Chinese Rallying Point

In Rome last week for an audience with Pope John, frail, pale Thomas Cardinal Tien Ken-sin, 69, was halfway to a new assignment--his first since 1948. In that year, as the Chinese Reds were advancing against the Nationalists, Chinese Cardinal Tien, suffering from a heart ailment, left Peking for Shanghai and then for a long recuperation in the still peaceful British Crown Colony of Hong Kong. After China fell to the Communists, the cardinal retired to a seminary of his congregation, the missionary Society of the Divine Word, near Chicago.

No assignment came from Pope Pius XII, who was said to be irked that the cardinal had left his post. But John XXIII, deeply concerned over the Chinese Communists' efforts to establish a tame "national" Catholic Church in schism from Rome, felt that Cardinal Tien could serve on Formosa as a rallying point for Asian Catholicism and as a symbol of papal interest in the Far East.

He installed him as apostolic administrator in Formosa, which now has 200,000 Catholics (up from 12,000 in the past ten years).

"I didn't go back before to avoid increasing the Communist persecution of the mainland priests," said Cardinal Tien last week. "But now the situation could not be worse, and perhaps my return will give the Catholics moral encouragement."

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