May 6 — With a weary creak in her voice, 69-year-old Rose Hu doesn't sound very different from most people her age. She speaks a little breathlessly, her words carefully paced — perhaps as much a factor of her age as her status as an immigrant to America.
But Hu is no ordinary immigrant. For almost a third of her life, from young adulthood to the fading glow of middle-age, Hu was a prisoner of the Chinese government. For 26 years, she saw little but prisons and labor camps.
And if her voice belies the hardship she has suffered, the words she uses do not. "I have cancer, I have diabetes. I am a dying person," she told ABCNEWS.
Hu does not regret her time in jail though. Almost a half-century ago, she was arrested by China's communist authorities because she belonged to a group that authorities labeled counterrevolutionary.
That group was the Legion of Mary, a worldwide organization of Roman Catholic lay people.
Focus on Catholicism
China's antagonism toward religion has been well-documented by practitioners of Falun Gong and Buddhist followers of the Dalai Lama — but few people know Catholics in China face similar scrutiny.
Unlike Tibetan Buddhism, which threatens Beijing with a separatist movement, and Falun Gong, which China has classified as an "evil cult," Catholicism is one of China's five officially sanctioned religions. The other four are Protestantism, Buddhism, Taoism and Islam.
However, Catholicism's official status means that Catholics are required to register with a "patriotic association," which monitors activity like personnel selection, sermon themes, dissemination of religious publications and congregation size.
For Catholics, this is especially troublesome, because many believe the Chinese state is claiming powers that belong only to the pope.
Some Catholics so dislike this arrangement that they have joined or established "underground" churches, which operate independent of the government — and against the law.
Hu was jailed because she was associated with the former bishop of Shanghai — who vowed allegiance only to the pope and refused to cooperate with the patriotic associations.
To this day, Hu has harsh words for members of what she calls that other church: "They are against [the] Catholic Church," she said. "They don't believe in God."
Despite government opposition, the underground churches have been relatively successful. According to official government statistics, there are about 4 million Catholics in China.
The Vatican says there are actually 12 million Catholics in China — 8 million who have not registered with a patriotic association.
The Rev. Matthias Lu, a Catholic priest based in the United States and an authority on Catholicism in China, voiced typical criticisms of what he called the "patriotic church."
"The bishops and priests are inviolate and illicit. They have excommunicated themselves. They have defrocked themselves," he said.
Shades of Gray
However, the difference among China's Catholics is not as stark as it might seem. "It's not quite that black and white," said Mickey Spiegel of Human Rights Watch.
There are clergymen in the patriotic church who are recognized by the Vatican, she said. Experts also noted many other Western churches were cooperating with the Chinese government as well, having realized it's better than operating underground operations or not operating at all.
There are as many as 600 "joint ventures" between churches outside China and the patriotic associations, said H. Pierson French, an adviser to the Episcopal Church on companion relationships with the China.
"It's like with Toyota," he said, comparing the joint ventures to the Japanese automaker opening factories in the United States. "You have to comply with their rules."
French said he saw the patriotic associations as a Chinese attempt to make foreign religions more "indigenous." The Christian services he has seen in China were much more evangelical and less hierarchical than the ones he is familiar with, he said.
Richard Madsen, a sociologist at the University of California at San Diego who has studied Catholicism in China, said the growth of the underground church was not completely attributable to anti-Beijing sentiment.
The patriotic associations are sometimes slow to acknowledge new churches or allow congregations to expand, he said, so people sometimes get together and practice on their own, creating what could be called an underground church.
He said most Chinese Catholics were actually "kind of in the middle" about government oversight. As for those who refused to cooperate with the government, he said: "Most Catholics I met in China see these people as political hacks. They don't see them as political leaders."
Old Wounds, Barely Healed
Some Western experts sympathize with Beijing's tight lid on religion. They said China was still smarting from its experience in the 19th century, when missionaries helped European colonists carve it up.
"Everything is predicated on foreigners trying to get a piece of the pie," French said. Like Falun Gong, whose leader resides in New York, and Tibetan Buddhism, whose leader resides in India, Catholics were especially threatening to Beijing because their leader resides in Rome, he said.
And Spiegel acknowledged Beijing was a little easier on religions with connections to China, like Taoism. "They certainly haven't had the problems that so-called Western religions have had," Spiegel said.
Relations between Beijing and the Holy See were rocky from the start. When the Communists first took over in 1949, they expelled foreign missionaries and jailed native clergymen, claiming they were enemies of the revolution — and broke off ties with the Holy See.
The Holy See went on to recognize Taiwan as the legitimate government of China.
Pope John Paul II's role in the transformation of Eastern Europe's communist strongholds in the early 1990s also alarmed Beijing.
But the two sides have reconciled in the intervening years. In October 2001, the pope apologized to China for any "errors" made by church missionaries in the past.
"I feel deep sadness for those errors and limits of the past, and I regret that in many people these failings may have given the impression of a lack of respect and esteem for the Chinese people on the part of the Catholic Church," he said.
Looking Toward the Future
However, it's not entirely clear if China's "two classes" of churches will come together anytime in the future. "If the political will was there they'd have got this thing solved in no time flat," Spiegel said.
The two sides still seem unwilling to give up a number of matters: China wants the Holy See to end its recognition of Taiwan, it wants the last word in ordinations, and the Vatican feels it still owes something to the priests who refused to cooperate with Beijing.
If this reconciliation should come, experts differed on what would be the ultimate result.
"I think that the state has very little interest in religion in ideological terms," said Daniel Bays, a history professor at Calvin College in Michigan. "The state is on the lookout for anything that can conceivably threaten it or have the organizational capacity to threaten it."
But Spiegel believed Beijing would still work toward eliminating religion. In all its policy statements, China has declared itself an atheist country, she said. "They recognize getting rid of religion is a long process, but they need cooperation, so they control believers," she said.
And despite China's apparent economic liberalization, Madsen said he expected Beijing to get more repressive in the future. As the economy gets more open, people move around more, and there are greater disparities in income, creating more forms of resentment — necessitating more control, he said.
For the moment, French said: "There doesn't seem to be any fear that old Mr. Wang down the street is keeping an eye on everyone and turning people in as they did in the Cultural Revolution."
It's very difficult to say that Chinese believers don't feel threatened, though. Many of the Chinese Catholic clergy contacted by ABCNEWS for this article said they would only speak anonymously, for fear of reprisal.
The Rev. Lu believed his group had "no future in public manifestation ... if they don't join the patriotic church, then they disappear," he said.
Rose Hu also says the attention she cultivated is dangerous. She wrote a book about her experiences, called Rejoice Within Sorrow. "Those who are like me, are few," she said.
But she repeats that she has no regrets about how her life turned out. "It's my privilege to take on such suffering," she said