The journalistic team of Haus Jakob recently had the great honour of interviewing the founder and current Herr Großmeister of Haus Jakob. In this interview, Herr Großmeister reflects upon his original vision of establishing a Catholic mission dedicated to the evangelisation of China, and the journey by which that mission ultimately developed into Haus Jakob as we know her today.
[J = the Journalist; G = Herr Großmeister]
J: Herr Großmeister, thank you for granting me this interview. It is such a great honour!
G: Thank you for having me.
J: My Lord, we are all very sorry and shocked to hear that one of our chapels in China have recently been raided by the local police and government agents, and Your Lordship was there to deal with them. So my Lord, would you share more details on that and the current state of our mission in China?
G: Yes. It was a few days ago, and not just the police—you were right about that—but also Chinese national security agents, government agents in charge of religious affairs, and agents of a department they call the United Front, which is essentially a department of the Chinese government dealing with people outside of the Communist Party. Well, they all came to one of our chapels that morning. They looked around, asked questions. By the grace of God, no one was arrested, and there was no violent conflict or anything. But it means that they have been watching us. They have been surveilling our mission in China. That’s the only explanation of how they had managed to locate one of our chapels. Our missionaries there actually have a very good relationship with the local people. That’s not a region with many Catholics, but the locals are generally not hostile to our missionaries and our mission. So we have reached the conclusion—a speculated conclusion—that the Chinese government managed to locate our chapel there through surveillance, and not that the location of our chapel was snitched out or anything like that.
In expectation of raids like that, all our missionaries in China including myself have actually given up the management of our online operations long ago. So in the eyes of the Chinese agents, we are just a bunch of unemployed people. All our online operations—websites and channels—are administered by our volunteers overseas—outside of China—like yourself. And we don’t know who you are, but you have access to our phones and our drives. So as soon as one of us in China takes a photo or video with his phone, some of our overseas volunteers will see the photo or video and copy that into other drives or devices. They will edit it and post it on our channels or websites, even after he, the missionary in China, has deleted the photo or video on his own devices or drives. As soon as one of us writes something, some of our overseas team members will save it. When the writing is done, our overseas teams will edit it and post it. And all of these are done without us knowing who you are, what your names are, what you look like, and what you do for living. We don’t know the total count of our overseas volunteers. In this age of AI, we don’t even know if all of you are real persons or not. That’s the beauty of this, so that there is absolutely no observable connection between our missionaries in China and our teams overseas.
J: Forgive me for interrupting, my Lord, but would Your Lordship consider it risky to give up privacy like this? Because literally anyone on earth right now, either a real person or AI, can access everything—every electronic device, every mailbox, every online drive, every bank account—of our missionaries in China, including my Lord yourself.
G: Well, it is not risky in the sense you probably have in mind. No. So whenever we eat or drink something, will there be a risk of choking? Yes. But should we give up eating and drinking because of this risk? No, we should not. When we live in China, we are bound to lose our privacy because the government is surveilling everything, whether you like it or not. If we have to share our private information with an anti-Christian government and regime, sharing our private information voluntarily with our brothers and sisters in Christ, who wish to help us because they love the souls in China as much as we do, is not that risky at all. Such a risk has the same nature as the risk of choking when we eat or drink. We take this risk nonetheless because there is something far more important and essential to achieve. In this case, it is the salvation of the souls in China.
J: Thank you, my Lord, for your answer! Talking about the salvation of the souls in China, what initially inspired Your Lordship to evangelise China? Because some people might think it is an unnecessary risk to proclaim the Holy Gospel in a country that is so hostile to the Christian Faith.
G: Well. That’s a very good question. As you may or may not know, I was born in China, and I am not a “cradle Catholic,” so to speak. I have always been believing in Catholicism since as early as I can remember, but I was not Baptised until much older, because I did not wish to be associated with the Patriotic Church of China, and I could not find a true Catholic in China to Catechise me and Baptise me. Yes. By the way, although Baptism can be administered by anyone, even someone who is not a Baptised Catholic, the difficulty is to find a Catechism class that teaches true Catholicism. That’s the difficult part these days. In China, you most certainly cannot find such a class in the Patriotic Church.
