Newsflash Archives > A Chinese Pope?

A Chinese Pope?

April 13, 2005

Note: The following article was written in March, 2005, before Pope John Paul II's death. It is a "thought experiment" about what the consequences would be of the election of a Chinese Pope. We publish it here, not because we think the election of a Chinese Pope is likely at this upcoming conclave, which opens April 18, but because we thought some of the arguments made cast an interesting light on the factors the cardinals may be taking into consideration as they make their choice. — The Editor

FLYING DRAGON IN THE SKY

What if the college of cardinals elected a Pope... from China? How would that affect the world's most populous nation? How would it affect the rest of the world? How would it affect the Church? Paul Badde tells the tale, as he envisions it...

- by Paul Badde

Heavy clouds have been hanging over the dome of St. Peter's basilica for weeks. Lightning flashes illumine the marble balustrade of the facade. It begins to rain. Notwithstanding, thousands of visitors flock into St. Peter's square this morning. They pass the security checks between the colonnades, where their bags are scanned before they can enter. Inside the basilica, near the puttini, the little carved angels with their enormous legs which support the holy water basins on the first columns inside the main entrance, a group of Chinese marvel, not at the famous Pieta by Michelangelo on the right, but instead at how Romans dip their right hands into the basin, touch their forehead, their chest, their left shoulder and then their right shoulder. For a moment, the area around the basin is deserted, and one man with short, gray hair carefully moves closer and tries to do the same sign: crosswise up, down, to the left, and to the right.

The holy water basin that is near every church door in Rome, in which the man dips his fingers to cross himself as the Catholics do, recalls baptism. On the threshold of each church, the water is a reminder of the River Jordan, which the Israelites had to cross before they reached the Promised Land after wandering in the desert for 40 years: before they entered the New World.

"Where do you come from?" I ask one of the pilgrims.

"From China."

"Taiwan or mainland?" Indignantly he looks at me: "There is only one China. Taiwan is one of our provinces."

Is he Catholic? He does not understand what I mean. I try to help him. "Religion?" he laughs before he hastily follows his group, which is approaching the grave of the Apostle Peter. "Nothing. None. Nothing at all!"

Recently I read in the news that these days, for the first time, many Chinese are beginning to ask who and what this is: this old pontiff in Rome in his white dress, whose illness has caused such a fuss in the global information empire. Young Chinese especially are said to be asking this question. News about the health of the Pope can be found on many information sites in the Chinese cyberspace, even on "Chinadaily," the official website of the government.

Here in the Vatican, however, the Pope has returned to his palace. They say he is recovering well. But everyone knows: one day he will not recover. One day, he will cease to step to his window every Sunday, with the words: "Carissimi fratelli e sorelle!" ("Most beloved brothers and sisters!"). Because of this, 2005 has become a special year for Pope John Paul II, in the growing public awareness of his transience.

Before the eyes of the world, a final greatness is descending upon him, the greatness of suffering, a greatness that cannot even be compared to the heroic years of his pontificate. He may live for years, but not without suffering.

Now, everybody knows only that he is mortal.

For a quarter of a century, Pope John Paul II has drawn attention to the papacy as never before in history. But one day, John Paul II will have a successor.

The Pope only needs to cough and the roulette of speculations begins to wind. But new Popes are always surprise candidates. It is part of the nature of the white smoke after a successful election, which scatters into the Roman sky from the chimney of the Sistine Chapel. One has to imagine the papal election, beneath Michelangelo's Last Judgment in the Sistine Chapel—with a college of wise, old men, as the most democratic process in the world, which cannot be found anywhere else.

No one can control it beforehand, no one can manipulate it. Here, there are not two parties with two candidates competing in an electoral campaign. If the election were false, or too timid, the good Lord himself would intervene. Then he would soon take the poor candidate back to himself and again bring all the cardinals back together in Rome, no matter how much they might dislike traveling. This is how he acted with the smiling John Paul I, after whose death the "right" candidate was finally elected. At Karol Wojtyla's election in 1978, Krakow rejoiced and the Kremlin trembled when he stepped onto the gallery above the main portal of St. Peter's basilica.

Therefore, one cannot rely on any Vatican expert or astrologer on the question of who will succeed John Paul II. Surely, his successor will be a surprise. No matter how close I might press my ear to the concealed doors of the Vatican, it is impossible to find out who the next man will be.

Hence, the following thoughts are not meant to contribute a new rumor or a particularly original variant to the merry-go-round of speculations, but simply to consider a potential surprise that the next papal election may once again have for the world. It is a small thought experiment based on facts, in simple conjecture on the historical possibilities that might arise from what might be the cardinals' boldest decision.

