China: Where Past and Present Meet

by Msgr. Owen F. Campion

In the suburbs of Taipei, the capital of the Republic of China which Mao Tse-tung overthrew on the mainland, is the National Palace Museum housing the ancient treasures of the emperors of China.

Defeated supporters of the republic, fleeing the mainland in 1949, brought these magnificent objects of sculpture and painting with them to their refuge on Taiwan.

Several years ago, Western visitors to the museum were astonished to see a special display of the art of "the Jesuits." After all, Jesuits and Catholics have never been many in China. But once, long ago, European Jesuits were not only present in China but were highly regarded for their skills in artistry and in other pursuits revered by the Chinese, such as astrology and mathematics.

(St. Francis Xavier [1506-52], while never himself in China, was part of an intense wish among Jesuits of the times to establish Christianity in the Far East.)

These Jesuits in China long ago are best remembered, however, for their then revolutionary approach to Christianizing China, an approach which not only provoked considerable controversy at the time but which also has theological and pastoral echoes in the present.

In 1583, two Italian Jesuits, Michele Ruggieri (1543-1607) and Matteo Ricci (1552-1610), arrived in Chao-ch'ing, on the Chinese mainland, after having spent some time in the Portuguese colony of Macao, now Macau. Macao, a Portuguese enclave on the Chinese coast, was a great place to prepare any Westerner to visit China in those days.

There Ruggieri and Ricci fully emersed themselves in Chinese culture, perfected their use of the Chinese languages, and dreamed and planned for the day so fervently in their hopes, the day that China would be Christian.

They were remarkable men, as were many of the other Jesuits who followed. Ricci is the best known. Fundamentally, Ricci's missionary strategy was to project as clearly as possible the basics of the Catholic faith without unnecessarily bringing along what was not essentially religious but merely cultural.

Ricci and his comrades were not the first Catholic missionaries to enter China. At least as early as A.D. 635, Nestorian Christians came to China; in 1625, a monument was uncovered, long before built to honor a Nestorian bishop. In time, however, no trace of the Nestorian venture remained, except in stone.

In 1307, Pope Clement V appointed an Italian Franciscan, Giovanni de Monte Corvino, the archbishop of Peking (now Beijing), attaching to the new archdiocese seven other newly founded, neighboring Chinese dioceses.

During his fascinating, and certainly very challenging, life as a missionary, Monte Corvino even translated the psalms and the New Testament into the language of the Tartar tribes among whom he lived for a while. Monte Corvino, now a candidate for beatification, died in 1328. Forty years after his death, Christianity was outlawed. Again, save when other Christian missionary expeditions spasmodically came and went, the Gospel was unknown.

When Ricci and his companions pondered their movement into China, other missionaries recently and occasionally had been present. Usually they did not cast the most attractive image.

Faithfully garbed in black cassocks, if Jesuits, or in the habits of their European religious communities, devotedly speaking in Latin, the language of their education and of Church dogmatic pronouncements, they understandably appeared not only foreign but foolish to the Chinese. In other words, the Chinese did not accept a word they said.

They were Europeans, albeit arriving from a Europe aglow with the High Renaissance, but in Chinese estimates they were barbarians. Ricci, by contrast, pursued another tactic, which in time was to be legendary.

He urged, and deeply placed himself within, a respect for China and the Chinese. In more ways than one, he sought to speak to the Chinese in their own language, to meet them on their own terms. Literal fluency in Mandarin Chinese was essential. Ricci learned the language, and he carefully studied Chinese philosophy.

Additionally, Ricci developed his considerable skills in the sciences of the times. He made good advantage of the scientific advances that he had known in Europe, such as the use of prisms, sundials and clocks, and he became a very good cartographer. In a relatively short time, he came not only to be accepted in China, but to be well regarded.

Other Jesuits came to join the initial party. Displaying the same depth of learning as Ricci, and as immersed in Chinese culture as was he, eventually they made their way to the imperial court itself.

One of these Jesuits, Giuseppe Castiglione (1688-1766), was a painter whose works attracted the admiration of the emperor himself. (It was Castiglione's art that the Taipei museum featured a number of years ago.)

