“Inculturation” has been a Catholic buzzword for over a half-century. It’s not the most elegant neologism, smacking as it does of sociologese. Still, it expresses a truth of Catholic missionary practice two millennia old: the Church uses whatever appropriate materials are at hand in a given culture to make the Gospel proposal come alive in that milieu. The parables of Jesus are the biblical warrant for this method of evangelization. The Lord used the familiar cultural materials at hand to drive home key truths about the Kingdom of God breaking into history – the merchant who finds the pearl of great price, the sower of seed who waits patiently for the harvest, the mustard seed that becomes a great tree, and so forth.
St. Paul was an early “inculturator” in Acts 17, where he tried to convince the skeptical Athenians that the “unknown god” through whom they hedged their religious bets had made himself known to the people of Israel and in Jesus, crucified and risen. That didn’t work out as well as Paul hoped, but the strategy was sound. And a few centuries later, it was deployed by the Church to turn the primitive Christian proclamation – “Jesus is Lord” – into creed and dogma, through the mediation of categories drawn from classical philosophy at ecumenical councils like Nicaea I and Chalcedon.
Inculturation also has a flip side: as the Church adopts cultural materials from a given environment to make the Gospel message “hearable,” a successful inculturation then results in the Gospel reshaping that environment so that it embodies a biblical understanding of human dignity and solidarity. As I explain in Letters to a Young Catholic, the inculturation of the Gospel in Mexico as mediated through the icon of Our Lady of Guadalupe is a paradigmatic example of indigenous cultural materials bringing people to faith, deepening that faith, and reshaping a culture.
What inculturation is not is what is happening in China today.
Under the iron rule of the dictator Xi Jinping, the religious policy of the People’s Republic of China is “Sinicization.” The gullible or duplicitous regard this as simply another form of inculturation. “Sinicization” is anything but that: it’s the perverse inversion of inculturation, rightly understood.
Catholic faith in China must be conformed to “Xi Jinping Thought;” it must not temper, much less correct, the official state ideology. Catholic practice in China must advance the hegemonic goals of the Chinese communist regime; if Catholic witness challenges those goals, or the way in which those goals are advanced through massive human rights violations internally and aggression internationally, the result is persecution, often via the corrupt legal system of which my friend Jimmy Lai is a prominent victim.
A true inculturation of the Gospel in China would call China and the despotic regime that currently controls it to conversion. “Sinicization,” by contrast, is a call to the kowtow, to obsequious acquiescence to the regime’s program of social control, which is essentially a refinement of what George Orwell described in the dystopian novel 1984 – although the dystopia is now promoted as a utopia of abundance, married to a restoration of national honor and dignity through domination of the world.
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The Vatican’s stubborn persistence in the evangelically disastrous, strategically misconceived, and canonically dubious deal it made with the Xi Jinping regime in 2018 – which gives the Chinese Communist Party episcopal nomination rights, in violation of the teaching of Vatican II and the prohibition laid down in Canon 377.5 – is a countersign to the importance of authentic inculturation for the New Evangelization. That deal is not advancing the Church’s mission of proclaiming the Gospel in China. It is not putting the Church at the service of Chinese society. Rather, it is turning churchmen into de facto mouthpieces for a regime that is persecuting Hui and Uyghur Muslims as well as house church Evangelicals and Catholics. Thus recently created Cardinal Stephen Chow, SJ, couldn’t even bring himself to mention the words “Tiananmen” and “massacre” on the 35th anniversary of that atrocity (in sharp contrast to the courageous witness of his predecessor as bishop of Hong Kong, Cardinal Joseph Zen, SDB).
This inversion of inculturation is also damaging Catholicism’s reputation internationally. The great British historian Sir Michael Howard once told me that the Catholic Church’s transformation into the world’s most prominent institutional defender of basic human rights was one of the two great revolutions of the 20th century, the other being Lenin’s Bolshevik takeover in Russia in 1917. Lenin’s revolution continues in China. The Catholic human rights revolution has stalled in Rome over the past decade, to the detriment of both the Church and the world.
