A Catholic China? What Could Have Been, What Could Be

With most books, the work itself overshadows the author. People read Don Quixote and frequently pay no attention to the fascinating life of Miguel de Cervantes, who wrote it. On the other hand, there are some authors whose lives overshadow the works they left behind. Such is the case with Ways of Confucius and of Christ. This short, unassuming work is a meditation on philosophy and theology by a man who, as Dom Pierre-Célestin Lu, O.S.B., is not famed for the role he played in Catholic life, but who, as Lu Zhengxiang, was well known (though largely underappreciated) for the role he played in Chinese history.

Lu (1871-1949) had a long and prominent career in Chinese politics and public service during a tumultuous era in that nation’s history. But over time he moved from an appreciation for the Catholic faith to a full conversion to it, eventually leaving both career and country to enter a Benedictine monastery in Belgium. In 1943 some of Lu’s Benedictine brothers asked him to tell them about his life and career and to teach them about Chinese culture; he obliged them with a series of talks that were first published in French as Souvenirs et Pensées (1945) and then in English as Ways of Confucius and of Christ (1948).

Despite the influential role he had in the development of modern China, Lu has become something of a forgotten figure. Thankfully, Joshua R. Brown, an associate professor in the Department of Theology at Mount St. Mary’s University in Emmitsburg, Maryland, has taken it upon himself to produce a new version of Ways of Confucius and of Christ, providing updated material as well as a great deal of background information for those of us unfamiliar with Chinese history in the early 20th century (which is most of us Westerners). The result is a fascinating work that nevertheless does not quite do justice to its even more fascinating author.

Lu Zhengxiang was born in Shanghai in 1871, in the days of old China, when the country still had an emperor, men were forced to wear queues (long, braided hair), and large portions of the country were dominated by foreign powers. Like many men of his generation, Lu deplored the sufferings and humiliations his country had to endure, but unlike them, he did not fall prey to rabid xenophobia. This was partly because his father was a Christian, a member of the London Missionary Society, and a lay catechist. He ensured that Lu was raised Christian in religion and Confucian in philosophy, instilling in him an ethic of duty and public service, as well as a disdain for money and parochialism. Due to ill health, Lu was mostly homeschooled until age 13, receiving only a portion of the traditional education in Chinese classics given to children of the powerful and influential.

At age 13 Lu was sent to the prestigious School of Modern Languages in Shanghai, which provided training in foreign languages (and, in the view of many of his contemporaries, in treason to China and service to foreign devils). Lu learned French and proved to be so good at it that he spent only a year in advanced training at the Tong Wen College in Beijing before being sent to the Chinese legation at St. Petersburg as an interpreter (where he would also learn Russian). One of the other ambassadors at the legation, Xu Jingchen, served as a patron and mentor to Lu, encouraging his interest in the modernization and reform of China, as well as charging him with learning more about foreign cultures. Xu credited Christianity in general and Catholicism in particular as the chief sources of the West’s success, and he admonished Lu to learn about the Catholic faith. That charge became a little easier for Lu when he met Berthe Bovy, a relative of the Belgian minister at St. Petersburg and a devout Catholic, with whom he fell in love and married in 1899 over the objections of his superiors. His joy would be tempered shortly thereafter by the events of the Boxer Rebellion (1899-1901), during which Xu was set up as a scapegoat by the Chinese government and publicly beheaded in 1900, an act for which Lu never forgave his country.

Despite this, Lu went on to enjoy an impressive diplomatic and political career. He was the Chinese ambassador to the Netherlands from 1905 to 1911, during which time he served as the Chinese delegate at the First and Second Peace Conferences in The Hague (1899 and 1907). He then returned to St. Petersburg to serve as the Chinese ambassador to Russia from 1911 to 1912. After the Xinhai Revolution in China, which overthrew the Qing Dynasty, Lu was called back from Russia to help establish the Chinese Republic, serving in the government of Sun Yat-sen, first provisional president of China. Lu was initially intended to be foreign minister but was briefly promoted to prime minister in 1912, a position from which he resigned in short order after it became clear that his skills lay with diplomacy, not politics. He went back to the Foreign Ministry, which he re-established and re-founded along modern lines, serving as minister of foreign affairs a grand total of four times between 1912 and 1920 (with one brief break to serve as secretary of state from 1915 to 1916). After World War I, Lu personally led the Chinese delegation to the Paris Peace Conference in 1919, but, as the provisions of the Treaty of Versailles involved China’s handing over territory to Japan, Lu categorically refused to sign it, despite orders from his superiors to do so, making China the only country not to sign the treaty. Lu’s career somehow managed to survive this grand act of defiance, and he would go on to serve as the Chinese ambassador to the League of Nations from 1922 to 1927.

