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At 108 years old, the world’s oldest Catholic monk in China has passed away. His long life stands as a testament to the brutal "death march" with which Mao's communist forces decimated the monasteries of Yangjiaping and Liesse in the 1940s, as well as the 1956 rebirth of the Abbey of Our Lady of Joy in Hong Kong.
The Chinese-language weekly of the Diocese of Hong Kong, Kung Kao Po, reported that Father Benedict Chao, a Trappist monk from the Abbey of Our Lady of Joy on Lantau Island, passed away on July 31. His passing leaves the distinction of being the world's oldest Trappist monk to Sister Sebastiana Yamaguchi Teruko, a 107-year-old Asian nun at Imari Abbey in Japan.
Father Chao’s 79-year religious journey was defined by far more than his extraordinary longevity. His funeral on August 14 marks the final farewell to the last surviving member of the Trappist group that endured communist persecution in China before re-establishing their community in British Hong Kong during the 1950s with the help of PIME missionary Bishop Enrico Valtorta.
Born in 1918 in Chengting, Hebei Province, Chao entered the original Abbey of Our Lady of Joy (Liesse) at age 23 in 1941. The monastery had been founded in 1928 as an offshoot of Our Lady of Consolation—China's first Cistercian abbey, established in 1883 in the Yangjiaping Mountains by French monks from Notre Dame de Sept-Fons.
When Father Chao joined in 1941, the monastic community was already familiar with wartime hardship. Japanese forces had occupied the monastery of Our Lady of Joy in 1937, leading to the imprisonment and death of several monks. However, the most harrowing chapter of their ordeal began in 1947, the year Father Chao took his perpetual vows.
Mao’s communist forces targeted Yangjiaping Abbey first. The monastery was home to roughly 75 monks, the vast majority of whom were Chinese due to a surge in local vocations. Commenting on this phenomenon, Dom Louis Brun, the third abbot of Our Lady of Consolation, observed:
"It has been said that the Chinese have a certain aptitude for contemplation and are more predisposed than some other peoples to the contemplative life, and this is attributed to their sobriety, their hard life, the existence of many Buddhist and Taoist monasteries, the meditative nature of the people, less inclined to action than the Europeans... We could say, something that will be seen by many as a paradox, that the Rule of Saint Benedict seems to have been written for the Chinese.”
Caught on the front lines of the Chinese Civil War in the summer of 1947, Yangjiaping was overrun. Communist forces incited local villagers to loot the grounds and subjected the monks to public beatings, torture, and revolutionary trials aimed at forcing them to renounce their faith.
The systematic destruction culminated on August 30. After burning the remaining structures, the forces bound the monks with wire or chains and forced them on a brutal "death march" through the mountains of northern China. Carrying the sick and elderly on their shoulders through heavy rains, the monks were forced to scavenge for food, forbidden from talking, and whipped if caught praying or nodding off. Up to three monks died daily from sheer exhaustion and starvation.
In January 1948, following a final tribunal in Panpou, the sub-prior Father Chrysostom Chang, age 29, was executed alongside five fellow monks. Right before his execution, Father Chang declared to his brethren:
"We die for the cause of God. Let us raise our hearts to him for the last time in the total offering of our being."
Father Chang became the leading figure among the 33 recognized martyrs of Yangjiaping, a group consisting of 30 Chinese monks, a Frenchman, a Dutchman, and a Canadian.
The community at Liesse suffered a similar fate. Attacks forced the remaining monks to flee to Xindu, near Chengdu, to temporarily reassemble. Recognizing that safety there would be brief, the abbot arranged for a small group—including Father Chao—to escape China for the Monastery of Notre-Dame-des-Prairies in Manitoba, Canada. By 1951, communist forces had liquidated the remaining Xindu community, leaving the Canadian refugees to carry forward the plan to rebuild.
Prior to relocating to Hong Kong, the exiled Chinese monks spent several months at Holy Trinity Abbey in Utah to learn cheese-making and improve their English. At the request of Bishop Valtorta, the British governor of Hong Kong granted the monks an isolated plot on Lantau Island. Working by hand, eight monks built the new monastery, officially opening it on February 19, 1956.
To establish financial self-sufficiency, the monks brought dairy cows to Lantau, producing butter, cheese, and milk. Their produce quickly became renowned throughout Hong Kong, bringing wide recognition to the "Trappist Haven Monastery."
Father Chao was elected as the community's third prior in 1974, leading the monastery until 1998. Shortly after, in January 2000, the Cistercian order officially recognized the Lantau foundation as an autonomous abbey, restoring its original name: the Abbey of Our Lady of Joy. Through the endurance of Father Chao and his brethren, the prayerful witness and legacy of the Hebei Trappists endure to this day.
Source - https://www.asianews.it/en/east-asia/hong-kong/farewell-to-father-chao-the-last-of-the-trappist-martyrs-of-hebei
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