Reflections | The Catholic Church in China: a complex history of controversies, conflicts and unwavering conviction

As part of last month’s landmark deal between China and the Vatican, Pope Francis admitted Communist Party-appointed bishops, hither­to excommunicated, into the papal fold while Beijing agreed to recognise some of the underground bishops in China who had been ordained by the Vatican.

With an estimated 1.2 billion Roman Catholics worldwide, tensions with some sovereign states are inevitable. Historically, the papacy’s political entanglements with European monarchies have been well documented, but in Asia there was an additional cultural dimension.

Catholicism in China was dogged by the Chinese Rites controversy for almost 400 years before it was finally resolved in the early 20th century. At the centre of the debate was the compatibility of traditional Chinese practices with Christian doctrine. As with most disputes, the actual issues were coloured by politics, in particular between rival factions within the Roman Catholic Church. The Jesuits, for example, saw no problem with certain Chinese rituals, which they believed were secular, while the Dominicans and Franciscans thought otherwise.

While the main issue was the Chinese tradition of ancestor worship, where descendants make ritual offerings to the dead and sometimes request their succour for blessings both spiritual and material, there were other points of debate.

These included Christian participation in the seasonal Confucian rites, inscribing the names of dead Christians on spiritual tablets that were placed in clan temples, and even the proper Chinese nomenclature for the Christian god (Catholics use tianzhu, or “lord of heaven”, while most Protestants use shangdi, an ancient Chinese reference to the supreme deity in the pantheon of Chinese gods, or simply shen, which means “god”).