Even after I went to Australia, I spent many years not knowing how to be Baptised, until a friend—a personal friend who is still a member of the Vatican II Church—told me about the RCIA offered in many Vatican II parishes. For those who don’t know, the RCIA stands for the Rite of quote-unquote Catholic, or maybe Christian, Initiation of Adults, or something like this. It is entirely a Vatican II Church thing. So unfortunately, that was not a Catechism class teaching true Catholicism either, but I was able to receive Baptism at the end of that. Even at the moment when I received Baptism, I did not know too much about Vatican II. I had probably heard of the term and about the historical event vaguely, but I did not know the full gravity of that. Most certainly, I did not know how many errors are contained in the Vatican II documents, and that the liturgies were changed in the wake of Vatican II, and I didn’t even know the existence of the Traditional Latin Mass back then, until, by the grace of God, I was introduced to Traditional Catholicism, the only true form of Catholicism, after years of journey following my Baptism.
So you asked me what inspired me initially to become a missionary. What inspired me was the command of our Lord that we ought to treat others in the same manner we wish to be treated (cfr. Matt. 7:12; Luke 6:31). Being a missionary in China, I am being the person I would be glad to have in my life and on my journey of Faith, and the kind of person I wish I had met sooner, the kind of person that would teach me the Faith, Baptise me when I was yearning for Baptism, and rebuke me when I did wrong. And these are essentially what our missionaries do—spreading the Faith, the Holy Gospel, administering Sacraments, and rebuking those who are wrong. Everything I have ever taught, either those for you to post online—on our websites and channels—or what I have taught offline, is the Truth that I am glad to know, and that I wish I had been taught sooner.
So when some people claim that staying in China as a missionary is an unnecessary risk, those people, on the one hand, might be outright heretics who deny the Catholic Doctrines on the necessity of Baptism and of Faith for salvation. There are billions of people in China. Most of them are not Baptised. Most of the Baptised are without the true Faith. All of those people will be suffering in hell for eternity. So on the other hand, people who think it is unnecessary to take the risk of evangelising China simply lack Charity. Billions of people are heading to hell, and you are okay with that? Have you love for their souls? Have you love for the God Who have created them?
Moreover, now you can participate in the evangelisation of China without coming to China yourself. You can become an overseas volunteer of Haus Jakob. You can help us manage our websites and channels. You can provide our missionaries in China with legal services when we are in trouble with the government. You can raise the awareness of the people in your country about the persecution we are undergoing as Catholics in China. At very least, you can make donations to sustain our mission.
J: Indeed, my Lord, there are so many ways people can participate in the evangelisation of China nowadays. Also, I would like to say that Haus Jakob makes many of us Traditional Catholics feel less like “home loners,” so to speak, as we are brought together to work on something so great. So thank you, my Lord, for founding this mission. And here is another question many of us are wondering: Why is the name of our mission in German, but the majority of our posts and videos are in English and Mandarin Chinese?
G: Ah! A very interesting question! So when I first worked to establish a Catholic mission focusing on the evangelisation of China, I named her the Mission in the Forsaken Land. “Forsaken Land,” of course, indicates China, because China is such a populous country with so few Christians, as if God has forsaken the people in this land. However, our Lord was once on the cross, seemingly forsaken by His Father, and His crucifixion made salvation possible. So when I first named the mission, the Mission in the Forsaken Land, I did so in recognition that the current seeming forsakenness of China might be a part of God’s plan for something great. However, I do believe that name is too long and too complicated, so I changed it to Haus Jakob more recently. I use German because in the German language, Haus can mean both a physical house and a home. This is a beautiful ambiguity because I wish our mission can be likened to both a home for Catholics to live and grow in Faith, Hope, and Charity, together as a family with God, and a physical house or a safe space for us Catholics to be Catholic unapologetically. And I wish this answer can satisfy your curiosity.
J: I believe it can. Thank you so much, my Lord! Thank you again for this great honour, and thank you for your time today!
G: You are most welcome. May God bless you.
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