Abstract
Charles McCarthy was arrested in 1953 and charged with being an imperialist secret agent. McCarthy recalled that, “There was no physical torture for me. It wasn’t necessary.” He exercised his priesthood in secret while living in Shanghai prisons. While levels of malnutrition varied, prisoners suffered afflictions that would plague them for the rest of their lives. A regular diet of ideological “re-education” was enforced during the first 3 years, which contained the worst of the hardships, a tactic that allowed prisoners to regain health and strength just prior to release. He spent more than 4 years in prison before being released, years so traumatic that he only spoke of them sparingly. This chapter tells his own prison narrative as well as those of his confreres.
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Clark, A.C.R. (2017). The Prison Years. In: China’s Last Jesuit. Christianity in Modern China. Palgrave Macmillan, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-5023-7_4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-5023-7_4
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