Catholic Life in China & Tibet

We have gotten a couple requests in the past week to translate the Called & Gifted workshop and materials into Chinese.

One such request was from a Chinese American Dominican who will be attending Making Disciples and four days later traveling to Hong Kong to join the Province of the Holy Rosary, which is entirely dedicated to missionary work.

I knew nothing about them so looked up their website and found this remarkable set of pictures of Catholic life in rural northern China and in Tibet.

It is the stories behind the pictures that are so moving and shed so much light on the realities lived by Catholics elsewhere.



This is a gathering of Catholics in a small village. They have being many years without a priest, but today Fr. Dang has come from the city of Kunming, more than 900 km. away, so the people from the village have spread the news around and everybody has come to the church, but the size of the crowd exceeds the capacity of the church, so many of the Christians have to attend Mass standing outside.



China has adopted the one child policy. This sight of brothers and sisters together is very seldom seen in the cities.



The Feast of Pentecost

See the whole slide show here. Whoever took this pictures has an artistic eye and a great love for the people.

There has been so much talk of "Catholic culture" around St. Blog's and the assumption is always that there is a single Catholic culture which is manifest nonsense.

There is one Catholic faith and as many Catholic cultures as there are Catholic peoples.

Every believer must attempt to integrate the universal faith into their own life setting - which means their own culture. And that means that there is a "cultural Catholicism" in China and Philippines and Brazil and Nigeria but these "cultural Catholicisms" are all different from one another and certainly from our version. The Chinese have a Catholic history and culture that is as old as that of Latin America but it isn't the same.

The industrialized west is not the world. The west is no longer synonymous with Christianity and our cultural debates are not the debates of the Church as a whole.

Look at these pictures and meditate for a moment on the cultural issues that these brothers and sisters wrestle with.