Ways of Confucius and of Christ is not primarily a professional meditation — interesting though that would be — but a spiritual one in which Lu recounts the events of his life and nation in order to examine the work of Christ in them. Lu would spend his life following the injunction of his mentor Xu Jingchen to deepen his understanding of the Catholic faith, “that universal spiritual government whose action had conferred on European society a moral strength that [Xu] desired for our own country.” He credits his wife for following the finest evangelization strategy of all by asking only that any children they had be raised Catholic, but otherwise “by not speaking to me about it” at all.

Lu and Berthe were never able to have children, but Lu continued to study his wife’s faith against the day that they might. Gradually, he simply found himself Catholic, and eventually he was received into the Church. The best parts of Ways of Confucius and of Christ are Lu’s mediations on becoming Catholic, and his reasons are unusual ones. “I am a Confucian,” he says time and time again, but eventually he came to regard Confucianism as the epitome of natural-law thinking, and he concluded that its best elements — morality, duty, stability, and, particularly, filial piety — reach their highest realization in the Catholic faith. What finer illustration of the principle of filial piety could there be, for example, than the submission of the Son to the Father to bring about the salvation of the world? Moreover, Lu’s meditations are not just personal but national: If Christ, by His humiliation and suffering, could bring about something wondrous, could not the humiliations and sufferings of China also someday bring about something wondrous?

For Lu, becoming Catholic was not so much a conversion as a logical progression. “My conversion is not a conversion; it is a vocation,” he would tell people, and he greatly desired that his nation would follow his personal example. Lu carried his comments about vocation to their logical conclusion: After Berthe’s death in 1926 he became a postulant at the Benedictine monastery of St. Andrew in Bruges, taking the name Pierre-Célestin Lu. Despite all his linguistic training, he found the study of Latin — particularly the study of theology and Western philosophy in Latin — challenging this late in life, but he persevered. He was ordained a priest in 1935, and in 1946 was made titular abbot of the Monastery of St. Peter in Ghent by Pope Pius XII. It is scarcely surprising that someone like Lu, predisposed to the presentation of the ordered life that Confucianism provides, would find in the Rule of St. Benedict the ultimate way of living that ordered life.

As a devout Confucianist, Lu expresses some disdain for Buddhism, blaming it for introducing into China a number of superstitions that have had a deleterious effect on its culture. Near the end of his work, he notes, “At present Chinese monasticism is Buddhist. What would our country be today if that monasticism had been Benedictine?” While he claims himself unworthy to be a Benedictine version of Xuanzhang, the monk who brought Buddhism to China, it is clear that embarking on some version of that project was what he hoped to do in the last days of his life.

Alas, such was not to be, in part due to the circumstances under which Ways of Confucius and of Christ came to be. Lu gave the talks that would become the book in a Belgium that was occupied by the Nazis, giving him firsthand experience of living under one of the great tyrannical forces of the 20th century. Though he always wanted to send a Benedictine mission to China, the events of World War II rendered that impossible. Worst of all, Lu’s beloved country fell under the domination of the other great tyrannical force of the 20th century with the rise to power of Mao Zedong by the time of Lu’s death in 1949. China would find itself under the domination of an ideology that set itself against both Confucius and Christ.

Confucian principles such as the importance of the family and filial piety were devastated by China’s brutal one-child policy, which has resulted in generations of people growing up not knowing what it is to have a sibling. Though this policy was abandoned in recent years, as of 2023 the fertility rate of China is a miserable 1.2 children per fertile couple, well short of the rate of 2.1 necessary for a country to maintain its population. (Sadly, the fertility rate of the non-communist Republic of China in Taiwan is no better, with an identical rate of 1.2, demonstrating that modernity’s values of “freedom” and consumerism are no better than communism at encouraging a stable population.) Furthermore, the government of China has taken draconian action against religion in general and Christianity in particular, and current Vatican Ostpolitik toward China is a signal low point in what has been an exceedingly disappointing pontificate.

And yet stories of the spread of Christianity in general and Catholicism in particular continue to emerge from China. There is no real way of knowing how true or false these stories are, but they persist. Of particular interest are the ones concerning the spread of Catholicism, which purportedly has been making inroads among the most educated classes in China, the members of which supposedly find both communism and traditional Chinese ideas inadequate means of understanding the modern world. Again, it is hard to know what the truth of the matter is, but time will tell whether the prediction made by one wag comes true: that China could be the world’s largest Christian nation and the world’s largest atheist nation at the same time. Perhaps one day there will be a new springtime of faith in China, and toward that day Lu’s book still has great value.

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