and to labor camps during the radical 1966-76 Cultural Revolution, according to the Vatican missionary news service Fides.

A Chinese prelate, John Tong Hon from Hong Kong, recalled that the Red Guards, the Cultural Revolution’s fanatical shock troops, hauled a statue of the Virgin Mary out of Duan’s cathedral and ordered him to destroy it in front of his parishioners. Duan refused.

“He said: ‘You can take off my head, but not my faith!’ ” recalled Tong, speaking at a 1998 meeting of Asian bishops at the Vatican.

In deference to Duan’s status as the oldest resident bishop in China, Pope John Paul II also invited Duan and Xu to the monthlong meeting. But Beijing, citing the lack of official ties between China and the Vatican, refused to give them passports and rebuked the pope for inviting them.

“The body is absent, but the heart is always present at the synod of bishops,” Duan wrote in Latin in a message to the pope read aloud at the meeting.

Nearly all Chinese bishops loyal to the Vatican remain underground, and authorities continue to detain and imprison some of them.

Duan also remained loyal to the Vatican but was, with Xu, allowed to operate openly within the government-run church, apparently in deference to their seniority.