Aug 17 : A seminar on the topic ‘The Catholic Church in China’ was held in St. Joseph’s Seminary on the 17th of August, 2019. The speaker of the day was Fr. Vincent from China. He is presently the vice-rector of the Pontifical Urban University in the Vatican.
The speech was mainly centered on the persecution and the suffering the Church in China still undergoes. Real life examples of the faithful who stood for their faith and how they endured persecutions in the 19th century were vividly described. The speaker said that the faithful had their teeth pulled out one by one, they were made to kneel on the broken glass pieces, and were made to sleep naked on ice in the winter, and yet they stood for the Church. He said that the inspiration of these witnesses has strengthened the faith in China. He enumerated the statistics that presently there are 138 dioceses, 104 Bishops, 4,000 priests and more than 2,000 religious nuns in China.
The words of Tertullian were quoted at the end, “The blood of martyrs is the seed of the Church.”
