Nomadic priest keeps the faith alive
The sun is setting as a small entourage makes its way slowly along a winding mountain path in a remote corner of Yunnan province. Father Joseph Dang, easily identified by his white baseball cap, has almost completed the two-hour trek down the slippery path after saying Mass in a small village when his mobile phone rings. He chats for a few seconds and then changes direction, heading off back up the mountain.
The call came from the family of an old man who had just died. By the end of the day, the young priest will have spent six hours on foot serving his scattered flock of 7,000, who live in an area overlooking the upper reaches of the Lancang River (as Chinese call the Mekong).
Dang, 39, is on what might appear to be an impossible mission. His hope is to keep the faith alive among a 150-year-old Catholic community on the Tibetan plateau, devout descendants of the first generation of Tibetans who were converted to Catholicism by French missionaries in the 1860s.
The native of Xian , in Shaanxi province, has been visiting the area several times a year since 2002. He is probably the first priest many local Catholics saw after the communists ejected the last foreign missionaries in 1951. Despite persecution at the hands of angry Tibetan lamas and later by communist officials, the community has clung to its faith.
Their story begins in 1846, when Pope Gregory XVI ordered the Missions Etrang?res de Paris to convert Tibetans to Catholicism. The lamas who then ruled Tibet kicked the priests out, driving them into Yunnan. They erected several churches in Tibetan villages on the west bank of the Lancang, where today crucifixes compete for space on the hillsides with Buddhist stupas.
The work of the foreign priests was no easier here. Half the 44 Europeans died of illness or at the hands of Buddhist assassins. In 1905, the Cigu Church was razed by Tibetan monks and two of the French missionaries beheaded, their heads allegedly hung on the gates.
In the 1930s, the beleaguered French priests turned the mission over to the Swiss Mission of St Bernard, whose members were, in turn, kicked out by the communist government in 1951. Catholics were later driven underground as the communists clamped down on religion, but they prayed quietly in their own homes and secretly brought their children up in the faith. During the decade-long Cultural Revolution that began in 1966, they hid their Tibetan-language prayer books from plundering Red Guards.