PARIS (AsiaNews): One of the great witnesses of the rebirth of China’s Catholic communities after the harsh winter of persecution of the Cultural Revolution, French Father Jean Charbonnier, of the Missions Étrangères de Paris [MEP], died on June 27 at the age of 91 at the institute’s retirement home in Lauris, France.
Ordained a priest on 21 December 1957, Father Charbonnier arrived in Singapore in 1959. He studied Putonghua and began serving local Chinese communities. Eventually, he became a crucial protagonist in renewing relations with the Church in China during the early thaw in the 1970s.
In 1980 the MEP appointed him to lead the Service Chine [China Service], tasked with resuming contacts with communities in 14 different dioceses in mainland China from where as many as 250 MEP missionaries had been expelled in the 1950s under Mao Zedong.
In this effort, Father Charbonnier was not alone. His work was closely associated with three other great missionaries and China experts from other institutes: Italian Father Angelo Lazzarotto, of the Ponifical Institute for Foreign Missions [PIME]; Belgian Father Jerome Heyndricks, of the Congregation of the Immaculate Heart of Mary; and Polish Father Roman Malek, of the Divine Word Missionaries, who died in 2019 [Sunday Examiner, 19 January 2020].
Jokingly, they were called the “Gang of four”, a moniker borrowed from four leaders of the Communist Party of China arrested in 1976 in what marked the end of the Cultural Revolution.
PIME Father Giancarlo Politi, who also died in 2019, was also very close.
Father Charbonnier is remembered for writing the Guide to the Catholic Church in China, a precious tool recounting his travels in various Chinese provinces. First published in 1986 in English and Putonghua, it was regularly updated until 2008, becoming an essential tool to break the ice between mainland Catholic communities and outside visitors.
His Christians in China: A.D. 600 to 2000, published in 2002 [based on the original French, Histoire des Chrétiens de Chine, published in 1992, updated ten years later], looks at the deep roots of the Christian faith in China, from the Xi’an stele to the death and resurrection of the 20th century.
“Their Christian faith,” he wrote in the preface, “is the faith of their ancestors. To begin with, during the first and second generations of Christianity’s presence in China, that faith was fragile and vulnerable, but later it became part of family tradition, which means that it benefitted from the tenacity of the basic Chinese principle of filial piety.”
Father Charbonnier wrote: “The Christians of China belong to a Chinese culture, as we will try to show. If they are sometimes labelled as foreigners, that is because they belong, like Christians in every country, to a kingdom that is not of this world, which does not prevent them from fulfilling their task conscientiously and working actively for the renewal of the society they live in.”
In September 1993, Father Charbonnier left Singapore for France, called back to take on another major task for the Church in China, namely to accompany seminarians from mainland China coming to study in France.
In this too, he was a pioneer. Welcoming the first four in 1994, from the dioceses of Shanghai and Wuhan, he planted another seed, which is now bearing fruit in China
