A. Start in Kiangsi Province
It was a thirty day journey, partly by river boat, partly on foot. His christian guides did all the talking, his own silence variously explained. Always there was the danger of discovery. The risk his guides were taking was considerable. He had his first experience of Chinese rest houses, always ones where his guides were already known. Thus he came to Tcheou-Tchang-Lu-Kia, an old christian centre some hundred kilometres from the capital of the province, Nanchang. Ominously his predecessor at the mission had been an old Chinese Jesuit, Father Yang, who had been imprisoned in Beijing but released through the efforts of the Vincentian superior, Father Raux. It was an area that needed vigorous pastoral care because there had been no priest there for several years. The christians were poor, so Father Clet soon learned the ways of the poor. As a Frenchman he must have missed his wine (so expensive that it was only used for Mass), and he could not manage easily the rice which was the staple food of the region. He slept on a plank bed and became accustomed to the customary single covering. He made light in his letters of all these matters.
The Chinese language gave him enormous trouble. He recognised that he had reached the age where it really would be impossible to grasp the enormous number of characters of the written language while even in the spoken language he could only manage the simplest of instructions. Despite this handicap he journeyed to the various christian centres and baptised in one year about a hundred people who were well instructed. He could, of course, have baptised a much larger number but he had learned already that when catechumens were baptised too easily they also abandoned the church easily.
Now that he was secure in his mission base he occasionally journeyed further afield. We learn of a a journey to the capital, Nanchang, to the great porcelain centre at Kinchetchin where he bought ten bowls to send to the procurator of the Paris Foreign Mission at Macao, Father Letondal, who had been of great help to him.
But there were problems. Though the mission was in fact a small one, and no doubt chosen as suitable to a starter in the missions, his own
difficulties with the language made it hard for him to be on his own. Also the two younger Vincentian priests in the neighbouring province of Hou-Kouang needed a more mature person with them, so after a year Father Clet was asked to join them in the mission centre of Koucheng.
Forgotten in the Mission in Hou Kouang
This province would be the territory of his mission for the next twenty six years until his arrest in 1819. An enormous province, later divided into two, traversed by the Yangzi-Kiang river, it was the rich granary of China. The christians, all that were left from the great Jesuit missions of the seventeenth and eighteenth centures, were a small and isolated group in a large population. The total number of christians in the entire empire was probably about 200,000, concentrated in the provinces of the eastern coast, and centred on such places as Beijing and Shanghai. In the province of Hou-Kouang, the only real concentration of christians was in the mountainous section to the west of Lake Tong-Ting and this had been greatly depleted by the persecution of 1784. There were some two thousand christians in the immediate area of Koucheng, and in a wider range, which could be visited only from time to time, there were some ten thousand. Writing to his brother, Father Clet spoke of some centres as far away as 200 kilometres. He travelled constantly, normally on foot. The two young French priests he came to support were dead within three years.
In our age of frequent and comparatively easy travel it seems almost incredible that a European missionary should have been left in this obscure place for twenty six years. The disturbed state of affairs in Europe at this time was the cause.The death of his French colleagues increased his isolation. The Chinese priests who came to him from the new seminary in Beijing did good work, but were not his cultural equals. We possess only a small amount of his correspondence, the bulk of it written to one of these Chinese priests. These letters have survived by the accident that this man preserved them.
Father Clet was subject to the Vincentian superiors in Beijing, who lived a totally different life. He never visited them, and they never came to him. The fiction was maintained that they did not know him and had nothing to do with him and his illegal preaching. Likewise he was certainly in touch with Macao, but only though a network of couriers, themselves
often in difficulties. By means of couriers his superiors in Beijing sent him money though this was often in short supply. Presumably. though we have no evidence for this, he was kept up to date, though with a considerable time lag. on the ever changing history of France and Europe.
For all of those twenty and more years he was aware that his activities were known to the authorities. There were even some christian mandarins. So it was essential to keep a low profile. As he wrote to one of his priests, the important thing is to protect ourselves because if we are arrested or taken away. then there will he no one to look after the pastoral needs of our people.
