A Chinese underground bishop who was sentenced to 10 years of forced labour in the 1980s for bringing Catholics on pilgrimage to the Marian Shrine of Our Lady of Sheshan died at the age of 98. Joseph Zhu Baoyu, bishop emeritus of Nanyang, made headlines in February for reportedly being the oldest person to recover from the coronavirus. Three months after his release from the hospital, Zhu died in his sleep on May 7 under the care of the Sisters of the Immaculate Conception.

He was one of three elderly underground Chinese Catholic bishops remembered in a Holy See communiqué on May 23 following their deaths over the past six months. All three died over the age of 90 after lives that spanned some of the most tumultuous periods for the Catholic Church in China.

Zhu was born in Pushan, Henan, in 1921, at a time of extraordinary growth of Christianity in China. This was also the year that the Chinese Communist Party was founded in Shanghai.

After his father died, Zhu’s mother enrolled him in a Catholic orphanage in Jingang at the age of six. Two years later both he and his mother were baptized. Zhu enrolled in a minor seminary. During the Chinese Civil War, he moved to the regional seminary to study philosophy and theology in the Archdiocese of Kaifeng in 1946.