If we take the surprise effect Karol Wojtyla's election had in 1978, then the globalized world may undergo a similar change after the next papal election. But to generate such surprise, the next successor of St. Peter will have to be not an Italian, a German or a Mexican, but a Chinese. This may sound absurd. Because next to Muslim countries such as Saudi Arabia, China is nowadays the most un-Christian country imaginable. It is a society ruled for half a century by an ideological communist atheism into which market capitalism is being interjected with startling rapidity.

Virtual slavery is common. Near mines, factories, brick-works and building sites, camps for migrant workers have developed, often with only one career option for their inhabitants: first, work without contracts, then debt-related bondage, and finally being held in barracks under guard.

Enslaved girls and women serve as prostitutes or are sold off to husbands. The acute shortage of women is a deadly consequence of Beijing's one-child-policy, introduced by Deng Xiao-Ping. The primary victims of this policy have been girls, who are frequently killed at birth, either actively or by neglect.

If they are only allowed to have one child, Chinese parents want sons. A population law from 2002 significantly limits the number of children. It permits married couples to have one child and allows certain couples to ask for permission to conceive a second child after two years. In case an "unauthorized child" is conceived, "social compensation payments" are to be paid, sometimes 10 times higher then the parents' annual income.

Millions of children of both sexes are aborted each year. According to a Human Rights Report by the US State Department, forced abortions and forced sterilizations occur daily.

Christian missionaries are not allowed to enter China; where the history of missionary work reflects an exceptional history of failure despite spectacular figures such as Matteo Ricci or Richard Wilhelm. For the longest time during this history, the old Confucian Chinese culture has met the Christian belief in the personal God with a pronounced disinterest.

The key principle of the communist party is atheism. And the party has become the dominant power in the state since the communists came to power in 1949. Ungodliness became a kind of state religion in China—despite the fact that, on paper, the constitution provides a guarantee of religious freedom. But above all, religion still symbolizes the "opiate of the people" to the party; hence, the state will protect its subjects from it.

China does not have any official relations with the Holy See.

The legendary persecution of Christians in tiny communist Albania followed the example set by great China, whose negative record of systematic suppression of Christians in the past 50 years may be compared to Diocletian's persecution of Christians in the ancient Rome.

The Italian daily Avvenire reports that the church in Rome and Hong Kong are seeking the release of 19 bishops and 18 priests in light of the upcoming 2008 Olympic Games in Beijing. "The faithful are all members of a so-called underground church," meaning they are Catholics loyal to Rome who, under great sacrifice, strictly reject the meticulous, oppressive control over religious activities by Beijing. "Despite international pressure, the government has maintained absolute silence about these cases, which makes us fear for the worst," writes the Catholic news service Asianews.

Another 13 bishops are "de facto under house arrest. They are constantly under strict surveillance and can neither publicly practice pastoral service nor receive visits from faithful or priests. Most of them are about 80 years old." The only "crime" they committed was to refuse to enter the so-called "Patriotic Catholic Association," established by the government in 1959 in order to have total control over them. The list of "disappeared" or detained faithful is endless.

This is one of the many sides of modern China. Exploding traffic, unrestrained capitalism, dramatic thirst for oil, energy and military technology from the global market and the aggressive destruction of the environment is already having consequences for the entire world. In the century of globalization, the architecture of the European social market economy is crumbling to dust in front of the billion-person armies of cheap quasi-slaves and workers. "There has been nothing like this in the history of mankind. Never before has such an enormous population, such a gigantic land mass, made its way into the global economy in such rapid speed," writes Wolfgang Hirn in his book The Challenge of China. Cities with millions of inhabitants and enormous construction programs are bursting into the future. James Wolfensohn, president of the World Bank, says that in 10 years Chinese will replace English as the primary language on the Internet. China's growth is simply mind-boggling.

In this context, it seems unlikely that the old communist myths will be able to survive for very long. There are more than just cracks in the ideological structure of the giant. On the 16th communist party congress in 2002, wealthy citizens were officially invited to share the leadership of the country. Jiang Zeming, president of the People's Republic, stressed in his lengthy speech before the congress, that the rich should no longer be viewed as the enemies of the working class. The expanding economy has replaced atheism as the new state religion. Profit has become the new god of a "materialistic civilization."

But even this transformed materialism will be incapable of maneuvering a great nation like China safely into the 3rd millennium. The ideological constructs of the 19th century have lost all their power after their bloody path through history. On the other hand, the Chinese cultural revolution called for by the "great chairman" in the 1960s left an immense cultural vacuum behind. Intellectual as well as spiritual resources of Chinese tradition were supposed to be burned down to nothing in an unprecedented havoc for the "right beginning." The consequences of this human experience are obvious to the Chinese elite.