The emperor was not only the political and military ruler but also the most dominant figure in Chinese life and culture. Even the most famous and desired Chinese cuisine today dates itself to dishes once placed before the emperors.

Contact with the emperor, and indeed the imperial favor, were vital in Ricci's plans. The Jesuit proposed to convert China to Christianity in a vertical process, from the throne downward. Today this strategy would seem either ridiculous or oppressive. However, many of the great historical sweeps to accept Christianity had been precisely in such a vertical pattern.

Although no records exist of any emperor's conversion, in Ricci's time and even thereafter many near the emperors adopted Christianity.

For instance, during the reign of Pope Innocent X, who governed the Church from 1644 to 1655, a communication arrived in Rome from the dowager empress of China who announced her conversion to the Catholic Church and her adoption of the name Helena, after the saintly mother of Emperor Constantine. She was not the only one then near the Dragon Throne to turn to Christianity.

Pictures of Ricci survive. He is portrayed not in his Jesuit cassock, but in the outfit of a Chinese scholar. On his brow is the formal headpiece of a Chinese scholar.

The pictures show more than this famous missionary's features. For, as you see, his basic philosophy was to make China Christian, but keep it Chinese. In time, his philosophy and its implications were drawn into a controversy in Rome.

The controversy often is minimalized as if it simply were a matter of rubrics. It is true, for instance, that those of Ricci's mind sought permission to wear the formal Chinese hat at Mass. Of course, this flew into the face of the requirement that celebrants at the Eucharist stand before the altar with their heads uncovered as a sign of respect. In China, however, bearing the head did not convey the same message.

Those sharing Ricci's theory of evangelization wished to celebrate the Mass and administer the Catholic sacraments in Chinese, not in Latin, and to wear distinctively Chinese garb. But they also saw these accommodations in liturgy as part of a broader effort very sympathetic to, indeed respectful of, ancient Chinese assumptions and beliefs.

For example, the Chinese venerated dead ancestors. Opponents of the Ricci-inspired strategy charged that such veneration was little short of worship. If it were worship, then in the eyes of the Church, it obviously was idolatry.

And the strategy had its opposition in the Church, in China as well as in Rome.

While Ricci is the best known of the Catholic missionaries in China in those days, he and his confreres in fact were not alone. By that time, other Catholic clerics also were in China. These other missionaries favored a much more traditional approach. They wished to bring China to the Catholicity that, in all its particulars and symbols, they knew.

It is easy today, in the face of a China overwhelmingly still non-Christian, to accuse Ricci's critics and indeed the Holy See itself (which eventually ruled against these ideas of accommodation) of being extraordinarily shortsighted. Therefore, according to this view, the Church simply surrendered China to narrow-mindedness.

On the other hand, some arguments against the Chinese rites can be advanced. China was very far from Europe, where most importantly was seated the papacy, with its primacy and its Spirit-protected reservoir of truth in religious matters.

To borrow a phrase from these present times, opponents of Ricci's reasonings, and their extensions, understandably, and perhaps not too unreasonably, worried that if Chinese Christianity were centered too much in China, then there would arise a risk of losing the universal reality of the Church and, along with that, a loss of Christ and the fullness of His Word.

In any event, it was the Roman rite that eventually took hold in China.

A while later, Catholic missionizing in China experienced its golden age, approximately between the years 1840 and 1940. During those times, missionaries arrived in numbers never seen by Ricci and his companions. They came overwhelmingly from Europe. But as the Church in the United States matured, American Catholics also came to China to preach the Good News.

These missionaries, in lives not too far away today, built a network of considerable Catholic presence. For instance, Jesuits established Aurora University in Shanghai. Until it was seized by the communists, Aurora University was one of the finest institutions of higher learning in the Far East. The darker side of this picture was precisely the fact that these missionaries were not natives of China. More critically, they were Europeans or Americans. The foreign presence, so long scorned but rarely encountered, now was thrust into the heart of China much more deeply and indeed rudely.

Foreign presence in China was not looked upon as a blessing by the Chinese, the great contributions of institutions such as Aurora University notwithstanding.

