"China's Catholic Moment"

The growth of Christianity in China is well-known if not well-documented. For example, it is quite likely that China has more Christians than any other nation on Earth-- and if not now, then soon enough.

But what of the nature and flavor of that Christianity in the near-term and longer-term future?

Francesco Sisca, in First Things (a Catholic-flavored magazine), argues that the Catholic Church is well-positioned to respond to the Chinese government's response to....wait for it....Falun Gong!

A surprising hypothesis-- at least to me-- especially in starting from Falun Gong. It's certainly provocative and somewhat compelling. But ultimately, Sisca is probably too optimistic about the relative impact of the Catholic Church, too simple in assessing the motives and abilities of the Chinese government, and far too underestimating of the Spirit.

During the 1990s, an idiosyncratic hybrid of Buddhist and Taoist beliefs called Falun Gong rapidly gained adherents in China. Founded in 1992, the Falun Gong elaborated ancient Chinese breathing exercises and meditation into an ethical system resembling a new religion....felt strong enough to offer a public challenge on April 25, 1999, in the form of a demonstration...Ten thousand elderly people from all parts of the country surrounded the leadership compound silently, refusing to speak with the police. The demonstrators appeared after China’s leaders rejected Falun Gong’s demand for official recognition.

China’s leaders had had no prior warning of the demonstration from security forces, and they subsequently determined that the protest was abetted and perhaps even organized by senior security officials. The government suspected that Falun Gong’s ringing of the presidential palace was part of an attempted putsch supported by the most xenophobic wing of the Communist party and aimed at stopping the reforms and modernization the government was attempting to advance. In June the government of Jiang Zemin banned the movement.

Nominally a spiritual movement, Falun Gong has the hallmarks of the old anti-imperial movements that sought a return to Chinese tradition....

In addition to its reactionary nostalgia, the Falun Gong has a highly structured organization (modeled after the Communist party), complete with cells, a ­central committee, and a politburo....

But the Chinese leadership also drew from the episode a decisive lesson. Since the discrediting of Maoism twenty years earlier, China had been living with no cohesive set of values. The Maoist model had offered a form of secular religion...The successive assault by modern Western ideas and communist ideology erased the old imperial ideology, and the collapse of the communist model left China with a spiritual vacuum....

The Chinese Communist party’s belated recognition that a backward-looking traditionalist movement might overthrow its reform campaign and stop the modernization of China led some its leaders to a radical conclusion. In a now famous essay, one of the youngest important party officials, Pan Yue, argued that religion might well be the opiate of the masses but that the Communist party needs just such an opiate to keep power as it changes from a revolutionary to a ruling party. The party, he argued, needs to learn how to use religion to enhance social stability and to avert rebellions and revolutions.

One result was a world conference on Buddhism, held in Hangzhou in 2006...Another was the 2007 revision of the party constitution. But the decisive result of China’s reconsideration of religion may have been the Seventeenth Party Congress, held in Beijing in October 2007. Religious affiliation is forbidden for party members—but there, in close-ups on television screens...[was] the second-ranking figure in Tibetan Buddhism...

Two months later, on December 18, 2007, the Chinese Politburo held an extraordinary meeting. All twenty-three members of China’s top leadership gathered for a daylong set of lectures on the subject of Christianity—and, even more significantly, announced that it was doing so: an unambiguous signal to the public that the Communist party now approved of the practice of Christianity alongside Buddhism and ­Confucianism....

For the most part, Chinese Christianity remains an unstable mixture of Christian and traditional elements....That helps explain Beijing’s special interest in Catholicism as a potential unifying force. On the face of it, the loosely organized and geographically dispersed Protestant churches may seem less of a threat to party rule than does the international organization and unity of the Catholic Church. But the Catholic Church remains of far greater interest to the authorities than the amorphous and sometimes ephemeral denominations that comprise the “house churches.”

That is partly because China’s Catholics have shown no interest in politics, despite decades of repression...