BELATED DIALOGUE

In an interview with Xinhua, Wolfgang Kubin, a sinologist at Bonn University in Germany, saw a historical significance of the ongoing dialogue between Confucianists and Christians.

"This kind of dialogue was started some 400 years ago, but because of a lot of misunderstandings, it ended up with frustration on both sides. Now we come back again and try to continue what began between the Confucians and Catholics in the 16th or 17th Century," he said.

Historical records show the exchanges started with the arrival of the first two Jesuits, Michele Ruggeri and Matteo Ricci, who dedicated themselves to understanding Chinese culture by translating Confucian texts into Latin and other European languages, while Christian texts were published in Chinese.

But the so called "Controversy on the Rites," due to internal Christian divisions and misunderstandings of the true cultural values of Confucian rites and tradition, finally led to the Papal condemnation of the Jesuits' dialogue-based approach and expulsion of the missionaries by Qing Emperor Kangxi.

Missionaries returned during World War I, when China was mired in a crisis of identity as a feudal Confucian country that had prospered for more than 2,000 years and collapsed before Western powers dominated by Christian culture.

"As the Chinese people were in extremely feeble and destitute circumstances, Christian missionaries who prized open China's doors with opium profiteers under the shield of gunpowder were often associated with scars on the national pride," said Yan Binggang, director of the Advanced Institute for Confucian Studies of Shandong University.

In the 1800s, a massive anti-Christian campaign ran for more than half a century and climaxed with the Boxer Uprising, and Christianity was disparagingly dubbed "yang jiao" or "foreign religion."

That also explained why the New China had dedicating itself to building a new church structures on the basis of self-administration, self-support and self-propagation, Yan said.

"The world we face is closely connected by globalization, but cultural diversity is the direction we must strive to preserve," said Xu Jialu.

Citing interaction between the two civilized cultures in his own country, Yang Sung Moo said the Republic of Korea now had Confucianized Christianity and Christianized Confucianism.

"Although the past century has seen the world pursue Western-oriented modernization, no religions would be able to dominate people like imperialist Christianity of the old times, and like Confucianism under absolute feudal sovereign had by rampantly confronting existing moral values, rival religions or laws," he said.

"The alternative solution for a mature religion would be to serve the people, promote harmony through teaching reason and constant self-examination of past mishaps committed by religions," he said.

Austrian scholar Leo Leeb, with the School of Liberal Arts of Renmin University of China, studied German missionaries in Shandong and their contacts with Confucianism from 1880 to 1950, revealing dialogue as an insuppressible trend.

His studies found the Divine Word Missionaries who propagated Christianity in the homeland of Confucius had then already assumed a positive and respectful attitude to non-Christian traditions as required by the Nostra Aetate document of the Second Vatican Council in 1965.

"This positive attitude towards Confucianism was possible because Confucianism had already ceased to be the all-powerful mainstream thought of the Chinese. It was no longer a threat to Christianity," he said.

"Besides that, generations of Catholic missionaries had seen in the figure of Confucius a wise man, possibly comparable to somebody like Seneca, and it was easy to integrate such a sage into the Christian world view."