Satan Never Sleeps in Communist China
In 1962, Twentieth Century Fox released a movie based on a novel by Pearl Buck titled Satan Never Sleeps. The movie starred William Holden (Father O’Banion) and Clifton Webb (Father Bovard) as Catholic missionaries in China in 1949, as the Communists were taking power in village after village. It also starred the beautiful French actress France Nuyen, who played the part of a young Chinese woman named Siu Lan who is lovestruck for Father O’Banion, who as a dutiful priest resists her romantic overtures.
Priests and other clergymen have been forced to preach CCP ideology to the faithful.
The movie and Buck’s book portray the brutal hostility of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) to religion, in this instance Catholicism. According to a recent report, Satan is still not sleeping in today’s China.
Pearl Buck, a native of Hillsborough, West Virginia, was the daughter of Christian missionaries who took her to China in 1892 when she was five months old. Buck later returned to the United States to attend Randolph Macon Women’s College in Lynchburg, Virginia, but then went back to China after graduation in 1914. She lived in Suzhou after marrying John Buck in 1917.
She later moved to Nanjing and taught English literature at several universities there. She left China in 1934, hoping to return, but the struggles for political power between the Nationalists, Communists, and other warlords combined with Japan’s invasion of China prevented her return. Buck became a writer, earning a Pulitzer Prize for her novel The Good Earth and later a Nobel Prize for literature. In 1940, she led the China Emergency Relief Committee, which supplied medicine, food, and clothes to Chinese citizens. She was a remarkably prolific writer of both fiction and non-fiction works.
In the movie Satan Never Sleeps, when Chinese Communist forces take over the Catholic mission, the priests are tortured when they refuse to urge the people to be loyal to the communists, the church is ransacked, and all religious symbols are destroyed and replaced by Communist Party images.
In the church, the statue of the crucified Jesus is replaced by a large banner depicting Mao Zedong. In one scene, when the elderly parents of one of the Red Army soldiers attempt to carry the crucifix to safety, they are shot dead by other Red Army soldiers and the crucifix is thrown into a fire with other religious objects.
Religious Freedom Absent in China
In a recent report from the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom titled “The Sinicization of Religion: China’s Coercive Religious Policy,” Dylan Schexnaydre writes that Chinese President Xi Jinping “has implemented the coercive ‘sinicization of religion’ policy,” which calls for the “complete subordination of religious groups to the CCP’s political agenda and Marxist vision for religion.”
The CCP, the report notes, uses regulations and state-controlled religious organizations to “incorporate CCP ideology into every facet of religious life for Buddhists, Catholic, and Protestant Christians, Muslims, and Taoists.” The report notes the genocidal policies of the CCP against the Muslim Uyghurs in Xinjang Province, the political reeducation of Buddhist monks and nuns and the removal of Buddhist “religious imagery from monastaries and shrines, and the increasingly repressive crackdown on Catholic and Protestant Christians.
In an echo of some of the scenes from Satan Never Sleeps, the National Catholic Register reports that CCP officials “have ordered the removal of crosses from churches and have replaced images of Christ and the Virgin Mary with images of President Xi Jinping.”
Religious texts have been censored by CCP officials. Priests and other clergymen have been forced to preach CCP ideology to the faithful, and those who refuse have been “disappeared” by CCP authorities. CCP slogans are displayed in churches. Catholic bishops are forced to enroll in the state/party-controlled Bishops’ Conference of the Catholic Church in China. Catholics and other religious groups who attempt to practice their faith outside of party-approved religious associations are subject to criminal prosecution as “cults” under Chinese law.
The article in the National Catholic Register quotes Nina Shea of the Hudson Institute’s Center for Religious Freedom, who notes that the CCP is “trying to sever the Catholic Church in China from the pope.” And Pope Francis did not help the cause of religious freedom when he signed a secret agreement with the CCP giving party officials a veto on the appointment of bishops in China.
That agreement, She says, “makes no accommodation for bishops who resist joining the [state-approved] association for reasons of conscience nor does it address religious persecution.” The religious persecution of Catholics, Shea says, is “the most repressive … since the Mao era.” Satan never sleeps in Communist China.
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