Mid-December, 2024. No Christmas trees or wreaths. No lights strung across buildings. No carols.
It was my first Christmastide outside the U.S. or Mexico. Even as hostility toward Christ has risen in the U.S. and secularism has long existed in Mexico, both are still Christian societies. And China is not—a reality that hit home like never before. Without the secular trappings, our Lord’s incarnation moved me in a new way. Yet the lack of attention to the coming feast of Jesus’ birth wrenched my heart. More than ever, I longed for China to turn to Christ.
“Most people in China are Christians”
Sunday before Christmas, we headed to Mass in Lianyungang, where my husband’s family lives. On the way, our DiDi (equivalent of Uber) driver said he’s a Christian, too.
“How many Christians are there in China?” we asked.
“Most people,” he answered. “They just don’t say so.”
Although China is far from the most hostile country in the world to Christianity, repression there has worsened. I worried about the risks for our relatives in China if we looked for an underground church. My husband had no such concerns, nor did his family appear to. Still, we kept to official churches.
Tucked behind businesses, Xinpu Catholic Church had a nativity scene, its stable ready for the baby Jesus, and even a Christmas tree. Mostly older parishioners crowded the pews, joyfully worshiping for over an hour in the freezing space, the church obviously too poor to have enough heaters.
Christianity reached China in 635, brought by a Syrian Nestorian who traveled the Silk Road to present a Bible and proclaim the gospel to the emperor. (Or perhaps earlier.) A stele from 781 written in Chinese and Syriac shows that Christian communities existed in several northern cities, before the Tang empire suppressed the religion, though eventually it would be reintroduced briefly by the Mongols.
The Catholic Jesuit history is better known. Landing in Macau in 1582, Venerable Matteo Ricci immersed himself in Chinese culture and language. A firm proponent of inculturation, Ricci preached Christ using Chinese concepts. He wanted the gospel to ring true in context. What better way to make disciples for Christ (Matt 28:19-20)? As Pope Benedict XVI writes in Jesus of Nazareth (vol. I, 198, 173), wherever Christianity spreads, it brings “to completion all that is precious and great” in local traditions, “transforming and integrating their positive elements into itself.” Ricci’s views of longstanding forms of honoring ancestors, terms for God, and other issues became part of the complex, lengthy Rites Controversy.
Since Ricci’s time, many Christians in China have died for Christ.
All of this weighed on me during our trip.
In Shanghai, predictably, Christmas trees were less uncommon. Carols even played in the lobby of our hotel.
During Christmas night Mass at Saint Ignatius of Loyola, or Xujiahui Cathedral (徐家汇主教座堂), with its mid-nineteenth-century origins, English translations of the readings appeared on screens. But my husband had to convey the gist of the homily later. Same with Father’s invitation to Protestants and nonbelievers at the packed Mass. Given that some people take churches as tourist attractions, certain Protestant services required you to register in advance or even show a foreign passport, which seemed counterintuitive at best. Since I teach world Christianity at a college in Indiana, I’d wanted to go to a Protestant service, too, but we couldn’t find an open one. Father’s message to non-Catholics? In essence: You are welcome. Come and learn, join the Church our Lord founded on earth, benefit from the sacraments!
A Catholic China would indeed bring people into the fullness of the faith.
“China doesn’t have Christians”
Near the start of Lent in Southern California, I met probably the most faithful child I’d ever come across—an eight-year-old Chinese-American girl, whom I’ll call Hannah.
As we got to know her family over the summer, Hannah showed us her Bibles, expressing delight and wonder at stories from both testaments.
An apologist in the making, she has challenged friends who don’t believe in God. Once, she relayed, she yelled at someone on the phone until her mom told her to stop. I affirmed her zeal but suggested alternative ways she might reach people, leading to a discussion of our favorite arguments for God’s existence.
Earnestly, Hannah asked about faith. Prayer. Angels. The devil. Creation and evolution. Sometimes my head spun, and I would ask the Holy Spirit for guidance.
One day Hannah told us, “My dad says China doesn’t really have Christians. They don’t like Christians.”
Struck by the contrast, I recalled the DiDi driver. We said her dad’s basically right but also described Masses we attended in China.
Soon after, Hannah went to Mass with me. On the walk to the church’s double doors, she paused before a station: Jesus being nailed to the Cross.
“That’s so sad,” she said, staring at the image, about at her eye level.
“Yes. But he died for our sins, to save us.”
During Mass, she sang and listened. She appeared more engaged than other kids, displaying that spiritual hunger, unusual in one her age, especially without a clear religious foundation at home. It would make more sense from the child of an Evangelical family. Sadly, my experience doesn’t call to mind many fervent Catholic children, perhaps owing to modern Western catechesis, with its “strange ability to destroy the imagination of children.”
