THE CATHOLIC CHURCH IN CHINA

New Zealand Tablet, 25 August 1910, Page 1345

THE CATHOLIC CHURCH IN CHINA

■ The missionary in China it has been said) must denationalize himself,’ and this the Catholic priest does (writes Ellis Schreiber in the Catholic World). People at home have little idea of - the sacrifices men of culture and refinement, often of noble birth, make for the furtherance of Christianity, and the hardships and privations they heroically endure. Travellers tell of one who, though comparatively young, falls a victim to starvation and fever; of another who has seen no European, except perhaps a fellow-priest at r long intervals, for the space of thirty years; of a third driven from his station and forced to fly for his life. The anguish of such absolute loneliness and isolation alone would be intolerable without the sustaining power of divine grace. European customs, habits, luxuries are ail abandoned from the moment they set foot on the shores of China; parents, friends, and home are in many cases heard of no more, and they know that their graves will be far away from the land of their birth. When they left la helle France they left it without any hope of return. No work is too hard for them, no living too poor; they are not deterred by epidemic of sickness or threatened massacre; they have simply devoted themselves to the propagation of the faith and nothing can turn them from their purpose. They wear the dress of the Chinese, eat their food, conform to their customs and habits, shave theiy heads, and adapt the pig-tail, identify themselves with the natives as far as possible. ‘ The great mortality amongst the missionaries/ says a writer on China, ,f cannot be attributed to the climate, for diplomats and consuls bear their residence in China well enough; it is to be explained by the hard lives they lead, especially the Chinese food, the want of medical help, and. the privations of every kind to which they are exposed; the indescribably filthy state of the towns and houses, the lack of real privacy and quiet. In most instances the missionary occupies a Chinese house, with mud floor, a straw bed, paper windows, devoid of every kind of comfort.’

Subsequently to the war carried on in China by the English in 1860, in which France joined on account of the torture and beheading of one of her missionaries in Kwangsi, a treaty was concluded in which it was agreed that the religious and charitable institutions, the churches, colleges, cemeteries, houses, and all other possessions confiscated from the Christians during the persecution of 1724, should be restored; and the protection of foreign Christians in China was formally assumed by the French, to whom thus belongs the honor of inaugurating the new era of religion in that country. Unhappily the Catholic Church has, in consequence, been associated with what appears the aggressive policy of France, a power which is suspected by the natives of employing the missionaries as political and even military spies. After the cross, the sword; first the missionaries, then the gun-boat, then the land-grabbing; such is the process of events in the Chinese mind,’ says one who wrote in 1901. It is, indeed, deeply to be deplored that the outcome of the intercourse of the Christian nations with China should have been that, as lately as the opening years of the present century, she stored up a fund of the deepest resentment towards them; and that during that intercourse missionaries—-"those more especially of the Catholic Church, because under French protection— be regarded with distrust and hatred ; not because they taught the worship of the Lord of Heaven’ (the Catholic Faith), to show the Chinese how to attain to the ' better land ’ in the next world; but because they were the brethren of the 'foreign devils,’ only anxious to deprive them of the land and the wealth they possess in the present one.