Let a Hundred Churches Bloom

By Richard N. Ostling

After 30 years of repression, Christianity rises again in China

> At a sunrise service on the Great Wall this Easter, and in the cathedrals and churches of Peking, thousands of Christians celebrate the Resurrection.

> In downtown Shanghai, a standing-room-only congregation of 800 packs the handsome brick Church of Abundant Grace. After a resounding rendition in Chinese of the hymn Love Divine, All Loves Excelling, worshipers listen as Pastor Li Wentsai exhorts them to "abide in Jesus"continually, not just on Sundays. The church is one of five Protestant churches in Shanghai, and more than 100 nationwide, that have just been reopened.

> It is Christmas Eve 1980 in the fishing and manufacturing city of Wuxi. As in 40 other Roman Catholic parishes in China, the local church is being rededicated after having been shut down for more than a decade. But because Chinese Catholics have been cut off from liturgical changes brought about by the Second Vatican Council, the crowd of 3,000 parishioners celebrates the Mass in Latin. The ceremony ends outside in true Chinese style with a crackling flare of fireworks lighting up the night sky.

> A peddler who lives in a rural area of Henan province claims that at each of three baptizing ceremonies in his commune over the past year, "300 to 400 people became Christians." The man belongs to a loose network of "house churches," which are growing rapidly, especially in farm villages.

> At the Nanjing Theological Seminary young men and women sit in freshly repainted classrooms, learning the basics of Protestantism--along with English and some other secular subjects. The seminary reopened in March, with 47 students selected from 500 applicants. It is the first school allowed to train clergy since 1966. That year Mao Tse-tung's Red Guards not only closed the place and arrested the faculty but wrecked the chapel and destroyed four-fifths of the books in the seminary's library.

Even three years ago, such scenes would have been inconceivable. But today Christianity and other religious faiths in China are coming into the open again as a result of the Communist regime's decision to begin honoring a constitutional guarantee of freedom to worship. At the height of Mao's Cultural Revolution, 1966-67, virtually every religious institution and house of worship was suppressed. It was one of the most systematic attempts ever mounted to expunge religion from the life of a nation.

Tens of millions--perhaps hundreds of millions--of Chinese adhere to the ancient faiths of Confucianism, Taoism and Buddhism, which are cultural as well as spiritual forces. Islam has been deeply entrenched for centuries. Though China has been a special preoccupation of U.S. and European missionaries since the late 19th century, less than 1% of China's 1 billion people are Christians today.

Despite this minority status, reports of Christianity's renewal are coming in from every province of China. Christians already appear to be as numerous as they were before the 1949 Communist takeover. Stories of conversions and whispered claims of miraculous healing spread from village to village. Pastors and nuns, freed from "labor reform" camps, where many had been held for 20 years, are returning to their parishes. The Communist regime is returning confiscated church properties to Christian congregations. Frequently it even collects rent from occupants of such properties so Christian groups can begin to pay for repairs. Signs of Christianity are visible even in the areas of Islamic concentration. At Urumqi (pop. 1 million), the capital of the autonomous region of Xinjaing, Catholics are now worshiping under a temporary straw roof while they rebuild their chapel.

China is lenient toward religion just now because it is seeking respect and trade overseas and pressing hard for national unity to foster economic development at home. Describing the Communist Party's "united front" religious strategy, the top Protestant leader in China, Bishop Ding Guangxun, says, "In order to get religious people to take part in national reconstruction, they have had to respect religious faith. The common ground is patriotism, the wish that China should become stronger and more prosperous."

As in the Soviet Union, permission to print Bibles and pamphlets or even to open a church must be given by the state. Religious education of the young is limited to small-scale meetings inside the churches. The new religious freedom, in fact, is anything but complete. In some places the degree of tolerance seems to depend on how sympathetic local officials are to the policies of Vice Chairman Deng Xiaoping. For every church that has reopened, many more are still used as warehouses or barracks.

Christianity is an attractive, often dynamic option, given the spiritual vacuum created in China during more than 30 years of official atheism, the failure of Communism as a substitute religion and the fall of Mao as its messiah. A third to a half of the reborn church congregations comprise younger people. Last year Pan Xiao, 23, a woman worker, wrote a poignant letter to China Youth magazine: "Life, is this the mystery you try to reveal? Is the ultimate end nothing more than a dead body?" The magazine has a circulation of 3.7 million. When the letter was published, it drew 60,000 letters in response.

