VATICAN CITY – The Vatican on Wednesday denounced China for ordaining a bishop without papal consent, accusing the government-backed church of gravely damaging the faith and warning that the bishop risked excommunication.
Pope Benedict XVI learned of the ordination of Rev. Joseph Guo Jincai “with deep regret” as it constituted a “grave violation” of church law and hampered reconciliation efforts that have been a priority for the papacy, the Vatican press office said.
The Vatican also accused Chinese authorities of committing “grave violations of freedom of religion and conscience” by forcing Vatican-approved bishops to attend the ceremony.
Guo was ordained a bishop Saturday in Chengde, the first time in five years that China had carried out an ordination without Rome’s consent. News reports have said Chinese authorities forced at least three Vatican-approved bishops to attend, sequestering them for several days beforehand.
Communist China forced its Roman Catholics to cut ties with the Vatican in 1951, and worship is allowed only in state-backed churches, although millions of Chinese belong to unofficial congregations loyal to Rome.
In recent years under Benedict, relations have improved and Benedict has said that restoring diplomatic relations is a priority. Disputes over appointments in China’s official church have been avoided by quietly conferring on candidates, leading to several ordinations of bishops with the Holy See’s blessing.
But Guo, a deputy secretary of the Chinese Catholic Patriotic Association, the state-controlled group that runs Catholic churches in China, didn’t have the pope’s consent. He now risks an automatic excommunication, the harshest punishment in church law, the Vatican said.
In response, Liu Bainian, vice chairman of the Chinese Catholic Patriotic Association, said he believed the pope cared for Chinese Catholics and didn’t think the excommunication would be formalized.
“There are so many followers in China. I believe the pope loves China, he won’t make such a decision,” Liu said.
While reaffirming its willingness to improve relations, the Vatican said ordinary Catholics in China and Chengde in particular were most harmed by the decision.
The ordination “humiliates them because the Chinese civil authorities wish to impose on them a pastor who is not in full communion either with the Holy Father or with the other bishops throughout the world,” the Vatican said.
The move by China, the statement continued, “offends the Holy Father, the church in China and the universal church and further complicates the present pastoral difficulties” involved in tending to a flock in both an official and unofficial church.
The Vatican blasted the government for allowing the Chinese Catholic Patriotic Association, and in particular Bainian “to adopt attitudes that gravely damage the Catholic Church.”
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Associated Press Writer Gillian Wong in Beijing contributed to this report.
Anthony-Claret is a software Engineer, entrepreneur and the founder of Codewit INC. Mr. Claret publishes and manages the content on Codewit Word News website and associated websites. He's a writer, IT Expert, great administrator, technology enthusiast, social media lover and all around digital guy.
The great river of his life has fed many rivulets, And earned for this unbounded gratitude; Of our rivers he is the Nile, Leisurely in its flow and steadfast, Serving myriads on its timeless course. – From “Chinua Achebe (An 80th Anniversary Tribute)â€
Chinua Achebe is one of the world’s writers whose fame has become so synchronised with that of his most famous work that you cannot think of one without the other. This is an honour Achebe shares, on account of being the author of Things Fall Apart, with such immortal men of letters as Homer (for the Iliad), Plato (for The Republic), Virgil (for The Aeneid), Dante (for The Divine Comedy), Chaucer (for The Canterbury Tales), Shakespeare (for Hamlet), Machiavelli (for The Prince), Goethe (for Faust), Tolstoy (for War and Peace), Dostoyevsky (for The Brothers Kazamarov), Pushkin (for Eugene Onegin), Flaubert (for Madame Bovary), Dickens (for Great Expectations), Mark Twain (for Adventures of Huckleberry Finn), Thomas Beckett (for Waiting for Godot), George Orwell (for Animal Farm), T. S. Eliot (for The Wasteland), Rabindranath Tagore (for Gitanjali), Gabriel Garcia Marquez (for One Hundred Years of Solitude), Pablo Neruda (for the Viente Poemas …), Khalil Gibran (for The Prophet), and a handful of others.
