Rome in China

The Roman Catholic Church was willing to go halfway or better. If accepting Chinese ways and customs would help win China to Rome, then those ways and customs would be accepted. It was not a new idea. In the 17th Century, Pope Paul V gave Jesuit missionaries permission to say Mass in Chinese.* But the permission was soon withdrawn, and Pope Clement XI later forbade some of the native customs which the Jesuits had allowed converts to retain.

Many signs now point to the Church's swing back. At weddings and funerals Chinese Catholics may bow to tablets bearing the names of ancestors--if the priest is sure the gesture indicates only respect and is not tinged with Confucian worship.

Catholic art often depicts Christ, Mary and the saints with Mongoloid features. Though priests do not teach that Christ was Chinese, the Sinofication of icons has the Church's official blessing. (Not approved: a painting of the Madonna and Child which alarmed many Chinese because Mary looked too much like the late Manchu Dowager Empress.)

Decline of the West. The Church is also changing its administrative complexion in China. Last week China's first cardinal--shy, humble Thomas Tien was on his way back from Rome. He will take up residence not in Tsingtao (his old vicariate) or Nanking (China's capital) but in Peiping. Explained a Vatican spokesman: "Peiping is the moral capital of China, essentially Chinese, least subject to Western influence."

As a far more significant sign of the decline of Western influence, the Vatican raised China from a missionary field, wholly dependent upon Rome, to metropolitan status much like that of the U.S. China will be entitled to 20 archbishops (the U.S. has 21), outranking the vicars apostolic (now bishops) who have hitherto captained Chinese Catholicism as personal delegates of the Pope.

China, in the eyes of Rome, is thus no longer classed as a non-Christian country. Though only 3,300,000 (not quite 1%) of its people are Catholics, they outnumber Protestants 6-to-1, and the Vatican considers the Chinese to be unusually friendly toward missionary activity--even in Communist territory, where a million Catholics live.

*The Catholic Church already allows its liturgy to be said in nine languages other than Latin. Among them: Slavonic, Rumanian, Syriac, Arabic, Armenian and Gheez (classic Ethiopic).

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