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Tangshan Diocese has announced it will not bury deceased Bishop Paul Liu Jinghe until the government returns a former Church cemetery, prompting officials to take away clergy for questioning on Wednesday.
In an escalating standoff between Church and state, the announcement delaying the burial was made at Bishop Liu’s memorial service at Tangshan Cathedral on Tuesday, prompting two minutes of applause from the 3,000 people gathered.
In response, officials came on Wednesday morning and took clergy away to offices of the State Administration for Religious Affairs in their respective parishes.
The mobile phones of all priests and nuns in Tangshan, east of Beijing, are now being monitored, said a source who declined to be named.
The disagreement over the cemetery has escalated following the death of Bishop Liu aged 92 on December 11, a year after he suffered a heart attack which had left him bedridden.
Before his death, the bishop had demanded to be buried at Lulong Cemetery, the final resting place of the diocese’s first bishop, Ernst Geurts of Holland, who died in 1940.
The site became a church cemetery after priests and nuns were later buried there but it was wrecked during political turmoil in the 1950s, shortly after the Communists took power.
Since then, it has been used as farmland, and in 1993 – with the government’s permission – Bishop Liu reburied Geurts and other clergy in a corner of the 2.6 hectare site.
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