Whilst it is necessary to call people out who are supposed to be conscientiously driven by personal moral and public integrity but end up doing a disservice to their own apostolic witness such as has been seen in the previous post on Bishop Robert Barron, there are other moments when we need to give proper credit where it’s due and perhaps there is no such instance in more recent times more properly reflective of the need to do so than that of Pope Francis’ latest apostolic visit to the Far Eastern region of Mongolia.

Precisely what this trip did was to foster a more robust sense of solidarity and subsidiarity between the Catholic Church and the East. For here is a region which has perhaps drawn the irksome brow-raising uncomfortability over the more recent decades since the end of the Soviet era and Cultural Revolution in China, of certain ideological bents in the religious world of the West that are still given over to backward sentiments and perspectives hewn out of the bedrock of the colonial era which have unfortunately tended to habitually perceive Eastern culture and spirituality with too much of an unhealthy grain of suspicion. It’s akin, this unhealthy grain of suspicion, to the tares that were sown by the Enemy overnight after a certain farmer had by day, sown a whole field with wheat as told in one version of the Parable of the Sower. And what Pope Francis did in his recent sojourn and is intending to do much more of over the course of time, is instigate, albeit sensitively and with reflexive tact, the building of strong alliances and brother/sisterhoods between the Vatican, (and indeed the whole universal Church), and the society of East Asia. And we are getting it Papa Francesco! You love China, you love to see the fraternal bonds grow stronger and more everlasting between Holy Mother Church and the enigmatic lands of the Orient. We get that you feel a strong, towering sense of filial duty towards embracing the dynamic intersections between the traditions of the Far East and those of the West, thereby cultivating an intensive and healthy symbiosis out of this relationship so that the universal Christ Who is in all things and holds all things together can truly come alive in the midst of such encounters and remain so, long after these encounters have passed.

And this is the authentic blessing that such a living instance of the Holy Spirit’s work in the wider world sturdily brings forth from these timeless and necessary efforts made by the Holy Father to cultivate strong and lasting fraternal bonds and of perhaps even more importance are such bonds to places that have at times, seen an unfortunate history of fractured and unholy encounters with the West. I can sense very much in this a great duty of reparational humility on the part of Pope Francis to try and atone in some senses for the wrongs and misdeeds which have been done in the past on the part of some of those people who went to the Eastern nations with a rather unsavoury dualistic concoction of contradictory intentions. We name here the spectre of the Opium War in China and the horrendous insensitivity shown by the particularly greedy heart and mindests of some Western nations, particularly Great Britain in the 19th and early 20th centuries which planted seeds of mistrust and resentment and which turned hearts that ought to have been steeped in the good-will of their own appreciation of tradition and virtue into vengeful renegades seeking to right wrongs done in and through other wrong ways and means.

So Pope Francis is a true bearer of peace and good tidings to such people who perhaps need to receive such gestures more than ever, if only because of the fact that such gestures have a balming and soothing effect in aptly counterig all the ideological bickering that seems to wrangle the hearts and minds of many self-professed ‘devout’ Catholics in the West over what they perceive as a needless state of religious repression in the East among other hot-button issues that only serve to detract attention from the crux of the actual good that is being done in these parts.

The following  10 Major Principles/Objectives – Patrimony of Wisdom  are a good summary by Pope Francis of the universality implicit in much of traditional Oriental thought. This was given as part of the Holy Father’s concluding address of the Ecumenical gathering in Ulaan Baatar:

1. A healthy relationship to tradition despite the temptations of consumerism
2. Respect for elders and ancestors. How greatly do we need today a generational covenant between the old and the young.
3. Care for the environment, our common home. Another great and pressing need. We’re in danger.
4. The value of silence and the interior life as a spiritual antedote to so many ills in today’s world. 
5. Therefore, a healthy sense of frugality
6. And the value of hospitality.
7. The ability to resist attachmemt to material objects. (My Baby Ray is a living being created by God, not a material object! Actually, tonight he came into the kitchen and started gently heckling me to try and encourage me to come away from being too attached to the activity of eBay listings and now, I really understand even more about the fact of what he was trying to say then!!)
8. The solidarity born of a culture of interpersonal bonds,
9. Respect for, appreciation for simplicity (which is why I love my Baby Ray as him & I share such intimate and caring interpersonal bonds.)
10. And finally, a certain existential pragmatism that tenaciously pursues the good of individuals and of the community.

