by Dr. Erica Siu-Mui Lee*
Rome – We publish the speech given by Dr. Erica Siu-Mui Lee on the occasion of the Academic Conference entitled “100 years since the Concilium Sinense: between history and present” which opened the academic year of the Pontifical Urbaniana University on Friday afternoon, October 10, in the Aula Magna of the university.
During the Academic Event, the volume “100 years since the Concilium Sinense: between history and present 1924-2024,” published by Urbaniana University Press and edited by the Missionary Dicastery, was presented.
This volume contains the contributions of the International Conference on the “Concilium Sinense,” which took place at the Urbaniana University on May 21, 2024, exactly 100 years after the Council of Shanghai.
Your Eminence, Your Excellency, the Honorable Rector, the esteemed speakers, dear professors and students, ladies and gentlemen,
It is a profound honor for me to share with you a Chinese woman’s view of a 100-year journey of the Church in China after the Shanghai Synod.
Introduction
101 years ago, the First Council of China was convened in Shanghai. The Synod had a number of objectives.
I would like to focus on the contributions of Chinese Catholic women in the spreading of the Gospel message and the inculturation of the Christian faith.
The apostolic letter Maximum Illud issued by Pope Benedict XV in 1919, even though without any explicit mention about China, indeed served as the compass for the Shanghai Synod. It called for the training of local clergy as the “greatest hope for the new churches.”
Paragraph 14 of Maximum Illud states that, “For the local priest, one with his people by birth, by nature, by his sympathies and his aspirations, is remarkably effective in appealing to their mentality and thus attracting them to the Faith. Far better than anyone else, he knows the kind of argument they will listen to, and as a result, he often has easy access to places where a foreign priest would not be tolerated.”
I found that this insight is also applicable to Chinese Catholic women. Let us take a look at their real-life stories.
In order to better understand the 100-year journey after the Shanghai Synod, I would start our exploration for the period well before the Synod.
A Few Exceptional Women
During the history of the presence of Christianity in China, there were a few exceptional Chinese Catholic women. One was them was Candida Xu who lived in the late imperial China in the Qing Dynasty [
She was the granddaughter of Xu Guangqi, a Chinese official and scholar who worked closely with Matteo Ricci in the translation of Western classics to Chinese. Born and raised in an upper-class Catholic family, Candida Xu was able to make contributions that other ordinary Chinese Catholic women were unable to, including setting up an orphanage for abandoned girls in her own house, assisting in the building of 19 churches, and providing financial support to missionaries. She also accompanied her son to the provinces of Jiangxi and Hubei to visit Catholics and provide funding for building churches. Traveling by women at that time was quite exceptional, especially because well-off Chinese women practiced foot binding, therefore limiting their physical mobility. It was remarkable that Candida Xu travelled with her son using cranes.
Besides Candida Xu, other women with written historical records of their noticeable contributions included Agatha Tong who funded the building of a cathedral and Agnes Yang who helped the poor and consecrated virgins. As scholar Yu Zhang observed, “despite their small numbers, these upper-class women actively participated in the mission and created a Catholic identity within the rigid Confucian society of the late imperial China.”
Life of Ordinary Chinese Catholic Women and Their Contributions
What about the majority of ordinary Chinese Catholic women? When one tries to understand their contributions, there are only very limited historical records on the life and work of individual woman. Nevertheless, there were still some written records by missionaries, religious communities, and some regional documents. Together, these records present a portrait of their collective identity and fill in the picture of how women lived out their faith.
We could notice how this collective identity has evolved over time as a result of a number of factors, including the changing social and cultural contexts in China.
In the past, up to and including the imperial period, there was the practice of strict gender segregation. It means that there was a rigid boundary between men and women that could not be crossed. In the 18th century, women could only visit small women churches called “Holy Mother’s Churches.” It was only in the 1850s that missionaries began building gender-inclusive churches where men and women Catholics could worship together. The male and female sections in interior church setting were sometimes separated by partitions which could be 2 meters high, thereby further obstructing the views of the congregation.
As time progressed, this practice of sex-segregation in church setting had begun to relax, especially during the Republican Era , not directly because of the Shanghai Synod, but more because of cultural and societal changes in China at that time.
Traditionally, Chinese women were depicted as obedient and passive. However, this stereotyped image of Chinese women did not represent the entire picture, for Chinese Catholic women received the Catholic faith not only passively, but also actively appropriated the faith and lived it out.
For example, consecrated virgins who lived with their parents preached the Gospel to their family members. For lay Catholic women who were wives and mothers, they handed on their faith to their children. Some were even successful in converting the husband to the Catholic faith. In this way, Chinese Catholic women played a prominent role in evangelization within their own households.
Furthermore, female Catholics had easy access to other women to share their own conversion experience. Indeed, this unique way of spreading the Gospel might not be possible for missionaries or priests, because the presence of priests among women may not always be appropriate in view of the traditional Chinese values. Furthermore, as German historian of Christianity in China R. G. Tiedemann observed, the task of preaching “required a great deal of wisdom, eloquence and prayer, as well as patience.” Because women are patient and they can spend longer time with others, Chinese Catholic women could fulfill this need.
