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The shades in the room were drawn against the hostility of the outside world. The earliest Christians had existed in much this way under the pagan rule of imperial Rome. Thirty-three members of the extended family in whose home Yin celebrated this mass knelt around the low wooden table that served as the altar. The youngest, a baby girl, seemed to have forgotten the brief trauma of her baptism and suckled her mother’s breast contentedly.

Siblings and cousins waited patiently as Yin distributed communion first to the family elders. The celebration of mass was a rare event, and Yin labored to ensure that each service was memorable enough to be worth the risk of attendance. For a majority of the world’s Catholics, the only peril mass presented was to their soul if they failed to attend regularly. But the danger to Yin’s persecuted flock was more immediate. The government in Beijing viewed attendance at an illegal mass as an expression of loyalty to a foreign entity over which China’s leaders held no control. The penalties for this crime included intimidation, imprisonment, and occasionally death.

Only the oldest of those present at this gathering could recall a time when Chinese Roman Catholics practiced their religion openly. Their children and grandchildren had learned their catechism in whispers and cloaked their faith in a mask of officially sanctioned atheism. In the countryside, people did not abandon the beliefs of their honored ancestors at the whim of rulers in distant Beijing. Nor did they behave in a way that might draw their government’s wrath. The underground Catholics of China bent like the willows in the wind, but they did not break.

After distributing the bread of the Eucharist, Yin offered the wine, reenacting a ritual that originated with the Passover Seder Jesus shared with his closest friends on the eve of his crucifixion. The simple act brought Yin and his congregants into communion with a billion other Roman Catholics around the world and with God.

Yin had prayed in beautiful churches, but nowhere did he feel closer to the Creator than with those clinging to their faith against immense hardship. It was in ministering to his endangered flock that Yin truly fulfilled his calling as a priest and became, in the words of Saint Francis of Assisi, a channel of Christ’s peace.

“This is the blood of Christ,” Yin said reverently as he offered the glass to a boy just old enough to make his first communion.

The boy bowed his head respectfully and replied, “Amen,” but barely allowed the scorching liquid to touch his lips. Yin suppressed a smile.

As Yin took the glass from the boy, he heard a metallic sound, the bolts on a heavy door pulling open. It was a sound he knew well, but not from this place.

“Wake up, old man,” a voice barked.

Light flooded in and the sacramental scene faded, erased from his mind’s eye by the intrusion. In an instant, the clandestine mass withdrew into his precious trove of memories.

Yin was sitting in the middle of a bare, two-meter-square cell surrounded on all sides by concrete. Legs crossed and hands palm down on his knees, he sat as erect and serene as Buddha. Only hints remained of the lustrous black hair of his youth, scattered threads in a mane whitened by age and hardship. Whiter still was his skin, bleached a ghostly shade by decades denied the warm light of the sun.

A thick steel door and a small air vent were the only suggestion of a world outside the cell. In a tamper-proof fixture recessed into the ceiling, a lone dim bulb provided nearly the only illumination to reach Yin’s eyes in thirty years. He had long ago lost all sense of day and night, and of the larger passages of time—temporal disorientation being but one of the techniques employed against prisoners like Yin.

“I said wake up!”

The guard punctuated his command by jabbing the end of an electrified baton into Yin’s abdomen. Yin exhaled sharply at the explosion of pain and toppled backward, careful not to strike his head against the floor.

“I am awake, my son,” Yin panted softly, regaining his breath.

“I’d rather be the offspring of a pig farmer and his ugliest sow than any son of yours,” the guard spat back. “Get up!”

Yin rubbed his stomach and squinted at the bright light pouring in from the corridor. His tormentor was a dark silhouette, and beyond the doorway stood several more guards.

The Chinese court had sentenced Yin to death for his many crimes against the state—an order not yet carried out for political reasons. The authorities recognized Yin as a man of great charisma and deep personal faith—a combination that could spread his foreign religion like a plague were he placed with the prison’s general population. So unlike most prisoners in the laogai—the gulags of China—Yin was not permitted the opportunity to reform himself through the state’s generous program of hard labor and reeducation. Instead, he was subjected to lengthy periods of isolation, punctuated by beatings and interrogations.

