The first church at Xujiahui (徐家汇) was
built in 1847. A medium-sized, Greek style church was built in 1851 (This was demolished
in the 1980s to make way for the new headquarters of the Shanghai Diocese).
With the growth of Xujiahui as a centre of Catholicism, a
new, larger church was commissioned. Built by French Jesuits between 1905 and
1910, it is said to have once been known as "the grandest church in the
Far East." It can accommodate 2,500 worshippers at the same time.
In 1960 the Communist arrested and imprisoned the leaders
of the Shanghai Diocese. Ignatius Kung Pin-Mei, Bishop of Shanghai was arrested
in 1955 and sentenced to life imprisonment in 1960. In 1966, at the start of
the Cultural Revolution, Red Guards from Beijing vandalized the cathedral, tearing
down its spires and ceiling and smashing its roughly 300 square metres of
stained glass. Red Guards also beat up priests and nuns at the church.
Powerless to resist, Bishop Aloysius Zhang Jiashu knelt at the altar and prayed
until he was dragged away - for the duration of the Cultural Revolution, he was
"sent down" for labour, repairing umbrellas and washing bottles. For
the next ten years the Cathedral served as a state-owned grain warehouse.
In 1978 the cathedral was re-opened, and the spires were
restored in the early 1980s. The building's restoration is continuing. In 2002,
Wo Ye, a Beijing-born artist, and Father Thomas Lucas, a Jesuit from the
University of San Francisco, began a five-year project to replace the
cathedral's stained glass windows. The new windows incorporate Chinese
characters and iconography.
This postcard came from Yiyi Yan (6 October 2015)
Postcrossing.
This cathedral is on my bucket list of places to visit.
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