After the millennium, tired Protestant pastors and burned-out Catholic priests could have keenly listened to a national Chinese think tank in a peculiar congress in Berlin. Scholars of the Institute for World Religions at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences in Beijing had gathered there to conduct research on the question: What makes the West tick? In the debates it became ever clearer to them that the Christian religion cannot merely be considered as the inner soul of Western societies but as the main principle of their ongoing success. Observers talked of a historical process, which was compared to the Hellenization of Christianity in the 4th and 5th century by scholar Peter Neuner from the University of Munich. The Chinese theologian Edmond Tang from the University of Birmingham compared it to the Sinization of Buddhism during the Tang dynasty. "Is Christian belief now also facing a Sinization?" asked Mark Siemons in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung.

Against this background, 12 million Chinese Catholics make up just one percent of the total population of 1.3 billion people. Additionally, another 12 million Protestants live in China. Approximately 70 percent of the Shaanxi region is Catholic. The extraordinary message, however, is, that China's troubled Catholics make up the fastest growing church in the world.

Father Bernardo Cervellera in Rome, who worked for many years as a journalist in Hong Kong, says that in the past years a real "conversion boom" has occurred in China. "About 100,000 people are baptized every year. Catholics have increased four-fold during the years of communism. But while entrepreneurs are given a free hand on investments, production, recruitment and dismissals, the official religions are strictly controlled. The party still does not tolerate any higher authority than to its own. The religious persecution hits thousands of catacomb faithful with arrests and condemnations. Moreover, it humiliates millions of faithful because the party still views them as hostile and threatening."

Nonetheless, in comparison to the Church in the free West, the number of new priests is on the rise, even though they are aware of all the hardship priesthood brings in China. Already since the "cultural revolution," seminaries and convents have been much sought-after. Also, the dividing line between the underground Church and the official "patriotic" Church has diminished more and more in recent years. This is due to the confusing situation of the "patriotic" Church, which is now also being persecuted, even though it is already controlled by the state. This process is particularly clear since the Pope canonized Chinese martyrs in October 2000 in Rome. Ever since, the patriotic Church and the underground Church loyal to Rome are growing together to a unified Church.

The party must feel increasingly threatened by these developments. The great interest in the Catholic faith by the youth, intellectuals and entrepreneurs is obvious to the officials. "These people are asking themselves what is the meaning behind all the new wealth and work, which is turning them again into slaves," Fr. Cervellera said. "They are seeking the purpose of life in a society with overhauled ideologies and a disinhibited capitalism which divides families and even destroys the last of the old values. It is a time of great crisis. Nowhere else in the world is the Church growing as fast as it is in China!"

Other observers in Rome carefully speak of the "thaw" between the Vatican and China these days. French cardinal Roger Etchegaray recently published a book entitled To China's Christians.

But all books, all analyses, all signals and campaigns would be utterly overwhelmed if a man from China would step out on the balustrade after the next conclave and would look to the world and China, as Karol Wojtyla looked to the world and his native "far away land" of Poland after his election in 1978. Many dams and dikes would break in the even more distant "middle kingdom" after the election of a Chinese Pope.

There is only one problem in this thought experiment: there is no suitable cardinal in China. Cardinal Wu of Hong Kong died in 2002. And the election of Paul Shan Kuo-shi, bishop of Kaohsiung, Taiwan, would explosively devastate relations between the island and mainland.

But when Pope John Paul II called 30 additional cardinals into the senate of the global Church in September 2003, he also proclaimed a 31st cardinal "in pectore" ("in his heart"), meaning the cardinal was not named in order to protect him. Since then, rumors in Rome have not ceased to suggest that this 31st cardinal is, in fact, the Archbishop of Hong Kong, Joseph Zen Ze-Kiun, whom the Pope wanted to protect from Beijing's reprisals. Also, in the short time since 2002, the seemingly fragile, polite man has acquired the reputation of a brave fighter for democratic and religious freedoms in the old free port. He has sharply criticized the new "anti-subversion law," meant to restrict connections to the underground Church in China. Immediately after this criticism, Beijing refused to give him a permit to enter China.

Joseph Zen Ze-Kiun was born in 1932 Shanghai. He is a former Salesian father, and has headed the diocese of Hong Kong since October 2002. So let's assume: Joseph Zen Ze-Kiun is the secret cardinal. Let's continue to assume that the Pope discloses this to the college of cardinals in the next consistory, and following this, that the cardinals elect him in an epochal decision and with great boldness, to be the successor of all successors of St. Peter. What then? Can this be calculated in advance?

Partially, yes. First, the entry refusal into Beijing would be irrelevant, because his most important journey would bring him to Rome. The world would be delighted by his charisma, the media would go wild. No human event since the 1969 moon landing would be comparable.

The election of a candidate from a missionary country, where the Church makes up a minority, would also abruptly symbolize the role of the Church and Christianity in a new way - which is, of course, globally a minority.

