Upon arriving in China, the Augustinian Recollects encountered terrible situations of insecurity and violence, misery and inequalities, customs against human dignity, lack of social empathy, and cultural aporophobia. However, not even in the worst moments, the missionaries never looked the other way.
The Augustinian Recollects who arrived in Shangqiu (Henan, China) one hundred years ago had the mission the evangelization and the announcement of Christ to a people who he did not know anything about Christian culture, including the command to love of neighbor and the reaffirmation of the dignity of every person as the image of God.
As soon as they set foot on that land they did what good logic would allow them to achieve this evangelizing objective: observe, know, to interiorize reality, local customs, and language. You can only dialogue and propose a new faith that is understandable and attractive, if it pays attention to the interests and way of thinking of the interlocutor.
On the other hand, those missionaries were men and women of deep faith and lived with passion their Christian, religious, and missionary vocation. Their eyes were mediated by the evangelical message of love and everything they see and observe impels them to action. The more anguish, poverty, misery, suffering and pain they saw, the more they needed to act: they announced Jesus and acted like Jesus and he would have done it.
This explains that the social works of the Augustinian Recollects in Shangqiu will begin practically from the beginning of the mission. Currently, it continues important social works in Shangqiu, especially in two areas: attention to the excluded and education.
In the first case, it is done through permanent visits to homes in a sort of a social program similar to that of the Cáritas of any Parish in the rest of the world; In the second case it is through a nursery school that was at the time financed from Spain with the support of the ONGD Haren Alde (currently ARCORES, Augustinian Recollects International Solidarity Network) and administrations such as the Government of Navarra.
To approach the enormous historical social task, we have chosen as a thread driver that of the protagonists of these solidarity actions, their beneficiaries.
Abandoned girls and discriminated women
The largest social project of the mission was born very shortly after the arrival of the missionaries, when they perceived with astonishment the frequency of infanticides, of abandonment of girls to their fate or the usual sale and transfer of age minors as if they were objects of negotiation and commerce.
On February 1, 1925, someone took three girls to the mission in deplorable conditions. The religious community faced a huge moral dilemma and unusual: not taking them in would mean their probable death or sale; welcoming them, in a very difficult situation to manage and that could easily overflow, because more would end up arriving and that was not the function of a religious community.
The community gathered and did not hesitate. They made concrete proposals to have the resources that would be required to accommodate them, with detachment and renunciation of food of the religious themselves. The help they gathered from Christian women would be fundamental. Thus began the Holy Infancy.
The presence of girls in the mission opened the need to organize their comprehensive education; It was not just about giving them food and shelter, but also guaranteeing their future with a dignified and stable life. In the reclusive nuns, they saw a solution, and they launched to ask for the help of volunteers in the monasteries to take care of this ministry and to begin female religious life in Shangqiu.
On the other hand, the beneficiaries were permanently in contact with the values and mentality of the missionaries, which exercised in them a profound influence. Several identified themselves to the point of consecrating themselves as Catechists of Christ the King; others had the opportunity to choose much better with whom to start a family, something that theirs peers did not have the opportunity to do, since the marriages were arranged and the woman never had any say about her future and her options.
The Holy Childhood granted the missionaries a great ancestry and respect among non-Christians, in a society not accustomed to attitudes of empathy, welcome, solidarity, and attention to the most vulnerable. This made it possible to systematize visit to families, taking advantage of the good reception. They tried to instill respect for women and children in all ages, as well as sowing the seeds of evangelization.
Over the years, laws began to punish infanticide and were disappearing the most disembodied scenes of impiety that so much impressed the sensitivity of the missionaries; However, the abandonment of girls did not stop because the economic conditions of the families did not improve and by the deeply rooted structural machismo.
The Holy Infancy was developed in a 12×3 meter building, with bedrooms and a dining room. The love, warmth, and tenderness of human relationships stood out there, with the nuns giving free rein to their maternal instinct and their proactive experience of evangelical love.
This spirit of solidarity and empathy was also instilled towards the girls and other victims of inequality. There are surprising testimonies from girls of the Holy Infancy that helped the blind, elderly women in loneliness and misery or prisoners in how much they had the opportunity to do so.
The sick
Shangqiu did not have public health or sanitary infrastructure care. People could only have access to traditional medicine underpayment of large quantities. As for systematic and scientific medicine, only the Christians (Protestants and Catholics) launched some type of care.
The arrival of the Augustinian Recollect Pedro Colomo (1899-1979) to Shangqiu in 1932 promoted the Catholic care project. Bachelor of Medicine in the Philippines, Colomo organized health care with a dispensary in two spacious rooms, one for consultations and another for a waiting room.
