At an underground church service in China, you have to pray as quickly as you can and hope you don’t get caught.   To have your faith be dangerous is such a foreign concept to me it is hard to imagine.  Do they have secret symbols like the early Christians  who had to have secret gatherings in people’s houses I wonder?

Officially, religious organizations in mainland China today must be Government-recognized and approved.  The Communist Party of China doesn’t want people owing allegiance to the Pope, rather than it.   Much the same reason why the leaders when Jesus lived did not like Christians either.
The Chinese Patriotic Catholic Association was established in 1957 to control the Catholic Church is China. It is the only organizational body of Catholics officially recognized by the government of the People’s Republic of China.
Not everyone in it is even Christian,  and Pope Benedict XVI has referred to the agents of the Association as “persons who are not ‘ordained’, and sometimes not even baptized”, who “control and take decisions concerning important ecclesial questions, including the appointment of Bishops”.

Currently, Christians in China can own Bibles, but they still face persecution if they practice Christianity outside of registered churches. Many bishops and priests have been jailed for doing so.

A report just this month by Christian Solidarity Worldwide and China Aid Association detailed a crackdown on “house churches” and referred to a level of expulsion of foreign Christians “not seen since the 1950s”. These are people who refuse to partake in the Official Church sanctioned by the Communist Party.

I know that we have talked about the pros and cons of allowing China to have the Olympics before, but it appears something positive has come out of it for the Chinese people. For the first time the Communist Party has allowed bibles to be freely distributed. It has been confirmed that 10,000 bibles and 30,000 New Testament’s will be printed, and 50,000 special bilingual booklets containing the Gospels will be made available in the Athlete’s Village and able to be freely distributed.

Perhaps this could be a first step to more religious freedom in China?   It would be awesome if the Chinese could be allowed to be freely  in communion with the Catholic Church in the rest of the world.