Confucius and the Cross
CONFUCIUS AND THE CROSS THE peril at Shanghai has naturally called a great deal of attention to what has been accomplished by the missionaries of Europe in the vast Chinese land. An article in the...
...Up until now the principal obstacle encountered by the missionaries has been the occidental, foreign—and therefore suspect to the Chinese—character of the Christian religion...
...It is he who, having surrendered all the attractiveness of his native country, devotes all life to the building of a mystical spiritual kingdom which in the end passes over to the religious children he has reared...
...An article in the Fortnightly Review, signally the intelligent attitude toward native sentiment assumed by the Catholic Church, has been productive of much comment in the United States...
...Everything that could be done to remove this hindrance has now been accomplished...
...However trivial the statements used to uphold this controversy may seem, they call attention to the central policy of the Vatican, expressed so clearly by Pope Pius XI when he consecrated six new Chinese bishops: "I have consecrated the first Chinese bishops...
...This population may say to those who are led to reproach adherence to a foreign institution: 'No, we do not practise an alien religion: we are sons of the Catholic Church, Chinese in China quite so much as it is French in France or American in America...
...What this means in the world of religion and social principle has been set forth so well by Monsignor De Guebriant, superior of the French foreign missions, that it is worth while quoting his words: "The conversion of China to Christianity would mean the complete ruin of paganism...
...And yet, as Monsieur De Guebriant reminds us, the older missionary remains—the martyr of the past, the pioneer of the present, upon whose scroll the most radiant of all heroisms is inscribed...
...The promise for the future here held out is one in which the universal Church can rejoice...
...my successors will have the joy of consecrating the first African bishops...
...It is they who shall prove to their fellow-citizens, governing or governed, that while they are as whole-heartedly Chinese as anyone, they are also Catholic bishops, in possession of the whole truth which they are to preserve intact, safeguarded against doctrinal error as they are by their indefectible union with the Holy See...
...It is their task to encourage the Chinese to love a reli-ligion which is so generously and totally aloof from everything that might constitute a reason for opposing it...
...Among the many institutions which our country has freely borrowed from afar, we are the most ancient, and the most firmly rooted in the national soil...
...And when the present crisis will have passed, and (he Chinese stand delivered of the burdens which harass them, seeing that liberty is not the same thing as isolation, these bishops will be there to show how it is possible for a nation to cooperate with others while not surrendering anything of its independence or its originality...
...Among the sixty vicar-iats or dioceses which now divide up among them the territory of this immense republic, there are already six where a Catholic Chinese population is ministered to by a Catholic Chinese clergy under the jurisdiction of a Chinese bishop...
...The greatness and importance of the part which the new bishops are to play is evident...
...Various correspondents then hurried to the fore, magnifying the actions of a few imprudent missionaries into what they termed a general Catholic "demand" in China...
...See our Chinese dioceses!' "Who does not see the assistance that is given to Christianity in China by these recent initiatives of the Church...
...After all, the whole of Christendom is that which springs up in the furrow traced by the missionary apostle...
...The New York Times, for instance, noted the article and pointed to the importance of its major conclusions...
Vol. 5 • March 1927 • No. 20
