The beginnings of Our Lady of Consolation were every bit as difficult as La Val Sainte or St. Bernard’s Clairvaux, but as the years went on, the community prospered. By the time Pope Pius XI wrote Rerum Ecclesiae, Consolation was one of the great monasteries of the Order, in point of numbers and fame. Inside the wide enclosure were gardens and orchards surrounding a monastery and hostelry and the usual barns. In the center of it all was a large abbatial church, whose interior had the simplicity and dignity of a true Cistercian house of prayer. It was a large community, consisting of about a hundred, mostly Chinese, with a few volunteers from European monasteries. Here, the Cistercian life was taken in all seriousness, although a few mitigations had to be allowed in favor of the native monks: they are not robust enough to take the full burden of the Rule, even though they are inured to poverty and hardship.
When World War II became general—it had already been going on for several years in China—the superiors in the West began to wonder if the Chinese monasteries were now strong enough to stand by themselves without help from Europe. It was evident that they might soon have to do so. Consolation had sent a colony to a central Chinese province, and that monastery was now under the supervision of a Chinese titular prior, Dom Paulinus Li. The trial seemed to be a success, and the monks of Notre Dame de Liesse (Our Lady of Joy), as it was called, were turning over in their minds plans of expansion into Mongolia, when the Red armies swept down on both our houses and cut short all surmises about their immediate future.
It was after World War II ended that trouble really began for the Church in China. Our Lady of Consolation had not been much molested by the Japanese. A party of troops had spent one night in the monastery, but they left the next day without making any trouble. But when the American army withdrew from China and the Reds began to push back the Nationalist troops, things began to look dark for Our Lady of Consolation and her daughter house.
The only surprise was that the storm waited so long before it broke.
In 1946 the Communists had come and arrested the French abbot of Consolation, Dom Alexis Baillon, and one of his Chinese monks, holding them in jail for several weeks. Everyone expected the Reds to descend upon the monastery and finish their work then and there. But for some unknown reason they did not.
The blow fell in the summer of 1947.
Theoretically, the Communists allow freedom of conscience, and the attack on the monastery was not explicitly antireligious. The Reds were interested, most of all, in gaining the hearts of the peasantry by throwing them this most tempting prize. Of course, people believed that the monks were hoarding great wealth in their cloister. The “cruel exploitation” of the peasants by the “capitalist pro-Japanese imperialist Christian monks” was proclaimed with such insistence in so many meetings that people were able to forget, at least in part, the great services the monks had done them for sixty years past. Had not Our Lady of Consolation fed them in years of famine—including the time when the “scorched earth” tactics of the Red army had left them without a harvest or anything else to live on?
Two Chinese priests, Father Seraphin and the cellarer, Father Chrysostom, both of them prominent officers and well known because of their contact with the lay people who had business dealings with the monastery, were summoned to a village Communist court to answer the charges against the monks. That was only the prelude.
The trial, of course, was a joke. It lasted six days, and the monks were not allowed to defend themselves against a battery of fantastic charges covering the whole history of the monastery. It was said, for example, that Our Lady of Consolation had been founded by Europeans in order to help put down the Boxer Rebellion in 1900. (The rebellion had broken out seventeen years after the foundation of the monastery.) For having allegedly given “information to the Japanese,” for having “oppressed the poor,” “kept firearms,” and “sided with the nationalists,” the monks were ordered to pay damages to the people of the region.
As the two Chinese Trappists walked the stony road back to Yang Kia Ping, the word was already running like wildfire through the hills, “The monastery is finished!”
That night the Communists gathered for the kill, assembling peasants from miles around to share in the spoils. It was to be a fine party for them while it lasted. It would be their first real taste of the Red variant of the Roman Emperors’ “bread and circuses” technique. They would do well to make the best of it, because there were not many such opportunities in these mountains.
At midnight the gatekeeper of the monastery woke up at the sound of many feet and many voices. There was a loud outcry as men battered on the monastery gate. The brother went out to speak with them and was seized, beaten, and thrown into a corner, while the mob of men and women rushed into the enclosure.
That was the way July 8, 1947, began at Yang Kia Ping. The dark cloister rang with cries and the sound of smashing wood. Glass tinkled on the stones. Feet hit the stairways with a sound of thunder.
The monks sat up in their dormitory cells. Sleep ebbed from their eyes, and their minds filled quickly with the realization of what was coming. There was nothing for them to do but commend themselves to God.
The first attack was not so bad. The crowd threw the monks out of their dormitory cells and ripped up their straw mattresses in order to take the strong serge cloth covering. They seized everything they could lay hands on and ran out with armfuls of bedding, not forgetting to take whatever spare clothes hung in the cells.
By two o’clock the monastery was quiet again. The crowd had gone. Perhaps they were satisfied. When day dawned, the monks would take stock of the damage and try to do something about it. Meanwhile, it was time for the night office, so they assembled in choir.
After four o’clock, as the last Masses were being said, it was noticed that the Reds were filtering back into the cloister, prowling around and helping themselves to what they had not been able to carry away before. The monks consumed the sacred Hosts and left the Tabernacle empty and settled down to wait for the worst.
