Diocese of Fushun

DIOCESE OF FUSHUN. - In southeastern Manchuria, on the border with Korea. It was erected as an apostolic prefecture on 4 Feb. 1932, with territory detached from the mission of Mukden, and was entrusted to the Society for Foreign Missions of the United States of America (of Maryknoll); on 13 Feb. 1940 it was elevated to an apostolic vicariate and on 11 Apr. 1946, with the establishment of the episcopal hierarchy in China, to a diocese suffragan of Mukden.

It has an area of 80,914 sq km. As of 30 June 1947, out of a total population of about 5,500,000 inhabitants, Catholics numbered 11,000; priests 37, of whom 5 were of the Chinese secular clergy; 2 foreign lay religious and 28 sisters, also foreign. The Sino-Japanese and then the world war, and even more the civil war, claimed victims also among the priests and paralyzed missionary activity; at the aforementioned time there was no statistical data concerning the auxiliary personnel (catechists, teachers, baptizers, doctors, nurses), nor concerning the seminary and the other works, already quite flourishing.

The Christian origins go back more than a century and are due to Catholic families who had emigrated there from the area of Beijing, where persecution was raging. Most of the territory of F. was once a hunting reserve of the Chinese emperors, ceded only after 1870, for cultivation.

Adamo Pucci