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Ignatius Kung Pin-Mei
Chinese Roman Catholic cardinal From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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Ignatius Kung Pin-Mei (simplified Chinese: 龚品梅; traditional Chinese: 龔品梅; pinyin: Gōng Pǐnméi; Wade–Giles: Kung P'in-mei; 2 August 1901 – 12 March 2000) was a Chinese Catholic prelate who served as Bishop of Shanghai from 1950 until his death in 2000. He spent 30 years in prison for defying attempts by China's Communist Party to control Catholics in the country through the government-approved Chinese Catholic Patriotic Association. At the time of his death in exile in the United States, he was the oldest member of the College of Cardinals, to which he was secretly appointed by Pope John Paul II in 1979.
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Kung was born in 1901 into a Shanghai family with Catholic roots spreading back at least five generations.[1] He would become a priest in 1930, Bishop of Souchou in October 1949 just after Mao Zedong drove Chiang Kai-Shek to Taiwan,[2] and Archbishop of Shanghai on 15 July, 1950.[3] As Archbishop during the first half of the 1950s, Kung alongside Guangzhou's Dominic Deng Yiming refused to renounce the Vatican despite the demands of and threats by Mao,[4] to whose regime religious martyrdom had already become an embarrassment, since liturgical services became sites of anti-Communist demonstration.[3]
Declassified Chinese government documents confirm that Mao's aim was to completely destroy the Catholic Church in China, not merely to bring it into line with the regime.[5]
On September 8, 1955, Kung, along with several hundred priests and Church leaders, was arrested and imprisoned. He was sentenced five years later to life imprisonment for counter-revolutionary activities,[6] and replaced by Louis Zhang Jiashu, who was not approved by the Pope.[7] When replaced by Zhang, Kung was found guilty in a public trial of
charges of cooperating in "a scheme of US imperialists and the Vatican to subvert the Chinese people's democratic regime".[8]
Kung was secretly named a Cardinal in pectore in the consistory of 1979 by Pope John Paul II. When that consistory occurred the press almost generally believed Kung was the in pectore cardinal.[9][10] The formula in pectore is used when a pope names a cardinal without announcing it publicly in order to protect the safety of the cardinal and his congregation. After he was released in 1986, Kung was kept under house arrest until 1988, despite the efforts of his family to permit him to leave China. Under the escort of his nephew Joseph Kung,[11] Ignatius left China for medical treatment[12] and settled in the United States. In his first interview after being exiled, Kung highlighted how there was no freedom of religion in China.[12]
Kung learned he was a cardinal during a private meeting with the Pope in the Vatican in 1989,[1] and his membership in the College of Cardinals was made public in 1991.[13][14] By then, he had reached 80, so he did not have the right to participate in a conclave.
Kung died in 2000, aged 98, from stomach cancer in Stamford, Connecticut. His funeral was held at St. John the Evangelist Church (now the Basilica of Saint John the Evangelist) in Stamford with Cardinal James Francis Stafford, President of the Pontifical Council for the Laity, presiding. Kung's body was then transported to Star of the Sea Church in San Francisco, California, for a Low Mass with Cardinal Paul Shan Kuo-hsi of Taiwan presiding. A requiem Pontifical High Mass using the Tridentine Liturgy in Latin was said the following day at Five Wounds Parish in San Jose, California, with Cardinal Shan again presiding.
Kung is interred next to Dominic Tang, S.J. (Archbishop of Canton, China) at Santa Clara Mission Cemetery in Santa Clara, California.[15]
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