When the sun had risen, the crowd gathered again. Daylight showed that they had not obtained much by their efforts in the dark, and this time they settled down to do a thorough and businesslike job of cleaning out the abbey storerooms. All the millet and apricots and the rest of the foodstuffs were carted off to feed the Red soldiers, and the farm tools were distributed to the peasants. In the library they ripped the covers off the books to get leather and cloth. The light wind coming through the broken windows blew torn pages about the floor: pages from the Greek and Latin Fathers, pages of Scholastic philosophy, pages from modern books on scientific farming. The only possible usefulness all this could have to the Communists would be to help start the fire that would burn down the monastery which they hated with such peculiar intensity. But before this could happen, the monks would have to play their part in a long burlesque of legal procedure which the comrades had thought up to impress the peasantry.
The community was placed under arrest and imprisoned in its own chapter room for three days, awaiting the first public trial as a group. It was an elaborately planned affair held outside the monastery in the presence of over a thousand villagers marshaled by Red leaders with appropriate banners. The largest banner bore the words, “The trial of Yang Kia Ping by all the villages.”
The same charges were repeated, and individual monks were called out to answer questions. Father Seraphin was marked out for particularly cruel treatment because of his authority as one of the official representatives of the Trappists in their dealings with the outside. He would probably have been the first Chinese abbot of Consolation if things had been allowed to take their normal, peaceful course. But on this particular day, July 10, 1947, he was beaten across the back with clubs for two hours in the presence of “all the villages,” while the Red leaders shouted out charge after charge, and the cry of “guilty!” came back by acclamation from the crowds, primed by Communists scattered among them.
Then the monks were taken
home and locked up once again in their monastery.
The fact that the first trial, in spite of all the noise and outcry, had proved altogether inconclusive was shown by the events that followed. After two weeks, another trial had to be instituted, this time in the monastery church.
There must have been the most poignant tension in the hearts of those Chinese and European Cistercians as they filed out of the chapter room, along the cloister, and into the choir, as they had so often done before: and the gripping earnestness of their situation must have seized them with great force as they lined up in the middle of the choir, before the stripped high altar and its empty Tabernacle, while the Red soldiers who were to be their judges sat in the choir stalls on either side of them. Here, in this church, where so many of them had given themselves to God by solemn vows, the full, inescapable meaning of their Cistercian vocation was brought home to them more graphically than they had ever imagined possible. That they should be victims with Christ for the world; that they should fill up, in their bodies, what was wanting in the sufferings of Christ, for His Church; that they should dedicate their lives to God in a total, uncompromising abandonment of their whole being into His hands, to do with as He pleased; to lay down their lives as holocausts of adoration to the infinite God as a testimony, as a witness to His great glory . . . they were actually living that out now, in all truth. They were being perfect Cistercians in the fullest sense of the word. They were fulfilling to the letter the Benedictine ideal: to “prefer absolutely nothing to the love of Christ” and to live as men “whose bodies and whose very wills are no longer in their own power.”3
Once again the charges against the monks were roared out, and the answering roar of the “people” echoed from the bare walls of the choir with singular ferocity. It was a terrible contrast to the peaceful measures of the psalmody that had hallowed this place for sixty years. Again Father Seraphin took the worst of the beatings. When he cried out, “Have a little mercy!” he was answered, with a yell, “The time for mercy is past: this is the hour of revenge!” One of the brothers, whose name was Roch, was clubbed by three or four guards during his long examination. The monks who tried to protect their brethren by throwing their own bodies in the way of the clubs were pushed aside.
Only one person dared to stand up for the monks. A Chinese widow, a Christian catechist, insisted on telling the truth and defending a monk who had had charge of a mission in the hills during the war years. When She flatly denied that he had acted as a spy for the Japanese, she was beaten into unconsciousness and fell to the floor. They threw a banner over her and left her for dead.
The trial ended with the death sentence being passed upon the Trappist monks and brothers. Their wrists bound with wire standing at the presbytery step before the sanctuary lamp, they heard the sentence on the very spot where most of them had chanted their promise of “stability, obedience, and conversion of manners before God and His saints” when they made their solemn vows.
Even the passing of a death sentence was not enough for the Reds. They and the peasants seemed keenly aware of failure. Perhaps they had sincerely believed that the monks were capitalists and imperialists, hoarders of money and firearms, and agents for the Japanese. But by now it was clear that there was not a shred of evidence for any charge except the obvious one of siding with the Nationalists. After all, there was no other quarter from which the Trappists might expect any help!
This great monastery, which the Reds had imagined so wealthy, had yielded surprisingly little plunder. The monks, seen at close range, proved to be simple men who clung tenaciously to their incomprehensible religious ideal. No doubt their stubbornness was very annoying, but it hardly constituted a formal crime.
