Christianity and China, a non-one-way adaptation

The debate that took place at the event organised at the University of St. Joseph on the occasion of the centenary of the Council of Shanghai. Father Leopold Leeb: Many Chinese are interested in the novelty of the Gospel and this is the precondition for all inculturation. The decisive role of the “sensus fidelium” of Chinese Catholic families in keeping the faith alive during the years of persecution.

Macao () – The encounter between the Gospel and cultures is never a one-way street, but is always made up of reciprocal exchanges, and this approach is also valid for all the debates on the “sinicization” of Christianity, both in China yesterday and today. Among the many ideas put forward at the Symposium organised in Macao by St. Joseph’s University on the 100th anniversary of the Council of Shanghai, precisely this need to go beyond rather schematic readings of history was the most significant feature that characterised the three days of work that ended this afternoon with the conclusions that were handed over to the scientific coordinators of the initiative, Father Cyril Law and Father Gianni Criveller.

The event organized to mark the centenary – which brought together a hundred academics from all over Greater China (People’s Republic of China, Macau, Hong Kong and Taiwan) – was a moment of frank exchange of opinions between participants, with space for dialogues that allowed for a fruitful debate. From this point of view, two interventions in particular introduced important elements to reread in a non-ideological way the context of China in which the Shanghai Council took place in 1924.

In fact, while it is true that this event was an important prophecy concerning the valorisation of Chinese culture and of the local clergy, which was never fully fulfilled because of too much resistance, it is also profoundly wrong to try to reread the entire history of missions in China in the 19th and early 20th centuries as a colonial phenomenon. In this regard – also in the light of the current insistence on the sinicisation of religions in China – it was interesting what Father Leopold Leeb, a SVD scholar, professor at Renmin University and with many years of presence in Beijing behind him, underlined about the “Christianisation of China” as a precondition for a Church with a truly Chinese face. For it is not only a question of forms, persons or cultural categories that must be valued: there is a novelty of the Gospel that must also be able to find space in its entirety in the context of this great nation. “Many Chinese people are interested in what Christianity has to offer that is new and different,” Father Leeb recalled. “And we must also take into account the path that China has had to take to approach and understand Christianity. True encounter, therefore, requires this reciprocal integration.”

Equally significant was the reinterpretation proposed by Professor Rachel Zhu Xiao Hong, from Fudan University in Shanghai, who in her intervention pointed out that the “sensus fidelium” of Catholic families (formed in the faith and educated in institutions founded by missionaries) was what kept the faith alive in China beyond all the political storms of the twentieth century. In this regard, the scholar recalled the experience of the family of Msgr. Simon Zhu Kaimin, one of the first Chinese bishops personally ordained by Pius XI in 1926, who directed the apostolic vicariate of Haimen with great missionary dynamism in the following years. Being already old, however, he was labeled a reactionary by the communists and died basically deprived of freedom in 1960. That Zhu family still has some priests over ninety years old who have demonstrated with their lives that this “sensus fidelium” has always remained deeply alive, even in the hardest years of persecution.

The Symposium also presented important reflections on some specific aspects of the path that the Shanghai Council had already indicated a century ago: for example, Pan Zhi Yuan, a researcher at Shanghai University, traced the trajectory of the Chinese Catholic publishing sector in the first mid-20th century, while Franz Gassner of Macau’s St. Joseph’s University spoke about the idea of ​​a Chinese Bible, which was one of the topics the bishops discussed in 1924.

In parallel with the study sessions, the Symposium also saw significant public moments in this same spirit. On the evening of 27 June, in the Fatima Auditorium, a large crowd of Catholics from Macao attended the screening of Ageless China, a film shot in 1949 by the American Jesuits Bernard Hubbard and William Klement. This is a virtually unknown document of great quality, which allowed us to relive, with moving images, what life was like for the Catholic community in Shanghai in the late 1940s. This afternoon, the work concluded with another artistic moment: the presentation in the chapel of the St. Joseph Seminary of the Mass Regina Pacis, composed by the Austrian Salesian Wilhelm Schmid on the occasion of the coronation of the image of the Virgin in the sanctuary of Sheshan in Shanghai. All of these opportunities to rediscover a precious treasure for the journey of the Church in China today.