James Lin Xili

Who was James Lin Xili?

James Lin Xili was a Chinese underground Roman Catholic bishop of Wenzhou. His 1992 ordination as the First Bishop of Wenzhou was never recognized by the government of the People's Republic of China.

Lin Xili was born in Yueqing, China, on October 19, 1918. Lin enrolled in the St Vincent Seminary in the Roman Catholic Diocese of Ningbo in 1931. He was first ordained a Roman Catholic priest on June 3, 1944, and enrolled in the Fu Jen Catholic University in Beijing just three months later. He graduated from the University in 1948.

Lin returned to the Diocese of Ningbo, where he worked as the principal of a diocesan Catholic school until 1955. Bishop Andre-Jean-Francois Defebvre of Ningbo named Lin one of the diocese's administrators during the 1950s. He was arrested by the Communist Chinese government in 1955 and sentenced to sixteen years of hard labor for "counter-revolutionary crimes." He returned to his work as a Catholic priest following his release from prison in 1971. He worked from Yueqing beginning in 1978, where he restored and built new Catholic churches.

James Lin Xili was secretly ordained as the first Bishop of the Roman Catholic Diocese of Wenzhou on October 4, 1992.