It was phenomenal that during the Ecumenical meeting, the pope should engage so sincerely, enthusiastically, and zealously with representatives of different Eastern religious traditions as well as Protestants, and all at the same time and in the same place. It was just superb that we could see Buddhists, Muslims, Taoists, Shintoists, Eastern Orthodox, and Protestants all conversing together with Pope Francis and that each tradition had something very special and unique to offer during this encounter.

And what a stirring paradox this past fortnight rolling into three weeks now has brought forth into my life, what with the passing away of two people in my life who were rather dear to me, one of whom shared the same Oriental heritage as my dad. And so it was only right and fitting that such a beautiful tribute be made for him out of that wonderful Holy Mass celebrated by Pope Francis at the Steppe Arena in Ulaan Baatar. I could lovingly offer it up in spirit for my sweet friend Raymond Kong, an acquaintance from Kuala Lumpur, whom I will always cherish. And especially too, considering that within that very moving and heartfelt liturgy were the strains of traditional Chinese melodies that filled the air of that stadium with rivetting sounds which were everso familiar to me from my growing-up years since my dad reared me strong and well in the knowledge of and appreciation of these traditional melodies and symphonic resonances. My heart cleaved within me and surging memories of my father swelled up from within the deepest recesses of my soul. Such mesmerizing Oriental overtures that were interspersed with the hymnic traditions of the Latin Mass throughout that liturgy enabled me to reconnect in my spirit with my dad, my own father who I still miss very much as the circumstances of his passing back in 1997 were not the most usual of circumstances that more often accompany parental passings nor for that matter easy to accept since I was also still really and only an adolescent and besides, at that time I was also far away from the world of faith and good wholesome living, for like Fr Don Calloway prior to his conversion, I was caught in the snares of a serious drug addiction. And so, the experience of remembering the joys of my childhood spent in the culturally inspiring and gregarious company of my dad instigated by watching this Holy Mass live streamed on EWTN from Ulaan Baatar reinvigorated a vibrant & spiritually positive sense of being at peace with and at one with my dad once again, and in a manner quite unlike anything I had experienced in all those years since his passing. Traditional Oriental music, particularly of the mainland, always resonates the message of the importance of compassion and love in its purest sense, the sense of the filial and agape flowing together and intersecting harmoniously. This is authentically Christocentric.

And if it be that this blog post is a little on the disjointed or convoluted side, then so be it. For rummagings and musings must at times be allowed so that the Holy Spirit is not curtailed in His freedom of movement to inspire and so order the arrangement and sequence of the events that flow from the written path down which I am meandering.

And what’s more is that this whole episode has given me the urge also to resume reading one of the most intriguing books on life in pre-Revolutionary China I had started to read earlier in the year called My Several Worlds by American writer and daughter of missionaries to the Far East, Pearl Buck. This story she tells is just fascinating and it very much intersects so brilliantly with everything I have learnt from all that transpired from Pope Francis’ apostolic visit. Pearl Buck was a contemporary of another favourite writer and spiritual educator of mine, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. And he was somebody incidentally, whom Pope Francis quoted during his Ulaan Baatar Mass homily. Incidental it might have been in some ways but deliberate on the part of the Holy Father none the less since that part of the world where Pope Francis had ventured during those few days inaugurating September was a place which became dear to the heart of Chardin, after all, he worked therein for many years on projects which contributed greatly to the increase of specialized knowledge and more robust understandings regarding the archeological wonders of this scintillating part of the globe.

