Turning the Other Cheek

First Richard Nixon. Now Pope Paul VI. Few more unlikely suitors could be imagined to come acourting at the doorstep of that aging antiChrist, Chairman Mao Tse-tung. Last week there was the Vatican's staid Sacred Congregation for the Evangelization of Peoples, proclaiming in its weekly bulletin that Chairman Mao's thoughts contained "Christian reflections."

The ideological overtures appeared in a study printed by Fides, the missionary congregation's news agency. Unlike Soviet Communism, which Fides stigmatized as pragmatic and economic, Maoist doctrine is "a moral socialism of thought and conduct." The People's Republic of China "looks toward the mystique of disinterested work for others, to inspiration to justice, to exaltation of a simple and frugal life, to rehabilitation of the rural masses and to a mixing of social classes."

On Christianity's behalf, the report reminded readers that Pope John XXIII and Pope Paul had put forth a similar system of social thought in their encyclicals Pacem in terris and Populorum progressio. The papal social doctrines, the article suggested, "must have come to the notice of the Peking leaders who may find in them the best evidence that religion, and Christianity in particular, is not a leechlike superstition but a genuine servant of man and, therefore, also of Chinese man."

The study eventually got round to pointing out that Maoist Marxism is atheistic, that the Chinese party is "full of prejudices against religion" and that the church in China is still "severely treated and oppressed." Nonetheless, it hoped that "the opening of China to the world" would provide "a path to contacts with the Holy See."

The icy mood between Mao's China and Paul's Vatican has been thawing ever since 1970, when China released Missionary Bishop James Walsh after twelve years' imprisonment. Later the same year, on his tour through East Asia, the Pope stopped in Hong Kong to celebrate a Mass during which he delivered "a message of unity and love to all the Chinese people wherever they may be." At the time, the Vatican's "foreign minister," Archbishop Agostino Casaroli, described the Pope's speech as an explicit gesture to Communist China.

Pharisees. Many churches in China today are used as warehouses and factories. No one in the West--and probably no one in China--knows how many believing members are left of the 3,500,000 Roman Catholics who existed in China before the Communist takeover in 1949. Still, a small pro-government group called the Patriotic Association of Chinese Catholics was supported and even encouraged by the party in the late '50s and early '60s. The group even consecrated a number of bishops--never recognized by Rome--but was suppressed again during the Red Guard revolutions. Since 1971, however, a few showcase churches have been periodically open.

One U.S. Catholic foe of Communist China was incensed by the Fides article. Said Right-Wing Jesuit Journalist Daniel Lyons: "Mao's ideas are no more Christian than Hitler's were. Hitler also fed the poor--when it served his purpose. We have the right to expect Vatican spokesmen to speak out like Christ against the Pharisees and not to try to create dialogue with them by compromising Christian teachings."

Lyons' rhetoric is intemperate and hardly typical of mainstream Catholic opinion. But the Vatican shift, which appears to show more concern for the good works of Mao's China than for the faith of its still persecuted Christians, may well trouble less polemical Catholics, too. The idea has come from Rome, however, not from some progressive theologian, and Rome seems to be moving with history.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.