The Usual Suspects
Sitting with them around a Chinese Dinner table, they seemed rather ordinary, the usual collection of suspects one has come to expect as clergy gatherings in China. Men all in their late thirties or earlier, with only the veneer of a third level education to differentiate themselves from their mainly rural flocks. Their daily lives are very simple and rooted in a vision of Church strong on external pieties. In case, gentle reader, you imagine, I am dismissive of externals, I have seen how these expressions of faith were the glue which kept rural communities going in difficult times. What fascinates me is how the changing circumstances of today, invites new pieties to help address new challenges. These men sharing rice with me have the responsibility to articulate these new responses, but they have locked into, by circumstance, to the round of pastoral services usually associated with the dismissive term “sacristy priest”.
These are the men ordained in the late ‘80’s and early 90’s when it first became possible to reopen seminaries. Since most Chinese Catholics live in the rural areas, a vocation allowed a culturally supported alternative to staying down on the farm. A vocation, despite the obvious limitations, had much to offer a pious young man with talent. Unfortunately, the seminaries, especially in the early days, were not particularly well run, and the formation offered little in the way of grounding in contemporary theology, scripture or liturgy. What it did do, was give these good men education enough to offer the sacraments and the rudiments of traditional pastoral care to their tightly knit, somewhat ghettoised Catholic communities.
These men were returned to their native diocese, the “Oils still glistening on their anointed hands” and put straight to work. They had little opportunity to be apprenticed to older priests and were often appointed to newly emerging parishes immediately. The challenge of those first ten years was simply to set up basic Church structures and take advantage of the opportunities that the lighter hand of government control allowed. The “naturals” thrived, the “adequate” survived, but the attrition of good men who simply couldn’t cope, though only talked about in hushed tones, has been high. In the apparently static world of rural China, the simple needs of the Catholic community could be met by men hewn from the same soil, with the same world view, with the addition of the “laying on of hands” to guarantee the validity of the Sacraments.
But the world of China’s first generation of priests is changing rapidly also. The maturing Church is asking new questions of itself and its place in Chinese Society. Rural China is no longer the closed world it was when these men went to the seminary to be prepared for ministry. Rural migration, is taking the their younger brothers and sisters to worlds they themselves have never seen, while they remain tied to a world view which is increasingly out of touch, with only rare opportunities to come together, reflect, and understand the new world they must work in.
AIDS surprisingly, is a stimulus to such reflection. World wide experience has shown the importance of “faith based institution” in the fight against AIDS and even in China, helpful cooperation between government agencies and the Catholic Church is becoming more common. The men who gathered at the table were ostensibly coming to hear about AIDS, but in fact they were hearing ideas which challenged many of the norms of their world views. Peasant sexual mores ally easily, if only superficially with Catholic teaching, but the vocabulary of AIDS awareness included things that are, by common consent, unmentionable in rural China. In a Church which largely sees engagement with the world as being about persuading it to accept Baptism, actually collaborating with non-Catholics on AIDS prevention invites them to look up from the round of narrowly pastoral duties and engage with society in an entirely new way. To Priests already busy enough with traditional duties, the addition of an AIDS Awareness agenda can seem like only an unwelcome and irrelevant extra burden.
It would be easy to be condescending about this first generation of China’s priests, Already they are looking unsophisticated compared to their better educated juniors. There is much to criticise in their uninformed conservatism perhaps. However during the day I had listened to their stories, I had watched them struggling to fit the new ideas into their relativity mature wineskins. As I watch these senior priests (all, distressingly, younger than myself), eating their evening meal, I could only feel admiration for them. Despite all that one might say, they have filled the gap between the generation trained before 1949 and the steadier flow of clergy coming on stream in recent years. It has not been easy for them creating the institutions of local church out of nothing, with only out of date role models to work on. Also these men are young, they have many years of ministry left, it will not be easy for them in the future as better equipped generations of priests respond more nimbly to the challenges of a rapidly changing society. I hope that when the histories of the modern Chinese Church comes to be written, the fervor and endurance of this bridge generation of priests will be lauded as it ought to be. Pray for them.