Catholic Exchange

St. Francis Xavier, the Jesuit missionary to India and Japan, famously died on an island near Macao before reaching the mainland of China.  Overland trade routes, though, had brought Christian missionaries from the Syrian Church to the imperial city of the Tang Dynasty as early as the seventh century!

Christians in China is a treasure trove of Church history lovingly compiled by a French priest who spent thirty years in East Asia and is now the director of the China Service of the Paris Foreign Missions.  The author has made an effort, not just to chronicle missionary work, but to describe the dramatic encounter between the European and Chinese cultures.  He does this admirably in thirty chapters, divided into five parts. (Christians in China A.D. 600 to 2000. By Jean-Pierre Charbonnier (Ignatius Press, P.O. Box 1339, Fort Collins, CO 80522, 970-221-3920, 2007), 610 pp., PB $24.95.)

I. “Relics from China’s Past” include the earliest monumental and documentary evidence of Christianity in China (e.g. a lengthy inscription on a marble slab, manuscripts on silk).  The Mongol Dynasty established by Khublai Khan in 1279 was somewhat receptive to the Catholic faith, and Pope Nicholas I sent a delegate to China who headed a short-lived Franciscan mission and became Archbishop of Beijing.

II. China was not so easily conquered by Westerners as Mexico.  “The meeting of Catholicism and Confucianism” initiated in 1583 by Matteo Ricci, S.J., was an intellectual dialogue about natural theology, science and technology.  The reader finds memorable portraits of the first Confucian scholars to convert to Christianity and a chapter on Candida Xu, a 17th-century benefactress of the Church in Shanghai.  Jesuits served in the imperial court as astronomers and mathematicians, but dreams of a Chinese Constantine were disappointed.

III. The complex controversy over Chinese rites was decided by Rome in 1704:  Catholic converts were forbidden to burn incense in honor of their ancestors or Confucius.  This caused turmoil in the Catholic missions among the educated, and consequently “The Gospel [was] preached to Poor Peasants in the 18th and 19th centuries.”  This missionary outreach, conducted along more conventional lines, was slower but fruitful;  chapters are dedicated to the phenomenal ministry of an early native priest, to the work of lay catechists and to consecrated virgins.

IV. When China was forcibly opened up to Western trade in 1840, the missions came under a French protectorate backed by the military of several European nations.  Catholic and Protestant communities in China expanded during the colonial period, but the author notes disadvantages as well:  cultural tensions were an obstacle to further evangelization.

V. Under Communism, the Church in China was at first subjugated to the state and then, during the Cultural Revolution, practically destroyed.  Fr. Charbonnier judiciously outlines the respective positions taken by underground Catholics and members of the “Patriotic Church”.  In recent decades, as China has fostered ties with the West, the Church has revived.  Part Five also takes a wider perspective, surveying Christianity in Taiwan and in the Chinese diaspora and examining the effects of Vatican II on Catholic life in China.

Fr. Charbonnier’s book has been translated into crisp British English by M.N.L. Couve de Murville, Archbishop Emeritus of Birmingham, England, who also amplified the early chapters with background information, making the book more accessible to non-specialists.  The volume is illustrated with maps and photographs;  useful appendices include a chronological table, multi-lingual bibliography and index.

This highly readable church history concisely addresses theological, political, ecclesiological and cultural issues as they arise.  In his Conclusion, the author optimistically writes that, despite “centuries of repeated persecutions, … today Christians are fully integrated in their civilization, and they can work for the transformation of society.”