China and the Church: Building a bridge

By Guglielmo Gallone

“My Chinese dream is to be a bridge between Christianity and China: I hope that the Pope can visit my country, and that China can welcome the light of the Gospel.”

Those were the words of Chiaretto Yan, a Chinese member of the Focolare Movement, in an interview with Vatican Media.

He was speaking at the launch of his book Il mio sogno cinese: Dialoghi e incontri con il cristianesimo (“My Chinese Dream: Dialogues and Encounters with Christianity”), which was presented on Tuesday at the Vatican Media headquarters in Rome’s Palazzo Pio.

The universal desire for truth, goodness, and beauty

This dream, Yan explains, is rooted in the conviction that, for Chinese culture, Christianity is not a foreign element but a possible dialogue partner.

“In every human being there lives a universal desire for truth, goodness, beauty and love,” he said, “a deep longing that crosses cultures and traditions, and that in Christianity finds expression in a personal relationship with God.”

“On the one hand I am a Catholic Christian,” Yan continues, “and on the other I am Chinese. The Christian faith tells me that God comes toward us, that He became incarnate out of love for humanity. God’s initiative toward the human person is divine Revelation. Other cultures, as well as other religions, are also humanity’s effort to seek God. That is why I believe these two 'directions' meet; they are not in contradiction.”

Five paths forward

With this spirit, the author chose to focus on five areas of research that could bring Chinese culture and Christianity together: philosophy, ecology, politics, economics and cultural dialogue.

“These are all highly topical issues,” Yan observes, “and they are a shared challenge for all humanity. We have seen this in Pope Francis’ pontificate, in encyclicals such as Laudato Si’ and Fratelli Tutti, but we also see it in contemporary Chinese debate."

This convergence is also grounded in the Chinese tradition, Yan continues. “Confucius says: ‘We cannot know enough about this life, so I do not investigate the afterlife.’ Laozi says: ‘Those who know do not speak; those who speak do not know.’ These statements do not point to a rejection of transcendence, but rather to an attitude of humility: the afterlife is a mystery, and human beings do not possess it — they can only draw near to it. At heart, this is an attitude of openness that recognizes the limits of language and reason, and that finds a point of contact with Christianity."

While in the West dialectic has often been conceived as conflict, Yan explains, following philosophical schemes such as Hegel’s, "in Taoism it takes the form of harmony: yin and yang do not oppose each other in order to annihilate one another, but call to and complete one another.”

Within this logic, Yan sees the “dialectic of love” proper to Christianity, especially in the mystery of Christ on the cross, who empties himself, makes room, embraces emptiness in order to fulfill the Father’s will.

“In Chinese philosophical language as well,” Yan notes, “the relationship between being and non-being is not destructive, but generative: it is from this relationship that harmony is born. And it is here that dialogue becomes deeper, to the point where it becomes possible to speak.”

The book launch

Dialogue was at the heart of the book launch, which featured Professor Agostino Giovagnoli, professor of Contemporary History at the Catholic University of the Sacred Heart in Milan; Fr. Federico Lombardi, S.J., president of the Joseph Ratzinger–Benedict XVI Vatican Foundation; and Fr. Antonio Spadaro, S.J., undersecretary of the Dicastery for Culture and Education.

Moderating the discussion was Gianni Valente, director of the Vatican's Fides News Agency.