During their time in Italy, the Chinese bishops also traveled to Naples with the bishop of Hong Kong, Cardinal Stephen Chow, according to Asia News. They offered Mass on Oct. 8 in the Chiesa della Sacra Famiglia dei Cinesi (Church of the Holy Family of the Chinese).
The church was built in 1732 as part of an institute founded by Pope Clement XII to train Chinese seminarians and teach missionaries the Chinese language to help with the evangelization of China. The Chinese bishops concelebrated the Mass and deposited a relic of St. Paul Wu Wanshu, a 16-year-old Chinese martyr killed in 1900 during the Boxer rebellion.
Yang also participated in the synod pilgrimage to the catacombs in Rome last week, which he described to Vatican News as “a profound experience to see firsthand where the Church, where my faith began.”
In addition to the synod, Yang also participated in the 2023 National Committee of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference, a political advisory body that is part of the Chinese Communist Party’s united front system, where it was decided that the Catholic Church should integrate its thought with the party and unite more closely to Xi Jinping, according to the official website of the Catholic Patriotic Association.
Yang, who was ordained with Vatican approval in 2010, is the vice president of the Chinese-government-sanctioned Catholic bishops’ conference and was elected as a leader of the Chinese Catholic Patriotic Association in December 2016.
Yao was the first bishop consecrated in China under the terms of the Sino-Vatican agreement, on Aug. 26, 2019. He is the bishop of Jining in China’s Autonomous Region of Inner Mongolia. He served as the secretary and later vice director of the liturgical commission overseen by the Chinese Catholic Patriotic Association and the Council of Chinese Bishops since 1998.