Yin knew it had been weeks, possibly months, since his last interrogation. The same questions were asked every time, and always he provided the same answers. The brutal sessions came far less frequently now than in the early years of his incarceration, more a task on a bureaucratic checklist than any genuine attempt at reform. After years of systematic effort, the Chinese government seemed to accept the fact that the underground bishop of Shanghai would die before renouncing the pope or the Church of Rome.

Yin rose to his feet and awaited the next command.

“Out!” the guard barked.

Yin followed as the guard backed through the door. Compared with the dimness of his cell, the light in the corridor burned his eyes as brightly as the noonday sun. The four guards stared at their charge with disgust.

“Restraints,” the senior guard commanded.

Yin assumed a familiar position with his feet spread shoulder-width apart and his arms extended from his sides. Two guards cinched a wide leather belt tightly around his thin waist. Four chains hung from the belt, each terminating in a steel manacle. Yin showed no outward sign of discomfort as the manacles dug into his wrists and ankles, knowing it would only invite a beating. The arteries in his wrists throbbed, and his hands began to tingle with numbness.

The lead guard inspected the restraints, though he knew they were unnecessary. Yin had never reacted violently toward a guard in all his years of imprisonment. The only danger the bishop posed was to himself, and that because of his stubbornness. Satisfied that Yin was securely bound, the guard motioned the escort to proceed.

Yin kept his head bowed and his eyes on the floor as he moved down the corridor. The simplest gesture, a nod or glance at anyone, was forbidden and would result in a severe beating, as the badly healed break in his left arm bore testament. Yin’s eyes gradually grew accustomed to the light as he shuffled along, taking two short steps for each stride by the guards.

Just up ahead, Yin thought, counting his steps.

The guards stopped. A buzzer sounded the release of the electronic locks securing the door to the solitary-confinement wing. The heavy steel door slid open, and the small procession continued.

Almost there, almost there.

Then he saw it—a glint, a tiny sliver of light on the floor. Yin turned his head a few degrees to the right and gazed upward. A small window, barred and paned with grimy wired glass, but a window nonetheless to the world outside. It was midday, and the sky was clear and blue.

A thin plastic cane lashed across Yin’s back, causing him to drop to his knees. The return stroke caught his right shoulder, and Yin toppled to the floor.

“Enough!” the lead guard commanded. “Get him back on his feet.”

The guard who had struck him grabbed Yin’s arm and pulled him up so forcefully that the bony shoulder popped. Despite the blinding pain, Yin found his feet, and when the guard released his arm, the traumatized joint slipped back into place.

The march continued through the concrete corridors of the prison, the light rustle of Yin’s sandals lost in the guards’ heavy boot steps. Yin knew the route by heart, but only one way—rarely did he emerge from an interrogation conscious.

Yin felt a conflicting mixture of relief and dread when the guards walked him past the doorway that led to the corridor of interrogation rooms. Today’s journey from his cell was to be different.

Lord, Yin prayed silently, whatever is your will, I remain your servant.

The guards escorted Yin through parts of the prison he could not recall. Then a doorway opened, and Yin felt a breeze kiss his face. It was not the prison’s fetid air thick with rotting filth and human sweat, processed and recirculated by dilapidated machinery. This breeze was a whisper from the heavens. Yin detected the faint aroma of prairie in summer and the sweetness in the air that follows a cleansing rain.

So they have finally grown weary of me, Yin thought.

The only reason Yin could fathom for the guards to take him outside was to put a bullet in the back of his head, so he savored each breath of fresh air as if it were his last.

“Stop!” the lead guard barked.

Yin kept his head bowed and focused on his silent prayers. The sound of footsteps crunching on gravel, the measured strides of a long-legged man, intruded on his meditations.

“The prisoner, as ordered,” the lead guard announced respectfully.

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