Aloysius Jin Luxian dies at 96; Shanghai bishop

Shanghai Bishop Aloysius Jin Luxian, who revived the Catholic Church in China’s financial hub after years of Maoist persecution, died Saturday, the Communist Party’s official Catholic Patriotic Assn. said in a statement on its website. He was 96.

Jin’s death leaves one of China’s largest and wealthiest dioceses in a deeply unsettled state, underscoring continuing tensions generated by the ruling Communist Party’s insistence on tightly controlling all organized religions.

Jin’s first anointed successor as acting bishop, Joseph Xing Wenzhi, resigned last year for reasons still unclear, and his replacement, Thaddeus Ma Daqin, was placed under house arrest at Shanghai’s Sheshan Seminary after enraging party officials by renouncing his membership in the party-controlled Catholic association.

Born into a Catholic family in Shanghai in June 1916, Jin was ordained as a Jesuit priest in 1938 and spent several years studying in France, Germany and other European nations. Returning to his native Shanghai in 1951, Jin was imprisoned for nearly two decades under Communist China’s founder, Mao Zedong, who ordered Chinese Catholics to cut their ties with the Vatican and jailed hundreds of priests and nuns as counter-revolutionaries.

Jin was paroled in 1972 and put to work as a translator based on his knowledge of several European languages. Following Mao’s death in 1976, he was formally released and named Shanghai bishop in 1988 by the Patriotic Assn. Although the Vatican recognized another priest as Shanghai bishop, Jin worked to recover church property and rebuild congregations, achieving a remarkable degree of independence from the authorities in Beijing.

China has an estimated 8 million to 12 million Catholics, about half of whom worship in congregations outside the control of the Patriotic Assn.

Jin served on the official advisory body to China’s rubber-stamp parliament as well as the Patriotic Assn., making him a frequent target of critics who argued he was too cooperative with the authorities.

He acknowledged those complaints in a 2005 interview with the Associated Press, saying he hoped the appointment of his successor would heal the rift between the official church and the semi-clandestine one that defies party control. The two disagree most sharply over the appointment of bishops, and it remains unclear whether the Vatican and Beijing will be able to forge a consensus on a new Shanghai bishop.