{"id":1924,"date":"2005-09-27T09:54:47","date_gmt":"2005-09-27T09:54:47","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/viamedia\/2005\/09\/from-the-east.html"},"modified":"2005-09-27T09:54:47","modified_gmt":"2005-09-27T09:54:47","slug":"from-the-east","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2005\/09\/from-the-east.html","title":{"rendered":"From the East"},"content":{"rendered":"

Vietnamese gov’t loosens seminary regulations – will allow new students every year, instead of every two years<\/a><\/p>\n

New pressures on Catholics in one Chinese province:<\/a><\/p>\n

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While there are signs of improvement in ties between the Vatican and Bejing, the Hebei government has launched a new campaign of persecution against the clandestine Catholic Church throughout the region. The campaign aims to have all Catholics, especially bishops and priests, registered with the State Office for Religious Affairs and to make them sign up to the Patriotic Association. "It seems we have gone back to the times of the Cultural Revolution, with intransigence and persecution," was the view of one believer. <\/p>\n

Hebei is the region with the largest number of Catholics (more than 1.5 million), where clandestine Catholics (not recognised by the government) are in strong majority. The campaign is backed by the Religious Affairs Office and by the police. Some government representatives have told unofficial bishops that "from now on, all the clergy, to distribute the sacraments, must have a special membership card conceded by the government." The motive behind this, say the representatives, is to unite the clandestine church with the official church which, in line with the prompting of the Holy See, are leaning more and more towards collaboration and unity. Many bishops of the unofficial church have given indications of participation in the Eucharist with official communities. Until a few years ago, such an admission would have been unthinkable. <\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Vietnamese gov’t loosens seminary regulations – will allow new students every year, instead of every two years New pressures on Catholics in one Chinese province: While there are signs of improvement in ties between the Vatican and Bejing, the Hebei government has launched a new campaign of persecution against the clandestine Catholic Church throughout the…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":180,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1924","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"yoast_head":"\nFrom the East - Via Media<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2005\/09\/from-the-east.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"From the East - 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The Catholicism comes from her side. Amy grew up in a number of places - Indiana - Washington, DC - Lubbock Texas - Arlington, Virginia - DeKalb, Illinois - Lawrence, Kansas - and Knoxville, Tennessee, where the family settled in 1973. She attended Knoxville Catholic High School, then the University of Tennessee where she majored in history. She received an MA in Church History from Vanderbilt University, where she wrote a thesis on the changing role of women in 19th century American Protestantism, and the ways Scripture was used to justify those changes. She worked as as a teacher in Catholic high schools and a Parish Director of Religious Education and started writing for the diocesan press - the Florida Catholic - in 1988. Amy has written columns for Our Sunday Visitor and Catholic News Service at times over the past twenty years. Her articles have been published in venues ranging from Our Sunday Visitor to the New York Times to Commonweal. She has written 17 books. 18, if you included the as yet tragically unpublished novel. Amy has five children, ranging in age from 26 to 4 and was married to Michael Dubruiel, who died unexpectedly in February 2009. She lives in Birmingham, Alabama.","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/author\/awelborn"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1924","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/180"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1924"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1924\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1924"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1924"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1924"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}