I am happy to announce the publication of a book review that I wrote in Horizons: The Journal of the College Theology Society. The book that I reviewed was Evangelization in China: Challenges and Prospects, by Kin Sheung Chiaretto Yan; it concerns the Catholic Church in China’s practice of evangelization, the call for the Church to proclaim the Christian Gospel to the nations. The timing of this review’s publication in the May 2016 issue of Horizons dovetails with a recent guest post I put on Artur Rosman’s blog Cosmos the in Lost, also concerning Chinese Catholicism.
While I would not call myself a scholar of Chinese Catholicism, per se, I am more broadly interested in religion, civil society, and Asian modernities on the Pacific Rim, so Chinese Catholicism has been of interest to me, and I have written and presented on it especially during the Hong Kong Umbrella Movement in 2014 and hope to write more seriously about it in the future. Catholicism more generally has become increasingly interesting to me since I finished my PhD on Cantonese Protestants and civil society, not least because the Catholic communion has some notable similarities and differences around church-state-civil society relations in relation to the Protestant churches, and I have spoken about my interest in Catholicism both at Catholic venues (on topics such as church-society relations and ecumenism) and to the press. I intend to try to think more deeply about Catholicism in my scholarship going forward. Certainly, this is influenced by my having become Eastern Catholic recently, but I hasten to note that my scholarship in this vein does not seem very affected by Eastern Catholicism as I have not yet written very much about Eastern and Oriental Orthodoxy as well as the Assyrian Church of the East, despite my personal religious practice.
I think my review of Yan’s Evangelization in China goes along the same vein as my previous thinking on Catholic church-state relations. While Yan proposes that the Catholic Church become an ideological dialogue partner with the People’s Republic of China’s (PRC) government ideology of the ‘harmonious society’ (和諧社會, héxié shèhuì), I use a term invented by Chinese netizens – ‘river crab’ (河蟹, héxiè), which sounds almost exactly like ‘harmonious society’) – to show that this would entail the Church ceasing to be Catholic and becoming Protestant in China. As such, I hope that my review is helpful in sorting through some of the theological problems in Yan’s proposals, especially because they seem to be entertained even at the highest levels of the Vatican in its thinking on how to dialogue with the PRC.
I expand some of my thinking from this review in my guest post on Rosman’s blog. Here, I examine a hit piece written in La Stampa against the retired bishop of Hong Kong, Joseph Cardinal Zen Ze-ken, in which the Italian journalist Gianni Valente accuses Zen of calling for schism if the Vatican were to sign a deal recognizing the government-sponsored segment of the Church. Examining Valente’s claims, I find that they do not match with Zen’s own practice of Catholic church-state relations in Hong Kong and the PRC. My post is thus devoted to explicating how Zen relates the church to both state and civil society and how his admonition to Pope Francis’s Vatican needs to be read – not least in light of Francis’s own pontificate.
My hope is that these two items will show an ongoing developing interest of mine in Catholic geographies, which as geographer John Agnew puts it, are fascinating political geographies in their own right. I am thankful to Luke Hopkins at Horizons for the initial contact to review Yan’s book and to Christine Bucher, also at Horizons, for the brilliant editing work that made me agree with my own review of the book even more than the more verbose version that I had originally submitted. As usual, I am grateful to Artur Rosman for letting me post occasionally on his blog on Patheos Catholic, and especially to his graciousness in letting me post all of my verbosity on Zen there. Perhaps as my thinking on Catholicism matures, my wordiness on the subject will also be mitigated.
Justin K.H. Tse 