It was the time when the British literally took Hong Kong — by coercion and trickery. But servants of Queen Victoria were hardly the only foreigners who looked upon China as a prey for their material exploitation.

Greed, to the point of frenzy, was the order of the day. Other European powers, and the United States itself, while not actually establishing themselves as decidedly on Chinese soil as did the British in Hong Kong, nevertheless by hook and by crook took what they wanted, and they wanted all they could get.

The Chinese and indeed Chinese culture were helpless — and humiliated. It is no mystery that Chinese suspicions and resentments for foreigners soared. Unfortunately for many Chinese, on many occasions Christianity seemed to come as part of the Westerners' baggage.

Even so, Chinese Christianity grew. For Catholics, Chinese priests and then bishops multiplied. Making the Church in China as Chinese as possible within the scope of a universal Church, Pope Pius XI, who governed the Church from 1922 to 1939, most boldly smiled upon native Chinese Catholicity. In what was seen as a key moment in history, he consecrated native Chinese as bishops.

His successor, Pope Pius XII, enthusiastically followed this policy. In 1946, in a gesture regarded as a landmark in Catholic history, the Pope named Bishop Thomas Tien, S.V.D., a native of China, the first archbishop of the restored See of Peking and a cardinal, as part of the process of establishing the Chinese hierarchy.

All these steps forward were halted, and turned around, by the press of communism and Mao Tse-tung's revolutionary armies in 1949.

This Marxist and, for Catholics, devastatingly harmful push was greatly assisted by 15 years of war that preceded.

Much of this warfare had involved the Japanese, who sought in one way or the other to dominate Asia. As fate unfolded, Japan's enemies were the Americans, the Dutch, the Belgians, the French, the Poles and the British.

While the Church in China by tiny steps was moving toward being Chinese, much of its personnel still were from nations at war with Japan. As the Japanese advanced into Chinese territory, many missionaries consequently had to return home. Others were imprisoned or killed.

Irish, Italian and German missionaries were less frequently molested: Ireland was neutral, and Italy and Germany were Japanese allies. But, in any case, the violence and turmoil of war upset much of Catholic life.

And indeed, the terror of the Second World War merely extended a long period of unrest and violence in China that had begun with the overthrow of the old, feudal, monarchical system much earlier in the 20th century. Then, with communism, and in the immediate and now long-term aftermath of the Chinese communist revolution, has come what has grown to be Catholicism on the mainland today — along with its contradictions, conflicts, differences, problems and, surely in not a few cases, its martyrdoms and its heroism.

The Church does exist freely on Taiwan. Ever since the government and supporters of the Republic of China escaped to Taiwan (or Formosa, as it then was called — a name in itself recalling European, or more precisely Portuguese, presence), the Church on the island has increased.

But it has had ups and downs. It has been trapped in the middle by events on the mainland and specifically by the exchange, or absence of exchange, between Taiwan and the People's Republic of China.

Taiwanese Catholics at times find little cause for delight. They know that the mainland looks intensively upon the island, eager to reclaim it as part of China's historical, territorial oneness.

Were that day soon to come, it almost inevitably would mean deep problems for the Taiwanese Catholics.

Balancing its position to maintain a place best to serve all its people, the Holy See has kept its apostolic nunciature to the Republic of China, but it has not assigned an apostolic nuncio to Taipei for many years.

Catholics on Taiwan know the picture is unsteady. A most welcomed gesture, however, was in February 1998 when Pope John Paul II appointed Bishop Paul Shan Kuo-hsi, a Jesuit, of Kaohsiung, Taiwan, to the College of Cardinals. He is the fourth native of China to receive the cardinalate.

While the particulars of the present ecclesial situation in China have surely been on the minds of many in China, and while Ricci's missionary strategy long ago is not now an exact and immediate concern, the arguments once raised to make Chinese Catholicity as Chinese as possible point to present-day considerations. The debate once revolving about the thinking of Matteo Ricci and his comrades lives.

From mid-April to mid-May 1998, representatives of Asia's bishops met in Rome for the Special Assembly of the Synod of Bishops for Asia. Due to the sad, troubled and disunited current state of Chinese Catholicity, no bishops from the mainland attended.

