By Thomas Tanase
While Christianity has always had an Asian history, the first Christians to enter the Chinese capital of Xi’an were the so-called Nestorian, as early as 635. When China closed itself off to “foreign” religions in the 9th century, the Nestorians retreated to the steppe peoples, up to the Mongols.
With this history, the Roman Catholic Church reconnected in the second half of the 13th century, when Marco Polo met the emperor Kublai Khan in Beijing. In 1294, Franciscan Friar John of Montecorvino arrived in Beijing, where he founded two monasteries. Although it yielded few results, Europe never forgot this horizon, up to Christopher Columbus, who initially set out to convert the great Khan.
That is when a new age began, Atlantic and Oceanic, allowing the Jesuits to arrive in China in the footsteps of Saint Francis Xavier. They impressed with European science. Matteo Ricci, who died in Beijing in 1610, and his successors tried to convert the elites by disseminating a Christianity that had undergone Aristotelian influence and was translated into Chinese to be presented as the culmination of Confucianism. The Jesuits negotiated the Treaty of Nerchinsk with Russia in 1689 on behalf of Emperor Kangxi. They also introduced China to Europeans.
An imposed Western model
However, the Chinese were not impressed by Aristotelianism. In Europe, philosopher Blaise Pascal thundered against the relativism of the Jesuits, and those who found them too accommodating eventually prevailed. Pope Clement XI condemned the “Chinese rites” in 1704.
The Jesuit gamble of a slow immersion to create a Chinese Christianity, even if it meant adopting traditional practices or concepts and Christianizing them, was rejected by those who demanded a wholesale conversion to a Western Christianity that had formed over a millennium.
The 19th century saw a new rise of Christianity, be it Catholicism, Orthodoxy promoted by Russia, or American-style Protestantism to which Sun Yat-sen and Chiang Kai-shek converted. However, this new age of Christianity, brought by foreign concessions, was also linked to colonial expansion. And the forced entry into Western modernity marked for 20th-century China a time of catastrophes perhaps unprecedented in human history.
China ultimately rebuilt itself on another Western model, that of a Communist Party that destroyed Christianity, as well as traditional forms of religiosity; a movement that reached its peak with the Cultural Revolution.
Anti-Christian authorities
Christianity returned with the opening of the 1980s but in an essentially American form, including Catholicism, which centered on Hong Kong. Today, Protestantism is booming in Chinese metropolises, while the authorities remain fundamentally anti-Christian due to Marxist ideology and because they identify Christianity with a Western influence reduced to the American model.
In light of this entire history, the provisional agreement between China and the Holy See signed in 2018 must be understood. Opponents immediately interpreted it through a Cold War lens, recalling the failures of Ostpolitik. They remain fundamentally supporters of Atlanticism, identifying the spread of Christianity with that of Western values and the Anglo-Saxon model. They hope for the collapse of communist power, the effects of which no one can measure, especially considering 20th-century Chinese history.
Defusing conflict
However, aside from the fact that China is an entirely different entity than the former Eastern Bloc countries, this attitude seems largely backward-looking. China is now at the center of an increasingly multipolar globalization, which will make Western domination impossible in the future, as it was over the past two centuries.
Sensitive to this transformation, the Argentine pope from the metropolises of the South and now leading a globalized Catholic Church, chose to defuse the conflict. He gambled on creating a gradual link between Catholicism and China, even though in the short term the Catholic Church remains persecuted in China despite the agreement.
Francis thus reconnects with a whole Jesuit tradition and, more broadly, that of an old Europe now in crisis, characterized by realpolitik and patience. This balance seems very precarious with the rise of what increasingly looks like a global confrontation between a post-Christian West, centered on the Anglo-Saxon world, and its enemies, gravitating around a China allied with Russia.
Indeed, the pressure to not renew the agreement and to abandon it is even stronger. But Francis scheduled an appointment with the future, hoping that in the world of tomorrow, the papacy, the custodian of a more complex history, can become a central interlocutor to build bridges between civilizations, creating an interest in Catholicism in China and elsewhere. – La Croix International
