The Last Trappist To Survive Mao’s Persecution Dies at 108

With the Saints, give rest, O Christ, to the soul of Thy servant, Benedict, where there is no pain, no sorrow, no sighing, but life everlasting.

From Aleteia

By Daniel Espaarza

Father Benedict Chao lived through Japanese occupation, communist persecution, exile in Canada, and 70 years of monastic life in Hong Kong.

Father Benedict Chao, the oldest Trappist monk in the world and the last survivor of the Chinese Trappist community that endured Maoist persecution, died on July 31, 2026, at the Abbey of Our Lady of Joy on Lantau Island, Hong Kong. He was 108 years old. He had been a monk for 79 years and a priest for 77.

The Diocese of Hong Kong announced his death, confirmed by Asia News on August 9. His funeral will take place on August 14. With his passing, Sister Sebastiana Yamaguchi Teruko of the Imari Abbey in Japan, aged 107, is now the oldest Trappist religious in the world.

A life shaped by persecution

Father Chao was born in 1918 in Chengting, Hebei Province, in northern China. He entered the Abbey of Our Lady of Joy — known in French as Notre-Dame de Liesse — in 1941, at the age of 23, made his solemn profession in 1947, and was ordained a priest in 1949. The timing placed him at the center of one of the most violent episodes in the history of Chinese Catholicism.

The monastery had already suffered under Japanese occupation — troops had seized it in 1937, imprisoning and killing several monks. But the worst came with Mao Zedong’s consolidation of power. In 1947, the same year Chao made his solemn vows, the nearby Abbey of Our Lady of Consolation in Yangjiaping was attacked. Monks were tortured and forced to leave. A year later, six monks were executed by firing squad following a people’s trial — among them 29-year-old Father Chrysostom Chang, the community’s sub-prior. Those killed during the persecution are commemorated as the 33 martyrs of Yangjiaping, comprising 30 Chinese monks and three foreign religious.

Father Chao’s own community at Liesse came under attack as the persecution intensified. Some monks were expelled from China entirely. Among them was Chao, who made his way to the Monastery of Notre-Dame-des-Prairies in Manitoba, Canada. There, and later in Utah, the exiled monks learned the practical skills — dairy farming, cheese and butter production — that would later sustain their new community in Hong Kong.

Rebuilding in Hong Kong

In 1951, the last Trappist community still operating in mainland China was forced to close. The scattered monks, now gathered in exile, began preparing to rebuild. With the support of Bishop Enrico Valtorta, a PIME missionary who was then bishop of Hong Kong, the monks were granted a plot of land in the highlands of Lantau Island. Eight monks built the new monastery by hand. It was inaugurated in 1956.

The community grew, adapted, and endured. In 1974, Father Chao was elected prior of the community, a role he served in until 1998. In 1999 the Cistercian order recognized the Lantau community as an autonomous abbey, and in January 2000 it reclaimed its original name — the Abbey of Our Lady of Joy — the same name the community had carried in Hebei before the persecution began. The circle, after half a century, was complete.

In acknowledging Father Chao’s death, the Order of Cistercians of the Strict Observance said his passing renewed their “reverence for those whose long lives continue to be offered entirely to God in silence, prayer, and work.” The order notes that it currently has three other centenarian members, all aged 103.

With Father Chao’s death, the Abbey of Our Lady of Joy bids farewell to the last member of the generation that was scattered by Mao, rebuilt a monastery in exile, and lived long enough to see the community they had saved become, once again, simply a place of prayer — on an island in Hong Kong, in silence, overlooking the South China Sea.