And so on the subject of Teilhard de Chardin…….

“Along with geology and Christian theology, he was also very much interested in ‘Eastern religions’, which for him included Hinduism, Buddhism, Confucianism and Daoism.[5] However, in ‘The Spiritual Contribution of the Far East’ he admitted that he really had no command of these traditions. [6] In this 1947 essay he reveals the long intellectual trek that he had made from his early, negative impressions of Eastern religions to his later appreciation of them. Nonetheless, his early judgments on Eastern belief systems appear scandalous to the modern reader. Take for example a note from a letter written upon his early arrival in China in October 1923:

“Nowhere, among the men I met or heard about, have I discerned the smallest seed whose growth will benefit the future of mankind. Throughout my whole journey I have found nothing but absence of thought, senile thought, or infantile thought. A missionary from Tibet returning from Koko-Nor on the Himalayan border, assured me that out there there still survived, to his knowledge, two or three solitaries who nourish their interior life by contemplating the cosmic cycles and the eternal re-birth of Buddha. But a chance passer-by like myself is not in a position to recognize these infrequent heirs of a venerable tradition of thought whose fruit is reserved for some new season.” (Bidlack, 2010)

It must be remembered that Pearl Buck and Pierre Teilhard de Chardin were of the same generation and spent time in China around the same era. However, Pearl Buck’s experience was of a vastly different kind to that of Teilhard’s and Teilhard most likely encountered very different folks to Pearl on account of the fact that he mingled and worked with those involved in scientific expeditions and just perhaps, he rubbed shoulders with some of the more naiive recipients of early Darwinian teachings on evolution who may have just been conned into believing this emerging minefield of modernistic rationalism…..I can somewhat believe that he may have very well encountered some of this albeit rather unspiritual, and altogether culturally contradictory trend in the academy of the time and place where he spent a great deal of his research hours posted there while on field assignmemt in China. Some colleges and universities in that era were brimming with the bourgeoning influences of Western materialism and ultra-empiricist thought, not to mention the impact of behaviourism too within the fields of psychology and health sciences. This is probably one of the things that sparked a great deal of further mistrust on the part of the more traditional locals to the gigantic influx of foreign influences of all kinds. I would imagine places like Beijing and Shanghai were at times hot-beds for this kind of thing. And these more negative of the foreign influences, aside from the horrendous trade in opium, were completely antithetical to the mainstay of tradtion and belief in the Orient generally. And this is also why many modern trends in China, and in that part of the world generally, are not actually indicative, reflective, or respective of the ancient values such as those enshrined in the 10 point Patrimony of Wisdom module expounded by Pope Francis. Sadly, some of these more modern trends are often mistaken for ‘tradition’, predominantly by Westerners ignorant of the crux of Eastern thought and practices. Among these are some particularly barbaric ones such as the cruelty to animals one sometimes witnesses in the wildlife trade, the so-called traditional medicine trade, and the horrific fad of eating dogs and cats that has been popularized by some black-market criminals in various parts of Asia. None of these things are actually traditional to Oriental culture. In fact, they are a horrendous insult and abnegation of all the customs and moral values of good will that the Far East generally holds dear and has done so since the beginings of its civilization.

And we further learn from Bidlack, 2010, that

“Teilhard arrived only twelve years after the 1912 dawn of the Republic of China. The new Republic wanted to replace the ‘superstitions’ of the past with the analytic precision of modern, western thought. Religion itself was shunned in the China Teilhard knew, so he would have had to take great measures to go out and discover Chinese religion. Furthermore, he lacked the intellectual tools to do so. He had no knowledge of Chinese—either spoken or literary—nor did he have an understanding of the methods used in anthropology for engaging another culture. He had little motivation to change this situation, because his primary interest was scientific, which focused his activities to that end.”

So we see that Chardin’s major focus was that of the academy in which he found himself. At that stage of his Chinese rendezvous, he was completely immersed in a world that was in a large part, disconnected from the bedrock of culture and tradition that by contrast informed Pearl Buck’s experiences growing up in China.

