China
+ Cardinal George Pell, Archbishop of Sydney
19 Aug 2007
About a couple of hundred years ago the French dictator Napoleon said that “when China awakes the world will tremble”.
China is now awake, with an economy second in size only to the United States.
What is not so well known is that Christianity, especially Protestantism, is spreading through China at a much faster rate than Christianity spread through the pagan Roman Empire.
The collapse of Communist ideology (a taxi-driver in Shanghai, once refused to take me to Chou-En-lai’s house, saying it wasn’t worth a visit), the destructiveness of the Cultural Revolution a generation ago and spectacular prosperity for a new middle class have combined to produce the “largest soul market” in the world as many search for a cohert sense of meaning and set of values.
Outsiders often approach our society with a different set of eyes and questions. A recent book on Christianity in the Third World quoted a senior Chinese official who had been examining the Western world trying to identify the reasons for our prosperity, vitality, and decent way of life. He concluded that Christianity, more than any other agent, was responsible for our great strengths.
The Chinese official is right of course, but his diagnosis could not have been more politically incorrect in the English-speaking world, as many of our best and brightest labour to diminish our Christian inheritance.
China has huge problems, most of the peasant majority are still impoverished with huge rural unemployment, but there is also unprecedented economic growth – an annual rate of 9.4% over the past 25 years. This vitality has spilled over into religion too.
In 1949 there were almost one million Protestants in China. Today the World Christian Database claims there are nearly 100 million Protestants although the CIA World Fact Book puts the number at 40 million.
If this level of expansion continues, China will become the third largest Christian country in the world after the United States and Brazil.
There are still pockets of religious persecution in China, often influenced by local factors, although the general level of freedom has improved. But the Catholic Church’s position is still not regularized.
While there has been steady growth in the number of Chinese Catholics throughout Asia e.g. in Indonesia, most estimate there are only about 12 million Catholics in mainland China, four times the number when the Communists came to power.
The Chinese Catholic story is full of heroes, martyrs and prisoners, but most Catholics are in the country side.
Recently Pope Benedict wrote to give them some basic guidelines and general encouragement, urging them to work together despite the divisions between the State-controlled Catholics and the underground Church. Progress has been made, with unprecedented levels of co-operation, but problems remain.
Pope Benedict also pointed out, as I did to recent visiting Chinese delegations, that Catholics make good loyal citizens and have much to contribute to nation building.
