The Chinese PM who became a Catholic priest
Roy Peachey tells the amazing story of the patriot who refused to sign the Versailles Treaty then dramatically embraced the monastic life

26 June 2009

Ninety years ago this Sunday, the foreign minister and former prime minister of China, Lou Tseng-Tsiang, stood alone in refusing to sign the Treaty of Versailles. His act of defiance is all but forgotten today but at the time he returned home a hero. Just over 20 years later that same man, having made one of the most unlikely political journeys of the 20 century, faced the challenges of World War II as a Benedictine monk and priest in Nazi-occupied Belgium.

Born in 1871 into a Protestant family in Shanghai, Lou became a pupil at the local school of foreign languages. After further studies in Beijing, he joined the Chinese legation in St Petersburg as a translator, before eventually entering the diplomatic service in his own right.

He became ambassador to Belgium and Russia and then, on the foundation of the Chinese Republic in 1911, was appointed China's foreign minister and shortly afterwards, for a brief period, its Prime Minister.

It was as Foreign Minister, though, that he led the Chinese delegation to the Versailles peace conference. The situation he faced was an extremely difficult one. Germany had seized part of Shandong province in 1897 but then lost it to Japan during the Great War. The Japanese, who claimed to have seized the territory on China's behalf, used it instead as a bargaining tool to gain further influence over the weakened Chinese government.

The Allies, seeing Japan as their stronger partner and ignoring the fact that thousands of Chinese labourers had died on the western front, allowed Japan to hang on to the parts of China they had occupied. Faced with such diplomatic humiliation, Lou refused to sign the treaty. He was the only delegate to do so.

After the war Lou gradually withdrew from frontline politics, resigning as Foreign Minister to concentrate on famine relief, before leaving China altogether in 1922 to help his Belgian wife, Berthe Bovy recover from a serious illness.

As a Catholic, Berthe had not been the wife Lou's parents would have chosen for him and, as a foreigner, she had not met the approval of his political superiors either. Nonetheless, Lou was convinced that "our spirits and our hearts were made for one another" and the marriage proved to be an extremely happy one.

By 1922, though, Berthe required a period of recuperation in Switzerland, where Lou served briefly as a delegate to the League of Nations and as ambassador to Switzerland. However, his wife's health never recovered and she died in 1926.

In response, Lou decided to withdraw from public life entirely and, having become a Catholic 15 years earlier, entered the novitiate at the Abbey of Saint-André in his wife's native country. There he lived an enclosed life, studied theology and, eventually, became a priest.

Any dreams of living out the rest of his days in monastic peace were shattered by the outbreak of World War II and the Nazi occupation of Belgium. Devastating as these events were, they marked a new phase of life for the man who was now known as Dom Pierre Célestin.

When the abbey was requisitioned by the Nazis in 1942, he moved to Bruges where he began, tentatively at first, to share the fruits of his experiences. In 1943, despite Nazi harassment, he began to write Souvenirs et Pensées, a book which was soon translated into English as Ways of Confucius and of Christ.

Not all of his political judgments have stood the test of time but his reflections on his own religious vocation and on what he called the "Christian vocation of China" are deeply moving. His ecumenical spirit is also impressive. There was no question for Lou but that "Protestantism has been for me a stage without which I think I should not have been able to reach Catholicism".

However, at a time when doubt is still sometimes cast on the ability of Catholics in China to be both fully Chinese and fully Christian, perhaps the most significant part of the book is the section where he explains how his countrymen might "feel at ease in an institution of which, today still, the external appearance, Latin and western, does not completely express the internal and profound universality".

Part of his answer was liturgical. Twenty years before Vatican II, Lou called for the introduction of Chinese into the liturgy. However, arguing for continuity as well as reform, he wanted to see the use of the Chinese literary language in the liturgy because of "its deep beauty, its vigour and elegance".

Another part of his answer lay in his uniting a deep personal devotion to the papacy - a devotion based on Confucian concepts of filial piety - with practical suggestions for reform in Rome, based in part on the study of Chinese language and culture.

However, Lou was no armchair critic. Even in his 70s, he hoped to return home to be part of a Christian monastic revival in China. Prevented from doing so by the ongoing civil war, he died in January 1949, shortly before the Communist victory.

Impelled by a deep sense of humility and a profound spirituality, the man who had once refused to sign the Treaty of Versailles therefore ended his life as a titular abbot in Belgium, praying, in the words which ended Ways of Confucius and of Christ, that God might "in all the nations of the earth, be honoured and glorified".