Aloysius Jin Luxian

In this Chinese name, the family name is Jin.

Aloysius Jin Luxian, SJ (simplified Chinese: 金鲁贤; traditional Chinese: 金魯賢; pinyin: Jīn Lǔxián; June 20, 1916 – April 27, 2013) was a Chinese Catholic prelate who served as Bishop of Shanghai.

Biography

Jin was born in 1916[1]: 117  into a family that had been Catholic for generations. The family lived in the southern part of Shanghai.[1]: 118  Jin's father was a businessman.[1]: 118  Jin described his father as a man who was generous but distant and rarely spoke to the children of the family.[1]: 118 

Jin attended the prestigious St. Ignatius High School, run by the Jesuits.[1]: 118 

Jin's mother died when Jin was ten.[1]: 118  His father became more distant and died four years later.[1]: 118  After the death of the parents, relatives took advantage of the family's finances.[1]: 118  One of Jin's great uncles paid for him to continue his schooling and Jin entered minor seminary in fall 1932.[1]: 118  Two years later, Jin's sister died and his brother went missing.[1]: 118 

Jin entered the major seminary and taught at St. Ignatius.[1]: 119  During this period, Japan began the full-scale invasion of China and the Second-Sino Japanese War.[1]: 119  Jin believed the attitude of many superiors was not supportive of China.[1]: 119  As a seminarian, he had witnessed a fellow seminarian being disciplined for flying a Chinese flag after the Japanese first attacked Shanghai.[1]: 119  Academic Paul Philip Mariani writes that these experiences contributed to Jin's sense of Chinese nationalism.[1]: 119 

In 1938, Jin entered the Jesuits and was ordained a priest in 1945.[1]: 120  He lived under the Japanese occupation of Shanghai for much of this period.[1]: 120  After the defeat of Japan and resumption of the Chinese Civil War, Jin was sent to a rural parish in an active combat zone.[1]: 120  Jin observed what he deemed as the corruption of the Nationalist government.[1]: 120 

In June 1947, Jin's superiors directed him to go to France for his final year of Jesuit training (the tertianship).[1]: 120  In France, Jin was exposed to progressive movements in the Catholic Church, including the worker-priest movement which sought to rebuild the proletariat's trust in the church by having priests work in factories.[1]: 120 

From 1948 to 1950, Jin studied at Gregorian University in Rome, where he wrote his thesis The Revelation and the Unity of the Father and Son in the Gospel of St. John.[1]: 120–121 

He returned to Shanghai in 1951.[1]: 121 Jin was surprised to learn that church leaders believed that the defeated Nationalists would return to mainland China with support from the United States.[1]: 122  Jin viewed this prediction as delusional.[1]: 122  He contended that the church should find ways to coexist with the government of the People's Republic of China.[1]: 122  Church leaders in China reprimanded Jin for his views and blocked him from becoming the rector of a seminary.[1]: 122 

He was arrested with his bishop and dozens of clergy and laity in 1955,[2] during major crackdown against the counterrevolutionary clique of Ignatius Kung Pin-mei of Shanghai. Shortly after his arrest, he began to cooperate with the Chinese government.[2] Jin provided information about the church's resistance to government policies and accused Kung and others.[1]: 122  In a 2006 interview, Jin explained these actions by pointing out that his Jesuit superior Fernand Lacretelle had already provided a lengthy confession and that Jin felt that the damage had already been done.[1]: 122  Jin's trial was held in 1960 and he was sentenced to 18 years in prison.[1]: 122  The verdict stated that Jin did not deny his role and had revealed activities to mobilise the church against the government.[1]: 123 

The government incarcerated Jin at various prisons and labor camps, including Qincheng Prison.[1]: 113  The Chinese government had Jin work periodically as a translator.[1]: 113  Incarcerated during the Cultural Revolution, Jin worked with political figures who would later become politically rehabilitated after the end of the Cultural Revolution.[1]: 123 

He was released from prison in 1982 and became the founding rector of the Sheshan Major Seminary, outside of Shanghai.[3]

Jin was ordained bishop of Shanghai without Vatican approval in 1985.[2] He succeeded Louis Zhang Jiashu.[1]: 215  Jin's stance, like others in the patriotic church, was that the election of bishops by the local church was consistent with ancient church practice through which election by clergy and people of the diocese was common.[1]: 144  As bishop, he focused on bringing the doctrine of the Patriotic Catholic Church in China in line with doctrine, ecclesiology, and liturgy of the Catholic Church.[2] For example, China had been one of the few countries post-Vatican II where seminarians were trained on the Latin mass, and Jin focused on seminarians training in the new rite and in the vernacular.[1]: 260  Jin celebrated the first Chinese mass in the Sheshan Major Seminary on 30 September 1989.[1]: 261  Jin also oversaw the renovating and building of churches in the modern style.[1]: 280 

For decades, Jin did not seek a papal pardon or reconciliation with the Vatican, contending that doing so would compromise his ability to work with the Chinese government.[2] In 2006, he indicated his submission to papal authority privately,[2] the Holy See recognized him as Apostolic Administrator to bishop Msgr. Joseph Fan Zhongliang.[4][5]

Jin died in 2013.[1]: 280 

Views

Evaluating the historical legacy of the Chinese rites controversy, Jin contended that the Catholic Church had blundered because a "Catholic who followed the prohibition [on observing traditional rites] in order to remain a Christian could not longer consider himself to be Chinese ... Chinese Catholics now became outcasts in their own society, pariahs among their own people."[1]: 185–186 

Jin's view was that the Catholic Church had made previous errors in China that made it a "western religion for the West and not for China."[1]: 186  Jin cited the special privileges to Christian converts (a contributing factor to the Boxer Rebellion), the Catholic Church's recognition of the Japanese puppet state of Manchukuo, the Church's request that Chinese Catholics remain neutral during the Japanese invasion of China, and how slow the Church was to consecrate Chinese bishops.[1]: 186 

Based on this view of history, Jin stated that there were three lessons for the Church in China: (1) the Church must "share the fate of the people" in order to "put down roots", (2) pastoral activity should be based on inculturation, (3) the Church "must be independent of colonial powers and must be able to exercise regional self-determination."[1]: 186 

Jin's memoirs cover through 1982.[1]: 24  They were published for internal church use in 2009, and published in English in 2012 by Hong Kong University Press.[1]: 24 

See also

References

  1. ^ a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p q r s t u v w x y z aa ab ac ad ae af ag ah ai aj ak al am an ao ap aq ar as at Mariani, Paul Philip (2025). China's Church Divided: Bishop Louis Jin and the Post-Mao Catholic Revival. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press. ISBN 978-0-674-29765-4.
  2. ^ a b c d e f Moody, Peter (2024). "The Vatican and Taiwan: An Anomalous Diplomatic Relationship". In Zhao, Suisheng (ed.). The Taiwan Question in Xi Jinping's Era: Beijing's Evolving Taiwan Policy and Taiwan's Internal and External Dynamics. London and New York: Routledge. p. 190. ISBN 9781032861661.
  3. ^ ucanews.com reporter (April 27, 2013). "Bishop Jin of Shanghai dead at 96". UCA News.
  4. ^ Wang, Zhichen (April 27, 2013). "Msgr. Aloysius Jin Luxian, official bishop of Shanghai, has died". AsiaNews.
  5. ^ South China Morning Post (Apr 28, 2013). "Shanghai Catholic bishop Aloysius Jin Luxian dies at 96". South China Morning Post.

Further reading

  • Jin, Luxian (2012). The Memoirs of Jin Luxian, Volume One: Learning and Relearning 1916-1982. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press. ISBN 9789888139675.
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