FATHER YANN BILLOT
By Theresa Marie Moreau
Blessed are they that suffer persecution for
justice’ sake: for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
– Matthew 5:10 –
Intruders muscled their way inside Tousewe Catholic Orphan Asylum, one inauspicious night in Shanghai, March 1952.
“Billot is to come with us to the Security Police. He can no longer act as director of this orphanage, by order of the People’s Government,” a Communist authority read from a summons clutched in his hand.
Dozens of orphans, adolescent and teenage boys, surrounded the uninvited strangers and immediately protested the arrest of their director, Father Yann Billot (1901-83, Society of Jesus).
“We are the People!” they yelled. “We are the Government!”
Forming a human shield around the priest, they rushed him to his room on the third floor of the orphanage, crowded around the door to guard their own guardian and blocked the stairway, preventing any of the officers from gaining access.
And so they stood.
The orphans refused to yield, and the authorities refused to concede defeat. Rather than retreat, they insisted and assured the young bodyguards that the foreigner would only have to report to the police station and then would be able to immediately return home.
But the boys knew better than to trust the untrustworthy.
Since May 1949 – when mud-spattered Communist troops marched victoriously into Shanghai after stomping the Nationalist soldiers in the outskirts of the city – the Catholic faithful learned of priest after priest, native and foreign-born, dragged off to harrowing prisons or torturous detention centers.
Some returned alive, some returned dead, some never returned.
After a two-hour stalemate, Father Billot coaxed his protectors to step aside, as he voluntarily emerged from his room. In an attempt to avoid more trouble, he surrendered to the police and agreed to go with them. But he didn’t go alone. From the orphanage to the station, all the way through the Zikawei (Shanghainese for Xujiahui) District, more than 125 orphans surrounded their director and noisily passed through the streets.
“This is a good man!” they yelled.
“This is a man without fault!” they testified in shouts to the men, women and children, who vacated storefronts, food stalls and homes, to fill the streets and crane their necks to see who screamed and why.
“We protest his arrest!” the orphans hollered.
Once at their destination, Father Billot breached his line of defense, climbed the steps, paused, turned toward his crusaders, raised his hand, blessed them, turned back around and disappeared from view as he passed through the entryway.
Determined to wait, the orphans pitched camp and resolutely stationed themselves in a semicircle outside the entrance. Observing all, the youthful sentries watched the front door open and close, as they looked for the reappearance of the spiritual father of their orphanage.
Tousewe Catholic Orphan Asylum had been established by Catholic missionaries, in 1864, at 448 old Phushi (Shanghainese for Puxi) Road. Waifs received not only shelter, food and clothing, but also a basic education, with an additional two years of training in a skill or a trade – such as blacksmithing, bookbinding, carpentry, mechanical arts, metalwork, painting, printing, stained glass, statuary or woodwork – in one of the institution’s world-class, world-renowned, award-winning technicalschools and workshops.
While waiting for the re-emergence of their director, little did they foresee that within a year, the Communist Civil Affairs Bureau would not only expel all orphans from Tousewe (Shanghainese for Tushanwan; translation: the mound at the turn in the way), but the regime would also grab control of all workshops, for the Communist State owned and controlled all means of production and distribution.
After two hours, the door swung open one more time and there stood their shepherd at the top of the steps, ready to tend to his lambs.
“Father Billot!” they joyfully shouted and ran to him, cheering all the way back home.
Once more at the orphanage, the young men did their best to give their priest around-the-clock protection to prevent any attempt of abduction; however, only a few days later, predatory police officers took advantage of the dark night, swooped in and snatched him up.
Father Billot’s orphans never saw him again.
Locked up in notorious Shanghai Municipal Prison, commonly called Tilanqiao (translation: carry basket bridge) by local Shanghainese, the Catholic missionary found himself in the hands of harsh interrogators: 19 times for several hours at a time. When he refused to sign his coerced “confession,” his torturers pulled his arms behind his back and tightly clamped on a pair of manacles, which dug into his flesh, relentlessly, for the next 24 hours.
After languishing in prison for 10 months, Father Billot fell ill with pleurisy, a painful inflammation of the lining of the lungs.
Transferred to the prison’s infirmary, he noticed another priest, Father Shih-Hsien “Joseph” Shen (old form of Shixian Shen, 1917-53), suffering on a bed nearby. He had been arrested 16 months earlier, on September 7, 1951, the 30th anniversary of the founding of the Legion of Mary, an organization the Communist-led People’s Government considered an enemy of the State.
A distinguished intellectual from Hankow (old form of Hankou), Father Shen received the priestly Sacrament of Holy Orders, in Rome, in 1942, and also earned doctorates in Canon Law and Theology. Assigned to the Catholic Central Bureau, 197 Route Ghisi (former name of Yueyang Road), he worked constantly with the Legion of Mary, spread throughout China by Father William Aedan McGrath (1906-2000, Missionary Society of Saint Columban).
