Falun Gong demonstrators hold memorial pictures as they march on Capitol Hill in Washington, on July 17, 2014. (Jim Watson/AFP via Getty Images)
by Eva Fu and Frank Fang
July 2, 2021
Priests and nuns were forced to kneel down in front of a large bonfire, watching helplessly as the flames devoured their sacred instruments and burned their skin.
In another Chinese city, students wearing red armbands hit Catholics with sharp wooden sticks, throwing one priest into a fire pit after he collapsed in pain. They beat one nun to death after she refused to stomp on a statue of the Virgin Mary.
One Catholic priest was buried alive in Beijing after declining to give up his faith.
Unsettling as they might be, these acts of brutality documented by Hong Kong-based missionary Sergio Ticozzi were hardly out of the norm for faithful Chinese during the frenzy of the decade-long Cultural Revolution from 1966, when all forms of religious practices were declared “superstitious” and banned.
Nor was such repression unique to that particular period during the regime’s more than 70 years of ruling China.
