Communist China's unlikely Catholic outpost: Tibetans

Opening the church door in Baihanluo reveals a large portrait of Pope Francis -- something of a paradox in an ethnically Tibetan area of Communist China.
The village is only reachable on foot or by horse, and surrounded by snow-capped Himalayan peaks.
But despite its remoteness French missionaries built the church -- with a curved, Chinese-style roof -- at the end of the 19th century.
Pope Gregory XVI assigned Tibet to the Foreign Missions Society of Paris, shortly after China was forced to open its doors following its defeat in the First Opium War.
Heading up the river valleys into the hills, cut off by snows in winter, they established "lost missions" in a still largely traditional and theocratic society.

At times it was a bloody cause, with evangelists martyred by monks opposed to Christ invading their Buddhist territory.

"It was China's far west. In Chinese, the Nu river was nicknamed the Valley of Death. The saying was you had to sell your wife before going because you didn't know whether you'd come back," said Constantin de Slizewicz, author of The Forgotten Peoples of Tibet.
After the Communist victory in China's civil war in 1949, foreign missionaries were arrested as "agents of imperialism", maltreated and expelled.
"The churches were closed, or converted into schools or barns. Christians could be jailed for having religious objects, and those who had important roles were persecuted or taken for re-education," de Slizewicz told AFP.

But Catholicism persisted among the rural peasantry, their fervour as enduring as their poverty.
The mayhem of Mao's 1966-76 Cultural Revolution brought with it another round of destruction.
But as well as maintaining the missionaries' tombs, the Tibetans have continued to recite the catechism -- some in Latin -- and celebrate Easter and Christmas, replacing the donkey and ox of the stable with a mule and a yak.
Now, in a less intolerant climate, as many as 500 parishioners gather for festivals in Baihanluo, perched on a mountain spur in the southwestern province of Yunnan, and recall the Nu patriarch Zachary, who died around a decade ago aged more than 100.