Chinese Scholars Expose Evils of "Canonized" MissionariesOver 20 Chinese experts on history and religions held a symposium Thursday, exposing the crimes committed by recently "canonized" foreign missionaries and their followers.Scholars listed a number of facts to illustrate that in mondern history Catholic missionaries' activities were closely linked with foreign forces' invasion of China. Prof. Dai Yi said, "lots of foreign missionaries followed the warships of foreign aggressors to China in and after the Opium War, and actually foreign aggression and missionaries' activities are combined into one. That is, missionaries' activities were an integral part of invasion, missionaries acted as guides and tools for foreign aggressors and in return, aggressors paved the way for the missionaries' activities." Some participants elaborated on the historic background and inner causes of "religious cases" in history, stressing that it is the foreign missionaries that should answer for the consequences because their monstrous evils exasperated the Chinese people and eventually fused the outburst of the Yi He Tuan (known as Boxers) Movement. Participants pointed out that foreign missionaries executed in certain "religious cases", such as Auguste Chapdelaine, Franciscus de Capillas and Albericus Crescitelli, had only themselves to blame for still being hated by people today, because they had stopped no evil. The Holy See, disregarding the strong opposition from the Chinese people, "canonized" these infamous missionaries, which reveals the Vatican's vicious intention to intervene in China's internal affairs through religious activities, the scholars said, pointing out that the "canonization" tramples on the sovereignty of the Chinese Catholic Church, as well as a severe provocation to the 1.2 billion Chinese people. The scholars all voiced their protest over the perverse and vicious deeds of the Vatican, saying that the present China is strong enough to protect its national security and national dignity and any attempt to distort history and humiliate the Chinese people is doomed to failure. According to the sponsors of the symposium, the participants are professors and researchers from the People's University of China, the Beijing University, the Beijing Normal University, the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences and other academic institutes, who specialize in history or religion. |
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