Forgotten. too, in Europe. For the greater part of this time the wars of the French Revolution and of Napoleon raged and rumbled on, distracting Europe from overseas commitment. For most of the time the Vincentian Congregation in France was officially disbanded. Allowed a brief revival under the Napoleonic concordat it was soon disbanded again. There was no possibility of sending new men out to give support. The Portuguese in Macao were also cut off from their resouces at home. He was not completely forgotten. There exists in the archives of the Congregation of Propaganda in Rome. dated from Paris in 1805 when the pope had come to crown Napoleon as Emperor of the French. a rescript formally delegating Francis Regis Clet to exercise his mission in China. Not the most useful of documents to him at that stage, twelve years into his forgotten ministry. But someone was thinking about him, knew he existed.
B. Hazardous Existence
It was an extraordinarily isolated and abandoned existence. Letters from Europe more or less stopped. Yet there existed a thin catholic ecclesiastical organisation in China. There were officially appointed s vicars apostolic, normally bishops, responsible for large sections of the country. and subject, as was Clet, to the legal embargo of the Chinese government. When a non-bishop was appointed. Clet with his ingrained sense of hierarchy. felt that his world crumbled a little. Even though they all lived a beggared existence, he unfailingly referred to the vicar apostolic with old time French courtesy as "Monseigneur". Always there was danger. One of his Vincentian companions. Father Aubin. was summoned to the vicar apostolic with the purpose of giving him a similarrole. Unfortunately he was arrested on the journey and died in Orison. This was part of the hazard of their work. It was safer to stay quietly in the mountains among the local christian community.
The countryside was plagued by bandits or groups in revolt against the government. Such rebel groups lived off the land and were the scourge of the farming people. Father Clet was fortunate in that rebel armies never came closer than seven or eight kilometres from his village but their presence made travel more difficult and dangerous.
To a surprising extent, considering the difficulties under which they all worked, he continued to be concerned with details of church law. Even when he was in hiding and in danger of arrest at the end of his life. he sent messages by roundabout routes to the vicar apostolic of Fo-Kien concerning the renewal of his "faculties" or authority to hear confessions and to carry out other church functions. Having gone from one province to another he feared that they had lapsed. In particular he was concerned about the validity of a faculty to grant dispensation for marriage in a form more generous than the Sacred Congregation permitted. When Father Paul Song, a newly ordained Chinese priest, joined his community. Clet himself being absent on pastoral visitation. he was careful to inform him that the apostolic administrator had lately renewed his faculties. so he was now able to do the same for Father Paul. asking him to sign the requisite document, and to abide by it. He also saw to it that that Father Paul read the pastoral letter lately come from the administrator. Not for nothing had he spent the formative years of his priesthood in a seminary. training budding priests under very different circumstances. He never lost that training.
Always he was the teacher, the advisor, faithful to the requirements of canon law. It was his practice to supply his priests with answers to moral problems which arose in the course of their pastoral work. His loiters show him concerned that they know accurately the days on which the church allows a nuptial mass to be celebrated: he clarifies the length of time during which a woman who has given birth is to be dispensed from fasting and abstinence; when rosary beads are blessed, it is sufficient to bless a number together, it is not necessary to bless each Rosary separately: the validity of baptism administered to an unconscious child of ten or eleven is analysed carefully. with several situations considered.
Then there was his health. We have very reason for considering that he had a robust constitution. But a major transplantation in middle life is upsetting and we find him describing how, on his journey from Macao to the interior of China to take up his first mission, he experienced a prolonged constipation which lasted for sixteen days on one occasion and for eight on another. As early as 1798 he writes to his brother that he had twice been seriously ill. Later, in 1812. he had a severe attack of pleurisy. This left him with swellings in his legs which made walking difficult. He was by then sixty four years old and had lived a harsh life for many years. From this time he could not longer travel to the more remote christian centres and had to leave this to his assistants. His world closed in still more.
