The return of a parish

Here is some more information about Nantou St. Paul Church, the Chinese parish where I usually attend Mass. This is taken from the sheet that the parish members brought to the English-language Mass last week. This highlights the history of the current church buildings, as well as the kinds of steps involved in bringing this property back into Catholic use. It had been given city and provincial historical identification a while before it was returned as church property. I wonder if that was the common steps in the restoration of some of the churches here. Note also the eventual return of the name "St. Paul," as a re-consecration.

The original name of Catholic Shenzhen Nantou St. Paul Church (Nantou Church as below) was Yu Ying Tang, which means orphanage. It was built in 1913 by Canossian Daughters of Charity. Yu Ying Tang was an orphanage which attached to St. Paul church of Nantou town, Xin An County at that time. During the China Culture Revolution, St. Paul church and the surrounding buildings were destroyed. The orphanage survived because it was impropriated by a public primary school. Yu Ying Tang was listed in a Shenzhen Preservation cultural relics unit in 1984. It was also listed in Guangdong Preservation of Cultural Relics unit in 2003. It was returned to the Catholics by the Chinese government with the implementation of the religion policy in 1992.

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Father Liu Lingsi was invited to celebrate Chrstmas in 1992, and named it Nantou Church. In 1994, Yu Ying Tang became known as the First Catholic Nantou Church, the first Catholic church in Shenzhen with the governmental permission.

After Yu Ying Tang was returned, Father Ren Lijun was the first priest to serve in Nantou church who was sent from Beijing parish on Dec 14, 1993. The Holy Mary's grotto was built after he came. The statue of St. Paul was built on July 29, 2005 while Father Zhang Hongbo served Nantou church. It was built for the efforts of Catholics to revere, to remember, and to remind us of the spirit of St. Paul's mission work. The Church resumed his name of St. Paul church at the same day. We celebrate this day in our church at the Feast of St. Peter and St. Paul every July 29.