China arrests 5 underground church members

Five members of China’s underground Catholic Church were arrested trying to visit a priest recently released from prison camp, according to a U.S.-based rights group.

Fathers Kang Fuliang, Chen Guozhen, Pang Guangzhao and Joseph Yin and Deacon Wang Lijun, aged 25 to 32, were on their way to visit Father Genjun when they were taken into custody in Baoding city in Hebei province July 1, the Connecticut-based Cardinal Kung Foundation said.

Lu had spent three years in a labor camp.

“At this moment, we have no other details,” Joseph Kung, president of the foundation, told Agence France-Presse.

China’s communist government, which broke off relations with the Vatican in 1951, recognizes only the state-sanctioned Chinese Catholic Patriotic Association, which does not recognize the authority of the pope. Similarly, Protestants must belong to the state’s Three-Self Patriotic Movement, which restricts the churches’ mission and teachings.

“The Beijing government continues to declare that its constitution guarantees human rights and religious freedom,” Kung said in a statement.

“Yet, these arrests of Catholic clergy continue only 70 miles from the capital of the Beijing government, which can no longer avoid its responsibility by blaming it on over-enthusiastic local officials.”

As WorldNetDaily reported, a Christian missionary organization claims to have obtained a top-secret Chinese government document directing a systematic campaign of persecution against unregistered churches.

The U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom, an independent panel established by Congress, noted in its May 2003 report a “deterioration of protections for religious freedom in China.”

“The Chinese government commits numerous egregious violations against members of many of China’s religious and spiritual communities, including Evangelical Christians, Roman Catholics, Tibetan Buddhists, Uighur Muslims, and other groups, such as the Falun Gong, that the government has labeled ‘evil cults,'” the report said.

The Kung foundation also reported the June 16 arrest of Fr. Lu Xiaozhou, a priest in Wenzhou city in east China’s Zhejiang province who was apprehended preparing to anoint a dying Catholic.

New York-based Human Rights in China said Chinese authorities arrested last month 12 members of an unregistered church in Guna Town in southwestern Yunnan province for engaging in “feudalistic superstition.”

At least 8 face imprisonment, according to the group, which said the arrests were part of the heaviest crackdown on home-based churches this year.