BOOK REVIEWS

Jean Charbonnier, Les 120 martyrs de Chine canonisés le 1er Octobre 2000

October 1st 2000 will remain in the memory as an illustration of how persistent and how profound cultural misunderstandings can be. In Rome on that day, 120 Christians (87 Chinese people and 33 foreigners), who had been martyred in China between 1648 and 1930, were canonised. Apparently, the Vatican authorities in charge of organising the ceremony were unaware that October 1st was national day in China… For the organisers, the date recalled the feast of Saint Theresa of Lisieux, the patron saint of missions. From their point of view, this was a most judicious choice—and who could take offence over the patronage of the young Carmelite, whose name had been invoked in reference not only to the Chinese martyrs but also to other witnesses of the faith who had been canonised the same day? Perhaps even—assuming that some of the organisers did know that Saint Theresa’s feast day and the Chinese national day fell on the same day—perhaps they even saw in this a providential coincidence that would permit Chinese Christians to bear parallel witness to their faith and to their love of their country((1). It appears that the Peking authorities were not really alert to the subtleties of the Roman liturgical calendar, and considered that picking that particular date, quite simply, had revealed the true intentions of those behind the canonisation. Several voices were raised to condemn the ceremony as representing a manipulation by the Taiwanese conference of bishops; the latter were always ready, it was said, to undermine the legitimacy of the mother country’s leadership.

On October 5th, in Peking, a score of Chinese academics from the main universities organised a symposium devoted to denouncing the crimes committed by the canonised foreign missionaries and by those who had come after them((2). The history of missionary expansion in China, it was said, was inseparable from the history of foreign aggression against the country. Missionary aggressiveness had been the primary cause of the Boxer Rebellion. Among those newly canonised, three missionaries, Auguste Chapdelaine, Franciscus de Capillas and Alberico Crescitelli, were specially selected for attack and described as imperialist agents whose names were execrated by the Chinese people right up to the present day.

The day after the canonisation, Pope John-Paul II took care, however, to declare that the Catholic Church, while canonising these martyrs, “did not in any way legitimise the actions of (foreign) people”((3). The declaration was manifestly insufficient to calm the tension. There are certainly several explanations for the rhetorical eloquence aroused by the canonisation on October 1st: Chinese leaders wish to reassert control over the Catholic Church, which they perceive—as does even the “official” Church—as troublesome; they are always eager to appeal to nationalist themes; and they are increasingly afraid of popular religious movements at a time when China’s past Christians put them in mind of certain contemporary groups, of Falungong in particular. The reaction was all the more sharp since, according to the official analysis, the support provided from abroad for groups such as this is the main cause of their success. The canonisation of Chinese martyrs could thus only be read as an element of an overall strategy aimed at destabilising the regime through a revival of popular religion encouraged from abroad. For those curious to see the faces of these new saints, whose appearance on the historical stage has suddenly sparked so much controversy, Jean Charbonnier’s study is a precious source of information. Above all, it is a precise account of the circumstances preceding the martyrdom of each of those canonised. The writer seeks to avoid the hagiographic excesses of former times. Even so, he acknowledges his reliance on his sources, the two volumes of documents published in Taiwan before the canonisation, the various volumes of the History of Missions to China published by Adrien Launay, the historian of Missions Etrangères de Paris (Foreign Missions of Paris) at the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth, the Annales Lazaristes (Lazarist Annals), and various monographs. Jean Charbonnier says that one would have to carry out extensive research into the Chinese sources of the time in order to validate and correct some of his accounts. Yet he does deploy his material judiciously, and the resulting portraits are in general convincing and astonishingly lifelike. They are indeed faces that emerge, those of the little Chinese Christian communities of Hebei or Sichuan and those of missionaries, always dedicated, but sometimes more enterprising than diplomatic. The hagiographic sources from which these accounts are mainly taken do not spare either detail or sensibility over the circumstances of the martyrdom; but they do offer us a truth as to the times and the milieu that should not too quickly be erased by accounts adopting a more distant and objective tone.

Let us pause for a moment over the case of the three missionaries selected by the Chinese authorities for special abuse during the controversy surrounding the canonisation. The Spanish Dominican, Franciscus de Capillas (1607-1648) is China’s first martyr; he was beheaded at Fuzhou, probably the victim of the political confusion that inclined the local government to growing reports that, at about that time, accused missionaries of social subversion and, in particular, questioned the institution of dedicated virgins and the practice of confession((4). Auguste Chapdelaine (1814-1856), priest of the Missions Etrangères de Paris, practised his apostolate in Guangxi, in a region not yet opened up to missionaries by the Treaties, and he rapidly came into contact with the Miao people((5). His Chinese patronymic, Ma, helped to bring him under suspicion of being a party to the Muslim revolts (these details show that the reassertion of a weakened central authority was a key element in his eventual destiny). After several series of accusations, and many tortures, he died of the iron cage torture. His execution was to offer a pretext for a new French military intervention, alongside the English, in October 1856, and was thus in part the origin of the Tianjin Treaty of 1858. While the actual person of Auguste Chapdelaine is in no way deserving of the accusations made by the Chinese authorities, it is certain that the circumstances of his apostolate and the outcome of his martyrdom are dependent on the political context of the time. Alberico Crescitelli, an Italian priest of the Pontifical Institute of Foreign Missions was slaughtered by the Boxers in July 1900, in Shanxi. The fury displayed by the Boxers group who killed him seems in part to have resulted from local quarrels, in which perhaps the missionary had supported the Christian community against the local authorities or other interest groups((6).

Even a cursory examination of these facts shows that the Chinese government of today has been able to identify, among those newly canonised, persons whose missionary activity went more or less hand in hand with subverting or weakening political authority or social custom, whether the missionaries wished it or not. But Peking’s criticisms also come down to endorsing the acts of successive Chinese governments going back to the start of the Qing dynasty. The operation is designed to legitimise the past, while denying the existence and the real vitality of the Christian communities from whom had come most of the recently canonised martyrs. These communities, after all, are also evidence of the way in which a civil society has justifiably tried to assert itself against, or at least alongside, cultural and political establishments((7). The debate thus raised touches as much upon the present as upon the past; and beyond any doubt it is more complicated than hagiographic or polemical simplifications might suggest. Here again, Jean Charbonnier’s book offers an exceedingly useful introduction. In due course, the historical circumstances surrounding the deaths of several foreign and Chinese martyrs will require more extensive study. Clearly, the interest of such work goes well beyond the field of mere historiography.

Translated from French by Philip Liddell.