With the arrival of more foreign female religious communities since the second half of the 19th century, Catholic nuns from the West organized social services including education and healthcare. Their leadership skills and professional knowledge attracted more Chinese women converts.
Consecrated virgins had the option to join these religious congregations. They received training in novitiate schools and served beyond their own households. They worked with missionaries to preach the Gospel, visit the poor, and manage schools for girls. The diocese also sent virgins to remote villages. By 1900, there were about 3,000 to 4,000 lay women working for the evangelizing mission in the countryside, and most of them were Catholic virgins.
This represented a significant path besides the traditional image of Chinese women who were supposed to take care of domestic affairs only.
Moreover, education had now become more accessible. By the mid-1930s, with the establishment of more schools for girls, education was no longer a privilege available only to girls from well-off families. Yet, the distinctive identity of being a Chinese Catholic woman was not a total departure from the traditional Confucian values, because Catholic education still focused on their formation as good Christian wives and mothers, and this is a value much appreciated in traditional Confucianism.
Perhaps this emphasis on the maternal dimension of womanhood is one reason why Marian devotion is always popular. In Chinese Catholicism, Mary is the role model of womanly virtues and a compassionate mother of her son, Jesus Christ.
In the 1950s
In the 1950s, because of the political change in China, foreign missionaries had to leave the mainland. Chinese Catholic women were still persistent in their prayer life, and passed on their faith to their children and to fellow Chinese. One notable example of perseverance was Sister Wu Yongbo . She joined the community of Our Lady of Kalocsa in 1949. After receiving medical training, she worked as a nurse in a hospital. However, she was sent to a farm to till the soil during the Cultural Revolution. She suffered as “one of the main targets of criticism,” and was imprisoned. After release in the 1980s, in 1991, “she became the superior of the Chinese Congregation of Our Lady, and in 1994 she founded an orphanage and a home for the elderly.”
Nowadays
Nowadays, Chinese women had more opportunities to serve in the public sphere. However, like other parts of the world, with the increasing influence of consumerism and individualism, there are less Chinese women joining religious communities these days.
Yet, their contributions are still extensive. Besides active involvement in social charitable services, they also preach the Gospel using their own means. For example, scholar Sister Guo Xiaoping interviewed 24 religious sisters, priests, and lay people in mainland China from 2022 to 2023. Her field study shows that with the internet becoming more popular, some lay women together with priests and religious sisters organized online faith sharing groups, taking into account their own contexts and needs, including their particular life style and their working culture, as well as their level of education.
Another example is how Chinese Catholic women voluntarily help those who have migrated to their villages as a result of cross-regional marriages. Scholar Zhijie Kang performed a study in some rural parts of China from 1980 to 2023 and recorded how Catholic women help migrant wives to assimilate their lives in the new living environment. Touched by the love of the volunteers, some migrant wives converted to Catholicism, not because of persuasion through speeches, but because of the living examples of the Catholic women who helped them.
Implications for the Present
What insights could we draw from these stories for the 100-year journey after the Shanghai Synod? What are the implications for the present? I would name two. First, their response to the call to holiness; and second, their contributions to the inculturation of the Christian faith in China.
Universal Call to Holiness
On the first point, there were some exceptional Chinese Catholic women and there were also a large number of them whose names and valuable work could have been forgotten by now because of the lack of historical records. Yet, they contributed to evangelization by compellingly living out their faith, by loving God and their neighbor.
In today’s theological vocabulary, they are responding to the universal call to holiness, in whatever capacity they are, each in their own way, even under challenging circumstances, especially at those times when women were at the lowest rung of the social hierarchy; and when animosity toward foreigners in society was widespread, and Christianity was regarded as a foreign religion.
Inculturation
The second point of inculturation echoed the insight of Pope Benedict XV in his 1919 Apostolic Letter, yet in a modified manner. Born and raised in the same culture with fellow Chinese, women are themselves embodiment of the Chinese culture. As our brief survey of their life stories recounts, there have been significant changes in the social and cultural circumstances in China over the years.
In preserving the Catholic faith and passing on the faith to successive generations, Chinese Catholic women not only contribute to evangelization, but also create the condition by which the preaching and the inculturation of the Gospel could be more effective. They nurture their own authentic faithful living, thereby mediating the Gospel message to fellow women and their families. They do so naturally, embodying the culture of their specific time and particular place. As women, they overcome dualities and adopt an open attitude in their active reception and transmission of the Christian faith. By their own witnesses, they demonstrate that Christianity is not a foreign religion, but could bear fruit in the Chinese soil.
Conclusion
To conclude, the lived experience of Chinese Catholic women tells us not only about the past of the Church in China, but also about what is going on today. Let us not forget the often-overlooked history of the magnificent contributions of Chinese Catholic women in bringing the Catholic faith and values into every aspect of their life in the Chinese culture, in the distant past and in the present.
Thank you!
* Holy Spirit Seminary College of Theology and Philosophy, Hong Kong SAR
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