Brother Peter Zhou

Peter Zhou Bang-Jiu is a monk of Saint Andrew's Monastery in Southern California. He originally  professed vows at Chengdu Monastery in Sichaun China. Begining in Nov. 1955, Peter spent

over 23 years detained by Communist authorities, including two years of solitary confinment. Here is an exerpt of a talk he gave on the 50th aniversery of profesed

vows in the year 2000:

I was very often criticized and struggled against in big and small sessions, but I had never been totally overthrown, nor had abandoned my principles, nor departed from my correct position. I was once beaten black and blue, but still resolutely refused to hold or read Mao ZeDung's "Quotations"


Before his arrest, near his father's home, on a high dike, Peter composed this prayer: "Merciful and Almighty God, You are able to help me respond continuously and very soon soon realize Your religious vocation granted me as a favor. If you let me become a fish temporarily, I would swim with the current to Chonqing, then into the Yangtze; I would pass through Nanjing and Shanghai, enter the East Sea, turn southward to Taiwan. Having retrieved my library there, I would finally reach Belgium and resume my monastic life in the Motherhouse!"


Monks from Saint Andre's/Zevenkerken  in Belgium founded Chengdu Monastery in the 1920s.

St. Andrew's in California was founded by the Belgian monks asked to leave China by The People's Republic of China. The monks in California prayed each night at Night Prayer for Brother Peter and for Father Paul Ou, who, in 1960, died in an earthly, East Asian prison.

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