To have been invited, a bishop would have to have had credentials from Rome. To travel, he would have needed permission from a government seemingly not the least interested in cooperating religiously with Rome. These considerations, as did those in Ricci's day, have implications much broader than merely the style of clothing worn by Catholic liturgical officers.

How can the Church convince not only the Chinese but also the Malays, the Indians, the Vietnamese, the Nepalese and the Koreans that its message is as essential to them, and of them, as it is to the Italians or the French or the English or the Dutch, when it is seemingly so attached to such foreigners whose reputation, after all, is hardly to be coveted in China?

In the balance is, on one end, the universality of the Church —not as a coincidence or convenience, but as a critical instrument, and outcome, of the Church's divine constitution — and, on the other plate of the scale, the essentially intimate character of religion. In preserving the truth given by Jesus to the Twelve, is it an advantage or disadvantage to embrace altogether the philosophical symbols and notions of a culture that, with no intent of discourtesy, is after all quite separate historically and currently from Christianity? How far can this nod to Eastern cultures go?

Were inculturation pressed as far as some demand, would new generations, born and reared in a new day, be able to connect intellectually with the revelation long taught, and reflected upon, by the Church?

All human cultural systems to some degree or another stand opposite Christianity, as all are human and, in that, subject to human short-sightedness and fault. How best to show this difference — between the human, on the one hand, and the divine, which is Christianity, on the other?

Possibly influenced by the past controversies in the techniques of evangelization; maybe abetted by the Second Vatican Council's regard for individual consciences and other religious systems as expressions of such consciences; perhaps assisted by the feelings of warmth and cooperation forged in times of facing common enemies — a new debate lives.

A controversy? Perhaps. But certainly it is spoken and considered, often and deeply.

Another consideration is what critics call a "religious indifferentism." This, it is warned, rises from the belief that Catholicity should not assert its ritual and dogmatic individuality, but rather seek to uplift all the society with a reverence for values and for human dignity. In this, it should honor and cooperate with the ancient, profound religious philosophies native to the East — Islam, Hinduism, Shinto, Buddhism and Confucianism.

Again with a glance to the Second Vatican Council, and noting the greatly intensified interest in, and regard for, individual conscience and for the possibility of an awareness of God outside Christian understandings, some ask if these ancient, great philosophies do not somehow at least themselves catch the shadow of divine revelation?

Theologies in behalf of all these ways of thinking can be quite involved, and they each can rest upon words as dear to Christianity as those of the Gospels themselves. In this is a basic argument that future Catholic missionizing in China must resolve.

For that matter, it is an argument that must be settled among Catholic missionaries everywhere in the world, and indeed among Catholics in places where large Catholic populations and considerable Catholic influence exist. Many professed Catholics in cultural settings long since Catholic wonder why the Church must insist that its concept of God and His Word is the best and foremost. These arguments, or responses to them, all so often echo of debates with which Ricci would have been familiar, have impact upon Catholic liturgy. As the liturgy is so vital to Catholic life, herein is perhaps the most evident expression of the conflict. Advocates for a more indigenous appearance of Catholicity call for a ritual more "incultured," more attune to local art and symbols.

The Church officially hardly frowns on such adaptations. How could it? Differences between East and West, for example, between Rome and Byzantium, are as ancient in Christianity as they are accepted.

But how far should this go? What about structure? Governance? Final authority? Source of authority? Matteo Ricci would find himself at home entering this debate were he still alive.

Of course, he is not alive. Dead long ago, he and his Jesuit confreres were buried, by special imperial dispensation, in a cemetery created for their remains in the Forbidden City itself, the residence of the emperors. These remains, the earthly relics of those who after all became almost without exception worthy Chinese scholars and who in all cases loved all things Chinese, were despoiled by roving bands supporting the Cultural Revolution a generation ago. Despite all, Ricci and his friends were foreigners.

The perceptions linger. The missionary challenge endures. The Lord awaits His beloved flock.

MSGR. CAMPION is the editor of The Priest and the associate publisher of Our Sunday Visitor.

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