Only users with possibilities paid and, in this way, collaborated to cover the expenses of caring for those who had no resources. The Spanish missionaries and Chinese catechists collaborated with nursing tasks.
Colomo knew the importance of prevention. Long before it was common as a public health instrument, he carried out a vaccination to stop an epidemic of cholera that prevented many deaths. He also distributed antimalarials and painkillers.
In a culture without the slightest empathy for those who suffered illness or pain, the sanatorium of the Catholic mission shone for its hospitality, relief, and consolation, and humanization of health. Because of this work, many accepted the foreigner missionaries overcoming the many preventions, misgivings, prejudices, and suspicions with that were usually seen.
Colomo valued traditional Chinese medicine and managed to gain access to formulas used locally from generation to generation, kept secret, with remedies of cheap production and great therapeutic effect for those ailments for which had a very contrasting use over time. The number of consultations grew despite the difficulties and stoppages caused by the stages of greater insecurity and violence.
| Year | 1930 | 1931 | 1932 | 1933 | 1934 | 1935 | 1936 | 1937 |
| Served people | 2,400 | 3,124 | 4,180 | 5,630 | 5,720 | 6,143 | 5,265 | 9,100 |
| Daily average of patients | 7 | 9 | 11 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 14 | 25 |
The nuns, furthermore, together with their task in the Holy Infancy and the dispensary, began a process of visiting houses in search of hidden or sick patients, abandoned, as well as dying. In addition to delivering medicines, they carried out the task of comfort, listening, and advice. They also offered emergency baptism when they encountered people in the full process of agony.
The refugees
Only three years after arriving, in 1927, the religious had to make their first parenthesis and exit the mission to safeguard their lives. It was for a short time, but the harassment of armies from different sides and powerful criminal gangs in fight for territory was constant in the first period of the mission (1924-1955).
Bombs fell on the mission complex between May 15 and 19, 1930 and May 20, 1938. Japanese, Chinese nationalist, and communist troops occupied the mission at various times, and expelled the religious and destroy everything.
The religious showed themselves to be true leaders of the people when dealing with that violence. They promoted agreements with the invaders to save lives and the civilian population did not suffer punishment, they offered shelter and food to thousands of displaced.
The missionaries were true architects of peace. In that hornet’s nest, they negotiated with the violent ones, demanded an end to the looting, respect for the civilian population, feeding the displaced, and the commitment not to attack non-contenders.
Particularly terrible was the blowing up by nationalist troops in 1938 of the embankments that held the bed of the Yellow River to stop the Japanese advance. The flood caused more than a million deaths and another million displaced. The flood was accompanied by a terrible drought. The role of the Augustinian Recollects was truly heroic and superhuman in such situations.
Thus, José Martínez mediated so that the guerrillas never entered Seliulou; Venancio Martínez interceded to avoid reprisals on the population of Yucheng, hard hit by the ebb and flow of the sides; and in Huchiao, Arturo Quintanilla managed to maintain calm even with the duplicity and triplicity of competing authorities. He was described as a “Man sent from Heaven”.
In Yungcheng it was Luis Arribas who won recognition for his welcoming refugees and their care for the sick and dying, without distinction of persons; in a stone stele they left it written that he was the “star of happiness on our path” and that “we love him like our parents, we follow him like our intelligence.”
The prisoners
In 1935 the Mission obtained permission to enter prisons, hospices, and other charitable centers. In the case of prisons, missionaries established a complete pastoral plan. They managed to get the officers to tell them about the sick prisoners, to whom they offered comfort and medicine. This group suffered violence, hunger, illness, contempt and ill-treatment, not always condemned in fair trials and with guarantees procedures.
People with disabilities
In China, people with special needs were often left abandoned in the streets and condemned to begging. When there was peace and resources, shelters were founded for them, very precarious but effective. In Shangqiu there was a shelter that gave them food and shelter.
They used him in around a hundred abandoned elderly people and those who had suffered mutilations of war. The attention of the missionaries made such an impression on them that on Sundays, there was a curious and touching image: a caravan of blind people, lame and beggars arrived voluntarily to the mission to listen to the Sunday liturgy.
Children without regular education
Until the Japanese invasion, the nationalist government imposed restrictions and controls and did not allow Christian schools to exist. After the invasion, it stagnated all public educational activity and the opening of schools became imperative individuals.
More than two hundred students of both sex studied in the schools of the mission until the fifth grade under the direction of three catechists and two secular teachers. This apostolate brought the Church into contact with wealthy families and higher degree of formation of local society, which until then had not been in contact with the missionaries.
Just as the other social projects had strongly attracted the most vulnerable and abandoned by society, formal education managed to end with the prejudices of the higher classes against foreign missionaries and against the Christian message.
