Ignace Kung Pin-Mei

Who was Ignace Kung Pin-Mei?

Bishop of Shanghai at forty-nine, in a city the new regime was cutting off from Rome. Arrested in September 1955 with hundreds of priests and lay people, he was brought some months later, hands tied behind his back, into a dog-racing stadium to accuse himself before the crowd and denounce the pope; he shouted the opposite into the microphone, the crowd took it up, and he was dragged away. He spent thirty years in prison, many of them alone, and died in exile at ninety-eight.