The Chinese diplomat(DOM) LU ZHENGXIANG was perhaps the most influential Chinese Christian to have lived during the Republican Era (1911-1949). He was appointed the premier and prime minister of foreign affairs, and was the diplomat who led the Chinese delegation at the Paris Peace Conference in 1919, where his resistance to foreign bullying made him an instant hero among the people of China.
Lu was born in 1871 in Shanghai, Jiangsu, and was raised a Protestant in religion and a Confucianist in philosophy. His father, Lou Yong Fong, was a lay catechist for a Protestant mission in Shanghai. He studied at home until the age of thirteen, when he entered the Schoolof Foreign Language in Shanghai, specializing in French.
He continued his education at the school for interpreters attached to the Foreign Ministry, and in 1893 he was posted to St Petersburg as interpreter to the Chinese embassy. At that time the diplomatic international language was French, but Lu also gained fluency in Russian. The ambassador, the reform-minded Xu Jingcheng, took an interest in his career.
Lu married a Belgian citizen, Berthe Bovy, in St Petersburg in 1899. Berthe’s example of her Catholic faith inspired Lu’s conversion in 1912. The same priest who had witnessed their marriage received him into the Church. In his personal memoir, he wrote about his conversion: “The last division between her and me had disappeared.” He received first Holy Communion and was confirmed by the Catholic archbishop of St. Petersburg.
After his wife’s early death, Lu Zhengxiang retired from political service and became a postulant at the Benedictine abbey of Saint-Andre in Bruges, Belgium. He was ordained a priest in 1935, and in 1946 Pope Pius XII (1876-1958) appointed him the titular abbot of the Abbey of St. Peter in Ghent. China’s Catholics know him best for his writings as a Benedictine monk, especially for his stirring autobiography, Souvenirs et Pensées, first published in 1945 while China was straining under the burden of a ruthless Japanese occupation and a civil war between nationalists and communists. This intimate memoir outlines his long political career and his vocation to the religious life and priesthood.
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What makes his writing particularly appealing to Chinese Christians is his insistence that Christianity is a fulfillment of Confucianism and, furthermore, that Benedictine monasticism could be the fulfillment of Buddhist monasticism in China. After acknowledging the successful implantation of Buddhism in Chinathrough monasticism, he suggests that it could be Catholic monks who finally infuse into Chinathe truths of the Catholic faith. In his final years he hoped to return to China as a missionary. His planned departure was postponed during the Chinese Civil War, and Dom Lu died in Bruges, Belgium on 15 January 1949.
In his memoir, Dom Lu recalls some advice given to him by another Chinese statesman: “Europe’s strength is found not in her armaments, nor in her knowledge — it is found in her religion. . . . Observe the Christian faith. When you have grasped its heart and its strength, take them and give them to China.”
Lu’s loudest exclamation to the people of Chinahas been that despite the hackneyed refrain that “Christianity and Chinese culture do not mix well,” exactly the opposite is true. For Abbot Lu, Christianity is the most effective way to complete the insights of Chinese philosophy and bring harmony to his native China.
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