The Legionaries of Sheshan
Kevin O'Neill
IF YOU take the number 36 bus northwest of Shanghai and put up with it rattling through dense traffic for 30 minutes or more, you journey past old rice-paddies that are being taken over by the new estates of the well-to-do. Eventually you reach the terminus of the route in the shade of the hill of Sheshan.
On top of the hill is a beautiful old church. You can walk up winding paths to the church as I did one cold January day, taking care on the black ice that rimmed the paths. You may meet individuals or small groups praying in front of statues and grottoes.
I came across three ladies who looked as if they were in their 70s, kneeling on the black ice in front of a statue of Our Lady. They were saying the Rosary and I watched them for a while. Their voices were a low murmur and their cadence wasn’t interrupted by a loud crash nearby which I later learned was from an artillery camp and whose artillery practice was often timed to coincide with daily Mass. Such is life in China.
The ladies continued to pray and I realised that their Rosary was not just five decades, but the entire 15 that they recited unfazed and unflinching as a gust of cold air rattled up the path and made me shiver.
When they finished, and stood up, the youngest lady turned to me and gave me a smile. I couldn’t resist the invitation to say, ‘hello.’ She asked where I was from - “Ah - Xin Xilin Ren!” (New Zealander). I asked where she was from and she told me that she and her companions were from a rural village around two hours bus trip away.
I asked why she came here. Her story was simple. She and her two friends were members of the Legion of Mary. They worked in their tiny village, visiting the sick and the needy that were neglected in the era of a self-reliant China. Her two friends had visited a sick farmer taking him a hot meal daily and on one visit had left him one of their miraculous medals.
A cadre had also visited the man, to ascertain when he would return to work, and he glimpsed the tiny medal. In China it remains an offence for Christians to actively spread their faith and the cadre had no hesitation in bringing the two elderly ladies before a magistrate, who sentenced them both to three months in a labour camp for the crime of spreading religion.
They had completed their sentence the previous day, and the first thing they had to do was to journey to the shrine at Sheshan to say thank you to Our Lady for helping them to get through their sentence, and also for giving them the opportunity to do penance “in a small way” (“Xiao - xiao”) in suffering for their faith.
I watched them walk slowly away up the hill to the main church. One of them had a limp. I wondered whether their experience would stop them visiting the sick and giving out miraculous medals in the future. Somehow, I doubted it.