So, the passion of Yang Kia Ping entered into a new phase. The Reds not only did not proceed to an immediate execution, they changed their tactics. They launched a psychological attack and followed it up with some crude efforts at “indoctrination.” Evidently they hoped that, once the monks’ eyes were opened to the brave new world that was peopled with such creatures as the Communists, they might be converted to the Red cause, admit the error of their ways, get themselves wives, and settle down under the Dictatorship of the Proletariat. Fifty secular prisoners were moved into the monastery with the monks for psychological effect, as the first step in a possible process of secularization. Then, toward the middle of August, the community was taken on a long and painful jaunt through the hills to view a village where the Reds had taken over the property of a rich landowner.
The Trappists were not impressed. One, the eighty-two-year-old Chinese Brother Bruno was so unimpressed that he lay down and died there. It was the Feast of the Assumption, the golden jubilee of his solemn vows. . . .
On August 29, the Trappists left Yang Kia Ping on a terrible journey whose stages were to be marked by the graves of more than one. It was the old monks and brothers that died first, from exposure and starvation and fatigue. Laden with chains or handcuffed with wire that cut their wrists to the bone, they tramped into the bleak hills. The young monks carried the old and weak in litters. It was cold, and an icy rain fell hour after hour, day after day. They had practically no food, no shelter. When they were allowed to stop, they fell down and slept among the stones. Occasionally they would stop over at a village, and the monks were put on show in another “trial.” No doubt the Reds were trying to save face by making a political circus out of their band of prisoners.
Their treatment became more brutal from day to day. Many monks, their hands permanently bound behind their backs, had to lap up their food from bowls like dogs. If anyone was caught moving his lips in prayer, he was beaten: for the Reds thought the Trappists had learned to communicate with one another by lip reading. And all along the way the soldiers taunted them:
“You believe in God! If your God exists, why doesn’t He help you? Why doesn’t He get you out of here? You say that God made you! God can’t make anything because He doesn’t exist. If a man and woman are strong, they have children. If they are not strong, they don’t have children, and God doesn’t have anything to say about it. . . . ”
The Red soldiers told them how Our Lady of Consolation had gone up in flames. They said, “Soon there will be no more Christian churches left in China.”
When the monks did not believe that Yang Kia Ping had been burned, their captors took a party of them all the way back to see the ruins with their own eyes. It was all too true. Nothing was standing except a few blackened walls, stark and terrible in the wild valley. The Reds had set fire to the building the day the monks had left—and that very evening a rescue party of Nationalist troops had arrived. They were twelve hours too late.
On September 6, Father William, a seventy-year-old French priest, died on the road and was buried at Lai Hsun Hsien, in the mountains. In the next ten days two of his compatriots, Father Stephen and Father Alphonse, followed him. The latter was a former Jesuit missionary who had felt that deep, undefinable attraction that brings men from the active life into the cloister, and he had become a Cistercian at Consolation. An exemplary monk, he had suffered greatly in his last days, tortured by dysentery and kept in solitary confinement, where no one could give him any care.
The Trappists were not even allowed to dig deep graves for their dead, and wolves came during the night and dug up the bodies.
By the end of September the “trials” of the Trappists had ceased to interest the population. The Reds, satisfied that they could now release some of them without “loss of face,” summoned five of the brothers and told them they would be sent away, with freedom to make their way through the Nationalist lines if they wanted to run the risk of getting shot.
Before they left, the Trappists were told: “You are not so much to blame as the old fathers. They have deceived you. They have taught you to think incorrectly. And that is the whole trouble with you people: you do not think straight. But now, perhaps, you have learned some sense.” But the Red leaders added: “Do not make the mistake of ent
ering another monastery or seminary and don’t get yourselves made into priests. We will soon have the whole of North China under our control, and if we catch you in another monastery, we won’t be so gentle with you next time.”
On October 4, seven more brothers were sent away with the same instructions. Seven brothers and young monks followed them on the 13 th. The latter group was released at the edge of no man’s land, between the two armies and in a coal field northwest of Peiping. As they approached the Nationalist lines, machine-gun bullets made the earth jump all about them, but they were untouched. A sentry brought them before his commanding officer, and they explained who they were. Soon they were put on a freight train headed for Peiping. They arrived in the city October 18, ragged and emaciated, and presented themselves at the college of the Marist Brothers.
After a time the various groups of Trappist refugees in Peiping gathered together and were given a small dairy farm in the suburbs. Here, they settled down in great poverty to live their communal life as well as they could. All of them were lay brothers or young monks not yet ordained priests. The Reds had kept all the surviving priests at Mu Chia Cheng. With them, were twenty-three other Cistercians. All were rated as “dangerous” prisoners and were frequently clubbed or flogged. Of the seven Europeans who had been in the community, three were dead, and two still remained behind. The latter were getting near the end when the young monks were released, and news of the death of one, Father Augustine, an aged Frenchman and the novice master of Yang Kia Ping, was reported soon after. The last European survivor was a Dutch Trappist from Koeningshoeven, Father Aelred Drost, who died in October 1947.
The position of the monks in Peiping was anything but secure, but they soon had the joy of welcoming Dom Paulinus Li, the Chinese prior of Our Lady of Liesse; he came from south China, where he had established a refuge for his monks in the province of Sze-Chuan. Plans were made to bring the survivors of Our Lady of Consolation to south China, where they would form a single community with the other refugees.
The Waters of Siloe Page 29