And then? An enormous fireworks display would explode over China. Above all, a Chinese Pope would, particularly in Confucian China, be perceived as the "flying dragon in the sky." And all of the 1.3 billion people would ask themselves: "What is a Pope?" They would bombard their neighbors with questions and storm the Internet's search engines. "The head of the global Church, which generated the global Western world? And he is now one of us? He is ours now?" The questions and answers wouldn't look much different. Any country—whether Spain, Mexico, Argentina—would be wild with excitement to produce the next Pope, but nowhere else would it have the consequences as in China.

"Do you know the Chinese atomic bomb?" asked a joke in the 1950s. "It's when Mao Tse Tung claps his hands on the radio and all Chinese would jump on the ground at the same time. The world would be thrown out of its orbit by the impact of it!" We will see if that is really the case when the first Chinese Pope is elected. China would jump up and down out of pride and joy, once they have understood what occurred in the far away city of Rome. To this day it is said that China's intellectuals have great difficulties in understanding Christian theology; the language itself is too foreign to them. But all cultures were once alien to Christianity: it was alien to the Greeks, to the Romans, to the Germans, to the Slavs, to the Mexicans... It is not a religion that grows on trees.

But a Chinese proverb also says: "The one who has got the fish can forget about the creel!" And with the Pope, China would suddenly hold Christianity's biggest fish in its own hands; he would explain and make them understand Christianity in Chinese (as the creel which caught this treasure for them). The rotten communist party would shiver like a colossus of clay. The earthquake would turn the Chinese officials more pale than the Kremlin's officials turned after the election of a Pole - and perhaps also many in Washington's State Department. The decision in the Sistine Chapel would newly calibrate the weights of the earth by means of one single bell stroke. Millions of Chinese would break into the doors of the Church, already on the first day after the election, and on the second day it won't be fewer, and the day after that...

De facto, there are two great and important events in the history of the world, which would be comparable to this—purely hypothetical—election: first, the Constantine change in the year 313; and second, the blazingly fast conversion of Mexico's Aztecs in the year 1531. The Constantine change took place only 10 years after the worst persecution of Christians in the Roman Empire under the Emperor Diocletian, when his successor Constantine vested the severely persecuted minority with privileges and merits in his Edict of Milan.

Even in their boldest dreams, none of the persecuted could have dared to dream or imagine this. It appeared like a miracle in the eyes of the contemporary Christians. Christianity became the state religion of the Roman Empire only 80 years later. The Constantine change founded the West.

The other took place in the hopelessly bleak situation in Mexico after the Spanish conquest. Our Lady of Guadalupe appeared to the Indian, Juan Diego, in December 1531 which led to 8 million Aztecs running into the churches to become baptized. At the same time, in Europe, 8 million Christians turned away from Rome to Dr. Martin Luther in Wittenberg. It was the determining event setting the compass for the path of the Americas throughout history (which is, of course, not finished yet).

But in China we are not talking about 8 million, but about the harmony and balance of billions throughout the world. All weights in global politics would have to be newly adjusted, if China would suddenly stand as a global player for Christianity in the arena of the last great evangelization. The battle of cultures would change in unimaginable ways, as would the conflict with the Muslim world. America would gain an ethnic counterbalance; it would be the end of Washington's moral hegemony. The secluded decision of the old men in scarlet red would open a dramatically new chapter in the history of the world.

Alternatively, the cardinals could also elect an Indian, as, for instance, the perfectly suitable Cardinal Ivan Dias of Bombay. Likewise, this would also have dramatic, but different, consequences.

Someday it will come to this, perhaps even in the next conclave. In passing to Asia, the papacy would go back to where it originated, before St. Peter set out for Rome, where he died, and where his tomb under the dome of St. Peter's basilica became the heart of Europe.

European Catholics will have to reach backwards like an unfortunate goalkeeper, to use an image from soccer, when they see a Chinese giving out the first blessing over St. Peter's square. All "Church tax" Catholics, all "conciliar" Catholics—the entire shy, timid and cautious European Church - would have to learn to see itself in a new way, if it would suddenly see above it a man from a persecuted and menaced minority Church where kneeling, being silent, folding hands, devotion and respect before the sacred and holy are still a matter of course. The global Church would once again change itself in incredible ways. The political and cultural Europe would turn around and rub its eyes once its most precious task and heritage was taken away from them and passed on. Something they had claimed for themselves as a natural inheritance and yet ridiculed for the last 1,000 years: the post of the Pope! Constantine stood at the beginning of the Christian Occident. A Chinese Pope would lead into the era of the Christian Orient. The prophetic Pope John Paul II said something like this a few years ago: "The third millennium will be Asia's millennium for the Church."

Paul Badde is Rome correspondent for the German weekly Die Welt.

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