On September 20, 1912, two prominent Chinese Catholics, Ma Xiangbo and Ying Lianzhi, wrote a letter to Pope Pius X to request his approval for the creation of a Catholic university in China. Ma Xiangbo traced his lineage to one of the oldest and most distinguished Catholic scholar-official families converted since the time of Matteo Ricci. Ying Lianzhi was a Manchu Bannerman who converted to Catholicism. Based on Chinese sources, Fang Hao indicates that the letter bore the signatures of both Ma and Ying. As early as 1940, while writing to Cardinal Luigi Maglione (1877-1944), Lu Zhengxiang attributed this letter to both Ma and Ying (see later in the chapter). The letter is included in various editions of Ma’s works in Chinese. On the other hand, works that rely on sources in Western-languages tend to attribute this letter only to Ying Lianzhi, as he was the one who signed the document sent to the pope. Thus when Celso Costantini mentioned this letter, he included only Ying Lianzhi’s name. Antoine Cotta, in his interview with Donald Paragon on May 4 1956, told him that he had translated the letter from Chinese into French for the pope. In the 1925 announcement that Ma Xiangbo drafted for the soon to be established Catholic University in Beijing, he traced the inception of the initiative: In autumn 1912, faithful in the North and the South (nanbei xinren) petitioned the Holy See for a Chinese university in Beijing. The specification of North and South indicates that the 1912 petition to Pope Pius X was not authored by Ying Lianzhi (faithful from the North) alone, but also by faithful from the South (thus likely Ma himself). While Ma Xiangbo’s influence on Ying Lianzhi was clearly established, due to his complex canonical status (more on that later in the chapter based on archival documents that I uncovered), Ying was certainly a more tactful choice for signing the letter. Ma and Ying’s collaboration was such that Ma explicitly gave permission to Ying to use his name in at least one occasion. Alternatively, it also happened that he asked Ying not to reveal his name in another occasion. Given the close collaboration between Ma and Ying, I choose to attribute the letter to both of them.
It was not the first time that Chinese Catholics had taken the initiative to petition a pope. Immediately after the Restoration of the Jesuits in 1814, Chinese Catholics wrote waves of collective letters to Rome to solicit the return of the Jesuits. Catholics in Beijing wrote to Gregory XVI (reg. 1831-1846) to protest against Bishop Gaétan Pirès-Pereira (1763-1838), the last European missionary serving at the Court, who chose to cede the properties of the Catholic Church in Beijing before his death in 1838 to the Russian Orthodox Church instead of leaving them to Chinese Catholics. Henrietta Harrison has told the dramatic tale of Joseph Wang Tingrong, a Chinese priest from a Catholic village in Shanxi who had studied in the College for Chinese in Naples and who, together with fifteen other Chinese priests of the diocese, petitioned Pope Pius IX (reg. 1846-1878) in 1861 to protest the unequal treatment of Chinese priests by Western missionaries.
Nevertheless, penned at the dawn of the newly established Republic of China which had just overthrown the Qing Dynasty, the letter by Ma and Ying was groundbreaking in multifold ways. Unlike Chinese Catholics’ previous letters to popes, it went beyond any specific issues. Its content had two intertwined dimensions: a historical one, as it told the story/history of Christianity in China, as lived and remembered by Chinese Catholics, to the world; and a theological one, reflected in the evangelization method that it strongly advocated. For if theology is faith seeking understanding, believers who are not professional theologians have theological ideas too. The request for the pope to establish a Catholic university in China was grounded in an evangelization method/theology that does not radically separate the secular and the divine.
The joined petition from Ma Xiangbo and Ying Lianzhi to Pope Pius X in 1912 furnishes therefore a starting point for me to examine how multilingual Chinese Catholic intellectuals set out to tell their story/history to the world at this crucial historical conjuncture. This chapter starts with an analysis of the 1912 petition to Pope Pius X as an essay on evangelization method. Following the multiple threads in this catalyst letter, it then examines the historical moment that Ma and Ying seized to directly appeal to the pope in 1912, before revisiting the history of Christianity in China as a battleground for competing evangelization methods and locating the lives of Ma, Ying and other Chinese Catholics in this history. In order to understand Ma and Ying’s interpretation of Ricci’s method at this historical conjuncture, it is necessary to analyze how their livers were inserted into the history of Christianity in China, including Protestantism, whose success in China Ma and Ying sought to emulate. This chapter, which inevitably includes some facts familiar to historians of Christianity in China, is supported by a large amount of archived or rarely combined materials explored in this particular light. I intend to illustrate the ways Chinese Catholic intellectuals constructed their own history. In those centuries-long theological debates about them, Chinese Catholics did not have their voices heard on the world stage until the time Ma and Ying wrote their catalyst letter.
(excerpted from chapter 1)