At Nanjing University, one of six campuses with new centers for sociological study about religion, 1,000 students showed up for the first academic lecture on Christianity. Says a young woman worker in Peking: "Communist philosophy puts so much emphasis on struggle. What I like about Christianity is its stress on kindness in human relations."

To future-minded urban dwellers, Christianity seems attractive simply because it is the traditional faith of the U.S. and most modern industrialized European nations. Officially restored churches, most of them in cities, are supervised by national Protestant and Catholic agencies that work closely with the government's Religious Affairs Bureau--separate denominations have been abolished--and Bishop Ding is the official head of all Chinese Protestants.

On the basis of 180 taped, in-depth interviews in China, Hong Kong's Chinese Church Research Center told TIME Correspondent Bing Wong that there are 5 million Protestants in the more than 50,000 "house churches" that kept functioning during the Cultural Revolution and became the mainstream of Chinese Christianity. Protestants, accustomed to lay leadership, began worshiping in such homes, often at night, and sharing memorized Bible stories as well as hymns. Churchless Catholics sometimes joined these clandestine meetings.

The underground services fostered a truly indigenous form of religion that has finally freed Chinese Christianity from the control of foreign missionaries and thus strengthened its appeal to xenophobic Chinese. Bishop Ding has recently extended official recognition to all rural house churches and hopes gradually to unify them under his organization. Local house leaders, though, are understandably wary of joining any agency under close Communist supervision.

There are far fewer Catholics than Protestants in China, and their situation is complicated. Of the 41 Catholic bishops in the country, only eight were appointed by the Vatican. The remaining 33 were elected by priests in China without papal approval, and are bishops of the government-approved Chinese Catholic Church, known as the Catholic Patriotic Association. There is one notable exception to this schismatic situation: Bishop Dominic Tang, 73, a Jesuit trained in Portugal and Spain. Even though Tang was appointed by the Vatican, remains loyal to the Pope and has so far refused to join the Patriotic Association, the government let him out of prison last year. It has also chosen to regard Tang as a bishop, mainly because so many Catholics in his diocese demanded it.

This February, when Pope John Paul II was in the Philippines, he addressed China and declared, "Whatever difficulties there have been, they belong to the past." Significantly, the Pope has not risked mainland disapproval by appointing a nuncio to Nationalist China, or naming a Cardinal to succeed the late Paul Cardinal Yu Pin of Nanjing, who went to Taiwan in 1949 with the Nationalists. The Pope pointedly refers to that island's religious hierarchy not as bishops of China but as "the bishops of Taiwan." Vatican insiders believe he would drop diplomatic ties with Taiwan in return for restored relations with China.

But the Chinese response to his Philippines speech was cold, and the "patriotic" Chinese bishops may decide to snub the Pontiff and reject the Vatican's overtures. Even if the status of existing bishops is worked out, the Communist rulers of China may not allow future bishops to be appointed by a Pope in far-off Rome.

Neither the Pope nor China's rulers know quite what to do about the many Chinese Catholics who, like Bishop Tang, suffered intense persecution for decades because they remained loyal to the papacy and spurned the patriotic bishops. It is possible that most Chinese Catholics will continue to refuse to recognize the government-imposed religious hierarchy. Says one such Vatican loyalist in Shanghai: "Many of us grew up together and shared the sufferings of being Catholic. There isn't a single one who will go to a patriotic church."

The current policies could change swiftly, particularly if the party felt threatened by the small but dynamic Christian minority. In 1957, Mao declared, "Let a hundred flowers bloom," but the brief blossoming of free speech that followed only led to fiercer repression. Indeed, some critics of the regime saw Mao's move as a ploy to lure dissenters into revealing themselves. Few question the current regime's commitment to limited religious freedom. But disillusionment with Communism or continued economic trouble could force Deng to change the "united front's" direction and crack down on Christianity again. The church has survived such a crackdown before, however, and its adherents vow that it will do so again.

--By Richard N. Ostling. Reported by Richard Bernstein/Peking and Rosemary Byrnes/Hong Kong

With reporting by Richard Bernstein, Rosemary Byrnes

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