Multilingual, Father Shen translated from English letters into Chinese characters the “Legio Mariae: The Official Handbook of the Legion of Mary,” written by Irishman and Legion founder Francis “Frank” Michael Duff (1889-1980). Assisting Father Shen in the literary task was Father Che-Ming “Matthias” Chen (old form of Zhemin Zhen, 1909-62), private secretary to the apostolic nuncio to China, Archbishop Antonio Riberi (1897-1967).
Completely dedicating himself to the Legion of Mary, Father Shen once told a group of Legionaries, “This is my life.”
It may also have been his death.
From Father Billot’s prison sickbed, he noticed that Father Shen constantly moved his lips in prayer.
“Your sufferings are not without profit to God and the Church,” Father Billot whispered to him.
“We are six. We are all martyrs for Christ!” he replied.
The six he spoke of were himself and the five arrested with him at the Missionary Society of Saint Columban’s rectory, 287 Rue Maresca (former name of Wuyuan Road), who included:
Father Chen, then-Father Joseph Gustave Roland Prévost Godard (1914-2005, Society of Foreign Missions of Paris), Father François Xavier Legrand (1903-84, Congregation of the Immaculate Heart of Mary of Scheut), Father McGrath, and Franciscan Bishop Edouard Gabriel Quint (1905-83, Order of Friars Minor).
When the medical staff – incarcerated doctors usually tended to the incarcerated – surrounded the patient in extremis and attempted to use a syringe to draw out some of the pleural effusion, the fluid collecting in Father Shen’s lungs, the priest started convulsing.
Ignoring regulations that forbade communication between prisoners and direct orders that he remain in his bed, Father Billot rushed to the side of his dying confrere and, with his right hand, traced the sign of the cross, twice, in absolution.
Immediately, Father Shen threw out his arms in the form of a cross and died, on January 10, 1953.
A few days later, on January 15, Father Billot was still quite ill when prison guards returned him to the general-population cellblock, where he found himself standing before a panel of “judges,” interrogators who had determined his fate and prepared his sentence.
“Expulsion forever from China!” one of the judges ordered.
Hours later, the native of Guingamp, France, climbed aboard a passenger train, with a small contingent of armed guards to escort him to the southern border of the unraveling People’s Republic of China, founded on October 1, 1949. From there he would be forced to enter the flourishing British Crown Colony of Hong Kong.
As a seminarian, he had first arrived in the churning Republic of China, in 1926. Continuing his higher studies of Letters, Philosophy and Divinity, he was ordained a priest, in Shanghai, on June 1, 1935. Subsequently, he devoted most of his vocation guiding young lives at Saint Ignatius High School, Zikawei Primary School and Tousewe.
Banished from China, he was forced to leave behind his work, his life, his fellow priests and his orphans.
In the journey southward, he was just one in a mass exodus of near-dead clergy and religious, foreigners formerly from the West who had made their homes in the East. Men and women, dry martyrs who had survived Communist prisons and persecution, slowly advanced to the border, the dividing line between slavery and freedom.
Along the way, Father Billot joined Father François Théry (1890-1982, Society of Jesus). Born in Lille, France, the Jesuit had been in charge of – until his arrest – the Catholic Central Bureau’s labor and legal department. He had also served as a professor of law at the Catholic Tsinku University, in Tientsin (old form of Jingu Daxue, in Tianjin).
In April 1951, authorities invaded the Jesuit seminary, locked up Father Théry’s study with all his books and then sealed the room closed by pasting across the door a big sheet of white paper with the characters of their names displayed prominently.
Defiant, the Jesuit took his own sheet of paper, signed his own name across it and pasted that atop the Communist seal. The next day, while sitting in the garden with Father McGrath and other priests, he expressed to them how he would never give in to the Communists.
That was the last anyone saw of him, as Father Théry vanished, on April 30, 1951.
The following day, May Day – International Workers’ Day, a day of sacrosanct celebration by Socialists – tremendous demonstra-tions shook the Canidrome, a stadium built, in 1928, in Shanghai’s French Concession. Originally erected for greyhound racing, after the Communist Party’s totalitarian regime grabbed power, the arena was subsequently used for show trials of political enemies and thunderous rallies of agitated mobs.
Thousands of spectators – ordered by the People’s Government to report to the stadium and to participate – screamed and cursed at their intended object of hatred: Father Théry. With his long beard and cassock, he stood atop the stage, on exhibition as an enemy of the State.
After that, no one heard anything about the legal scholar until his release, when he and Father Billot both limped their way to the border, where they arrived, on January 18, 1953.
Too weak to walk on their own, the two men leaned on each other as they staggered the final feet in the land of enslavement, crossed Lo Wu Bridge – a short span that spilled into the land of freedom – and left behind the Communist dreamer’s Utopia of death and destruction.