Cardinal Ignatius Kung, who died in the US on March 12th aged 98, spent 30 years in Chinese prisons and labour camps for his opposition to state control of religion.
Born in Shanghai, he came from an old Catholic family. His spiritual home was the Shanghai suburb of Xujiahui, a part of the Yangtse delta that had been the centre of Catholic worship since the early 17th century. He studied for the priesthood and was ordained in 1930 at the age of 28. In 1949, he was appointed Bishop of Shanghai and apostolic administrator to the dioceses of Nanjing and Suzhou, just days after the foundation of the People's Republic of China.
Cardinal Kung was closely connected with the Legion of Mary, set up in 1949 by the apostolic nuncio, Antonio Ribero. After Ribero was expelled from China in September 1951, Cardinal Kung continued to oversee the activities of the legion, a lay movement which reacted in much the same way to Communist rule as the Catholic church had in the face of 19th-century imperialism.
The Chinese Communist party attempted to deal with religion not by eliminating it, but by creating "patriotic", or government-sanctioned churches, free from outside influence. It was not quite so hard for Protestants, with the history of European Protestantism behind them, to declare independence from the rest of the world and follow the "three self movements" - self-government, self-support and self-propagation - although there were bitter arguments and many dissident groups of Protestants emerged.
For Catholics, the problem was more acute. Early in the Korean war, some Catholic priests in Sichuan, followed by the vicargeneral of Nanjing, began to call for a break with imperialism and
the outside world, a move that was condemned both by Pope Pius XII and Cardinal Kung. Despite his life-long defence of the Pope and papal authority, he was not unresponsive to political movements, but it was his opposition to the local "patriotic" Catholic church, and his refusal to allow its members to receive the sacraments, that led to his arrest in September 1955.
He was held without trial for five years, occasionally being brought out and paraded around Shanghai, where, according to his nephew, he defiantly shouted "Long live Christ the King, Long Live the Pope". Finally, in 1960, he was sentenced to life imprisonment for "leading a counter-revolutionary clique under the cloak of religion".
His fidelity was recognised by Pope John Paul II, who secretly proclaimed him a cardinal in 1979 while he was still in prison (it was not until 1991 that he was able to receive his red biretta in person at the Vatican). In 1985, after 30 years in prison - and long campaigns on his behalf by religious and human rights groups, and diplomatic pressure from Cardinal Sin of the Philippines - he was released, a very sick, old man.
In 1988, he was allowed to go to the US for medical treatment, but the compassion of the Chinese Communist Party was limited; his passport was withdrawn in 1998, leaving him a permanent exile.
Cardinal Ignatius Kung Pinmei: born 1901; died March, 2000