This association of writers’ names inseparably with their most famous works is apparently the result of such works having been read, studied and scrutinised for a considerable period and adjudged by those who should know to be among works of the highest literary merit, supreme legacies of belle lettres that should inspire the type of respect that borders on reverence, even a sense of wonder at the genius, effortless of otherwise, to which they owe their existence. They are, in a word, the timeless classics of world literature.
Things Fall Apart, incidentally, is the only work by an African writer to have been included in the Everyman’s Library, a series of world literary classics that includes the works of such “contemporary†literary heavyweights as Naguib Mafouz, Toni Morrison, Salman Rushdie and Alexander Solzhenitsyn, and such classic twentieth-century authors as Albert Camus, James Joyce, Franz Kafka and Joseph Conrad. It has also been selected by librarians as one of the “most influential fiction of the 20th century,†a selection published in the November 15, 1998 issue of Library Journal. Also, Achebe’s essay, entitled “An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness,†is the first work of literary criticism by an African to be included in The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, one of the most prestigious publications of its kind the world over.
Of course, neither Achebe nor his literary achievements is new to tributes, and one of my favourites of those tributes, a good number of which I have come across, coming from such eminent writers as Nadine Gordimer and Toni Morrison, both Nobel laureates in literature, is the one Nelson Mandela paid him, to wit: “There was a writer named Chinua Achebe, in whose company the prison walls fell down.†And so important is that writer as a pacesetter that Simon Gikandi, the distinguished African scholar and Robert Schirmer Professor of English at Princeton University, credited him with the invention of the idea of African culture on account of the impact of Things Fall Apart on his mind as a young reader. Achebe is also regarded by many African and non-African scholars as the father of the African novel.
And I unequivocally agree with this recognition; not because the African novel did not exist in some form or the other before the publication of Things Fall Apart, Achebe’s first novel, but because the publication of Things Fall Apart, in 1958, marked a watershed in the evolution of what before then was a continental literature in an embryonic state of an unpredictable metamorphosis. Things Fall Apart brought it to a sudden maturity, as a work that not only dared successfully to negotiate African content and respectability for the African world on its own terms, and with absolutely no hint of grovelling for solidarity from non-African sources. It was also the work which first led African fiction like a big masquerade to perform in the global arena of letters and win for itself the enduring respect of Africans and non-Africans alike.
What is more, the publication of Things Fall Apart created a healthy culture of emulation of Achebe’s writing style by other African writers – members of what has become known as the Achebe school – whose works together could form a distinctive corpus of African literature in English, a species of influence which did not exist in African literature until Achebe’s emergence on the scene; nor has any other writer known to literary history exerted such influence on the creativity of his contemporaries and successive generations of writers alike.
Things Fall Apart was, in all, a first-rate novel truly about Africa by an African and for Africans and the world, whose author chose to celebrate Africa realistically, and whose fusion of all the attributes of a good novel were outstanding. Written in English, in what better way could the respect it has won have manifested than through its over fifty translations into other languages of peoples who, as it were, would rather make their own a groundbreaking African novel which the publishers of the Everyman Library recognised as “the most illuminating and permanent monument we have to the modern African experience as seen from within�
As for me, it is for having read Achebe’s polemical writings that I feel the greatest measure of admiration for and indebtedness to him as a worker in the vineyard of ideas, a courageous creative thinker and a mentor of such minds without which there can be no intellectual men of courage.
Surely, it would be most unrealistic to hope to do justice to the huge and yet-evolving legacy of a man such as Achebe, the great river of whose life and works have in many ways fed (and enriched) many a rivulet, I inclusive. And as he celebrates his 80th birthday on November 16, 2010, I sincerely wish I could do more than register my gratitude to him through this medium.
Anthony-Claret is a software Engineer, entrepreneur and the founder of Codewit INC. Mr. Claret publishes and manages the content on Codewit Word News website and associated websites. He's a writer, IT Expert, great administrator, technology enthusiast, social media lover and all around digital guy.
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