On our walk back, Hannah again paused before a station, asking the meaning of INRI above Jesus’s head as he hung on the cross.
About Mass, she said with a smile and bright eyes, “It was really interesting.”
I could have wept. I grew up in a Mexican-Italian family that never missed weekly Mass (or stations of the cross during Lent). My memories of church from Hannah’s age include being bored and looking forward to a donut and socializing afterward. The most fervent time of my childhood was in a pro-life youth group and on retreats, the vibrancy later dissipating in Catholic high school. Secular university ushered in a dark period, before I fought to bring God back into my heart and my life.
How did Hannah learn to believe? Where did she get her fervor for the Lord?
1. God’s grace. I can only discern that he chose her.
2. A Chinese/Chinese-American church her family briefly attended elsewhere.
The oldest such church appears to be in Chinatown, San Francisco. These mostly conservative Evangelical churches reach people right away, an example being one of my Mandarin language teachers in Texas who found her way to a local congregation despite her limited time in the U.S. As a graduate student in Iowa, my husband met missionaries who invited him to church and hosted him for dinner early on. The Catholic Church could perhaps make reaching Chinese/Chinese-American communities more of a priority.
3. The U.S.—even Southern California, where hotel rooms in some areas don’t have Bibles—is still Christian. In Hannah’s case, there are the public school teacher who talks about God, a believing friend, yard and roadway signs: “Jesus Loves You.” “Prayer Changes Things.”
The following week Hannah shared a prayer, saying, “Jesus taught it.”
“We said that together at Mass—the Our Father. Do you remember?”
“Oh, yeah!” A smile, then a little frown. “How do people memorize it?”
“By saying it often.” I winced to myself. Growing up, I often said the Our Father mindlessly. Later, Pope Benedict led me to reflect on its meaning and significance.
“I want everyone in the whole world to believe in Jesus,” Hannah said another day. She worried about her little brother, who’s one. “What if he won’t become Christian? What if he listens to his friends?”
“You can teach him. Help him hold on to faith.”
Before we left town, I showed Hannah a video of the St. Ignatius choir singing “Ave Maria” in Shanghai and a Chinese couple’s testimony at a Marian Eucharistic event in Spain. For work reasons, my husband and I live in two states—far from easy. What a blessing to spend summer together, and to come across Hannah.
I’m grateful God didn’t put her in my path when I was lukewarm or lapsed, and would have had few or damaging answers! I know I still made mistakes. Sometimes I double-checked things in Scripture and the Catechism, returning newly armed. Without the Church, I would have been adrift.
I’d considered Protestantism once, dizzied by all the denominations, disagreements, and splits yet drawn to conservative Evangelicals’ great love for Jesus. But it didn’t remove the problems with sola scriptura or sola fide. Cradle Catholics can and should (and some do) cultivate the vibrancy you’ll often find among certain groups of Protestants. But had I left the Church, where would I have gone for help answering Hannah’s questions, when the Bible alone doesn’t necessarily have all the answers or interpret itself? When other churches offer confusing, incomplete, or no answers?
* * *
Back in Indiana for the school year, I wonder how Hannah is doing. Will her parents take her to Mass? Will her Evangelical classmate invite her to church? God willing, I’ll see her again when I return to California. For now, I pray that Hannah, her family, Chinese everywhere, and all people find their way to the Lord and his Church.
As for the numbers of Christians in China, estimates range from 2 to 9 percent of the population, or about 20 million to 130 million people, with Protestants like our DiDi driver far outnumbering Catholics. To be sure, in Protestant groups, it often seems almost anyone can become a missionary, as you might expect, given the “Protestant Principle”: each person as his “own arbiter” (121).
Though Catholics must take greater care with evangelism, the Church could do more to carry out Pope St. John Paul II’s call. Teach laypeople to evangelize in our everyday lives. Ingrain it in cradle Catholics from an early age. Use homilies and other methods to reinforce it.
In “Protestantism is Winning (and Has a Lesson for Catholics),” Trent Horn gives advice that’s also useful in Chinese/Chinese-American contexts. We can focus on the Church’s apostolic origins and fullness of the Faith. Treat our Catholic faith as a matter of spiritual life and death. Let it guide our every interaction. For our part, in China and everywhere, we can do more to invite people to Mass, look for missionary opportunities, ask the Lord to help us evangelize well, and bring more people into his Church.
May he one day turn the DiDi driver’s words into a reality. Let it be a Catholic China, bringing the richness and fullness of the Faith and unity in the one Church. The packed Masses we attended and Father’s appeal on Christmas, while Protestant churches turned people away, promise to bear fruit someday. For even if someone walks in a tourist, our Lord can change his heart. We can help, too.