Saturday, July 04, 2009

Catholic China: arise!


Fidelity to the See of Peter in the land of martyrs...
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2 comments:

JWY said...

Who's the cardinal?

12:47 PM
Anonymous said...

I read once that the Chinese Emperor in the 1680's, Kangxi(reign, 1661-1722) from age 9 to nearly 70 at one time considered briefly converting to the Roman Catholic Church. He was so impressed by the Jesuit scholars who were members of his court, especially the theologian and astronomer the Belgian Jesuit Ferdinand Verbeist (1622-1688) that he considered becoming a Catholic. And the whole of China would have converted likewise!

I think there are more Catholics in China (underground and state-accepted), than we think. It is most unfortunate, however that the Chinese Catholic Church (after pressure from the Vatican in the late 1980's-early 1990's) adopted all the reforms (and hence the abuses) of Vatican II. Before that time, all the way into the 1980's, the state-sponsored Patriotic Catholic Church still used the Tridentine Latin Mass.
It's almost amusing to have found out that after the introduction of the Vatican II reforms even in China....Mass attendance declined!

I hope the Catholic Church in China grows and flourishes. But we must also pray that the hundreds of Protestant bible sects in China (already in China since late Imperial times), die out.
As in other places (especially the USA), these "bible-based Christians", give Christianity a bad image.

4:03 AM

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