“One of the giants Teilhard worked with was V.K. Ting (Ding Wenjiang 丁文江), who was appointed director of the esteemed Academia Sinica. A scholar of Ting’s distinction had his finger on the pulse of the intellectual life in the Republic of China. Teilhard wrote of a conversation they had in 1924:

“Ting is a very intelligent man, in constant touch with all the ‘leaders’ of young China, and I had a really interesting conversation with him about the intellectual state of modern China. We came to the following conclusions: at present there is nothing that can properly be called Chinese thought. Their philosophical traditions have been broken, and they are still too much under the influence of western teachers. In the end, however, they will ‘find their own feet’ again. From the religious angle they need, as every man needs, something to ‘justify (sic) life’, but at the present moment they are going through a ‘reaction against a religions that has been found wanting—rather like France in the eighteenth century.”

And these men had megalithic encounters one might say with Western empirical science, models, and ideas that were to a large degree helping to form a strong rubric of questioning and negation when it came to the interplay of religious thought. Hence the observation that their Confucianism was unspiritual, it was merely pragmatic. I recall that there was a certain strand of Confucianism that was meant for and adapted purely to the public service, even in ancient times. And this was effectively stripped of all its original religious essence or philosophical relevance or (upon?) application. Hence it became a highly secularized version of Confucian thought and at the time Teilhard de Chardin was in the academy in China, such thought was in vogue and intermingled fervently with the then new thought from the West, hence:

“Accordingly, his scientific colleagues comprised his small circle of Chinese conversation partners. Such men could be secondarily labeled Confucian, in the sense that to be Chinese was to be culturally Confucian. However, this Confucianism isn’t especially religious. Religious aspects of the Confucian life are only now being rediscovered by New Confucians, like Tu Wei-ming or his student John Berthrong.”

And further these Chinese colleagues of Chardin’s “were western-educated scientists who did not even consider Chinese religion themselves, much less have an insider’s view of the subject. They viewed religion as part of China’s past, and they were creating a new future based on reason, upon which they could firmly ‘find their own feet’.”

Which is so why the modern scenario in the Far East of today is such a complex and convoluted, somewhat starkly contrasting megahub comprised  of myriad cultural and philosophical plethoras and vicissitudes, all competing for space so that in some regions it is tradition that rings out the clearest and loudest whilst in others it’s the frenetic and motley humdrum of consumerist modernity grasping with its talons at the throngs of many upon many who have turned their hearts and minds away from the superlatively abundant life of culturo-spiritual enrichment provided by the timeless wisdom of ancient and in many ways as alluded to by Pope Francis, universal traditions and moral stability, continuity, and restorative harmony.

And how amazing is this! To think that Pope Francis’ trip to the Far Eastern mainland, albeit “up North”, is a kind of larger step towards the fulfillment of one of de Chardin’s many prophetically inspired insights contained in a chapter he wrote for Towards the Future called’The Spiritual Contribution of the Far East’ where, according to Bidlack, “he envisions the future confluence of the religious insights of East and West.” No doubt Pope Francis has a fervent love of China, and of Asia generally as he is always making little by little consistent and concerted efforts to promote peace, dialogue, and fraternity between the Catholic Church and that part of the world.

So I don’t know what all the “uproar”** is really all about…..!

---

References:

(1.) Ecumenical Gathering with Pope Francis in Ulaan Baatar https://youtu.be/WZQczGQZ6zE?si=_19GwpnKzRFSB7qU

(2.) Buck, P. S., My Several Worlds, 1955, Methuen & Co, London

(3.) ‘Teilhard de Chardin in China: Challenge and Promise’, Bede Benjamin Bidlack, in China Heritage Quarterly, No. 23, Sept 2010

**https://www.americamagazine.org/arts-culture/2023/09/05/cbc-column-teilhard-246000