On Tuesday, 25 July, His Eminence Raymond Leo Cardinal Burke will celebrate a Pontifical Mass in honor of Our Lady of SheShan and to pray for China.
The Mass will be celebrated at 6PM at the Basilica of St. John the Evangelist in Stamford, Connecticut in the Diocese of Bridgeport.
The Mass is sponsored by the Cardinal Kung Foundation
Clergy attending the Mass please email Agnes Kung at cardinalkungfdn@gmail.com
Since the signing of the Provisional Vatican-China Agreement in 2018 – WHO KNOWS WHAT IT SAYS?!? WHO PUT IT TOGETHER?!? – and its renewal in 2020 and 2022, persecution of the Roman Catholic Church in China has significantly increased. Many bishops have been repeatedly arrested, released and rearrested or put under house arrest, seminaries closed, clergy were arrested and suffered months of re-education on “new theology” to force the priests to join the Independent Catholic Patriotic Association which is supervised directly by the Communist Party. Such atrocities have mostly been met with silence by Rome.
Mass via Livestream: https://stjohnbasilica.org/livestream
You can request holy cards of Our Lady of SheShan with a prayer authored by the late Pope Benedict XVI in 2008.
cardinalkungfdn@gmail.com
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God bless Raymond Leo Cardinal Burke!
Thank you for informing us of this!
Browsing around Wikipedia to see what I could piece together, I seem to find that it was under Jules Prosper París as Vicar Apostolic of Nanking that, after the demolition of the old church in 1923, the new – and current – basilica on top of Che-shan hill began slowly to be built in 1924 to be completed under Auguste Haouisée as first Apostolic Vicar of Shanghai in 1935, all under the daily supervision of the Portuguese Jesuit missionary-architect father François-Xavier Diniz. And, on June 14, 1924, the Servant of God Archbishop Celso Benigno Luigi Costantini as Apostolic Delegate to China together with twenty-five members of the episcopal conference he had called had climbed Che-shan hill and had solemnly consecrated China to the Virgin Mary.
There is a tantalizing statement that “In 1924, the first conference of bishops met in Shanghai and adopted the image of the reported apparition as Our Lady of China, or Our Lady Queen of China, and a painting depicting the mother of God bearing the child Jesus was commissioned and hung in the local church.” Nothing clarifies which “reported apparition” that was, however. (Other articles seem to suggest this was the one at Donglü in 1900.)
Sadly, the Japanese invasion followed in 1937. The “Sheshan Basilica” Wikipedia article notes “Peter Harmsen (‘Shanghai 1937 – Stalingrad on the Yangtse’ [2015]) gives an account of the battle around the basilica during the Chinese retreat from Shanghai.” About how things went under the Japanese occupation, I could find no details. But, after the Government of the Republic of China was forced to retreat to Taiwan, there were mass killings by the Communists in Shanghai and some 17 years later: “During the Cultural Revolution, Sheshan basilica was severely damaged. The stained-glass windows of the church, carvings along the Via Dolorosa, the statue atop the bell tower, and various other works of iconography were destroyed.”
The prayer authored by the late Pope Benedict XVI in 2008 rewards attentive reading, though I suspect that in the CNA article of 16 May 2008 which has the full English-language version, “trails” in the last paragraph resulted from accidental transposition of vowels in “trials”: “Our Lady of Sheshan, sustain all those in China, who, amid their daily trails, continue to believe, to hope, to love. May they never be afraid to speak of Jesus to the world, and of the world to Jesus. In the statue overlooking the Shrine you lift your Son on high, offering him to the world with open arms in a gesture of love. Help Catholics always to be credible witnesses to this love, ever clinging to the rock of Peter on which the Church is built.”
It’s heartbreaking, the Chinese Catholics and all Christians in China, how they suffer and it was Rome that did it. I’m appreciative about the Pontifical Mass for them, God bless Cdl. Burke. It would be excellent to see it for Nigeria. The poor Christians there are experiencing a genocide by the Muslims. Nobody in the world cares. God be with them.