Ignatius Cardinal Kung Pin-Mei
The school is named after Ignatius Cardinal Kung Pin-Mei, a Chinese priest who spent 30 years in prison in communist China, much of it in solitary confinement, because he would not renounce his allegiance to the Roman Catholic Church.
He was chosen for his example of steadfast loyalty to Jesus Christ and the authority of the Pope.
Cardinal Kung was homeschooled through sixth grade, attended a Jesuit high school, became a priest in 1930, and taught high school Latin and history, before becoming the first native Chinese Bishop of Shanghai in 1949.
In 1955, he was arrested by the Chinese government and sentenced in 1960 to life imprisonment. In 1979, Pope John Paul II secretly made Bishop Kung a cardinal in pectore. It was not until 1991 that the world learned of the new cardinal. Cardinal Kung’s motto that “neither sword nor fire can take away my faith in God” is just as relevant today as it was in 1955 in China.
Upon his release from prison in 1985, he was moved to parole (house arrest). He remained in house arrest until May,1988 when he was permitted to come to US for medical treatment and to visit his nephews and many family members whom he last met in 1955. He was pronounced a Cardinal on 1991. Cardinal Kung was invited to the Bridgeport Diocese by Bishop Curtis, and lived for nine years at the Retired Clergy Home in Stamford. He continued to fight for the right to religious freedom for Chinese citizens and for the right of Roman Catholics to maintain religious communion with the Pope, that they might live their faith to its fullness. He died in 2000 at the age of 98 and was buried out of the Basilica of St. John the Evangelist in Stamford. Efforts are currently underway to open the cause for his canonization.
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