EWTN News explains: Why the Church once forbade Catholics to honor Confucius

Rome once forbade Catholics to honor Confucius. Understanding why explains the Vatican’s newest dialogue, but a scintillating question remains.

Is Confucianism confusing to Catholics, or did the Church simply take centuries to clarify a stance on the teachings of Confucius and his disciples?

A bit of both.

When the Vaticanʼs Dicastery for Interreligious Dialogue held its first Confucian-Christian colloquium in Seoul, South Korea, on Aug. 4–5, some 150 participants from more than a dozen countries spoke about shared values and universal fraternity, virtuous leadership, and moral formation in a pluralistic society.

Three centuries ago, the tone was different. A Catholic in China who took part in the rites honoring Confucius could be told he had abandoned the faith.

The ceremonies were not just polite gestures: “Lǐ (礼),” usually rendered as rites or ritual propriety, is foundational to Confucian thought. They comprise customs that form a person, order relationships, and hold a society together.

The sage who taught this, centuries before Christ, is known in Chinese as “Kǒng Fūzǐ (孔夫子),” Master Kong. He died in 479 B.C. Missionaries who reached China some two millennia later latinized the name as Confucius.

Arriving in 1582, Father Matteo Ricci observed educated Chinese lighting candles and bowing before Confucius. Ricci, a Jesuit, concluded the rites were civil rather than religious. Dominicans and Franciscans disagreed. They argued that the offerings, the prostrations, and the temple setting could surely not be separated from religious worship.

The quarrel that followed, the famous Chinese rites controversy, was not just about rituals and religious language.

At stake was also imperial authority: The cult of Confucius was bound up with Chinese emperors claiming to govern by the Mandate of Heaven, and officials and scholars had to perform the rites to hold office or earn degrees. So telling Chinese Catholics to stay away from them meant a foreign power ruling on Chinese legitimacy.

From a Catholic perspective, given the role of the rites and the weight of the decision, the popes also took their time to make up their minds — several centuries, in fact.

A scintillating question remains

First Pope Innocent X condemned the rites in 1645. A decade later, Pope Alexander VII permitted them. When asked in 1669 which of the two papal decisions was now in force, the Holy Office answered: both of them.

Several decades later, Pope Clement XI condemned the rites again and confirmed this decision with a papal bull in 1715. In 1742, Pope Benedict XIV backed up the bull and required missionaries to swear an oath never to raise the question again.

That settled the matter for nearly two centuries. Then, in 1939, the Vatican abolished the oath under Pope Pius XII. Rome now judged that the ceremonies had come to carry a merely civil meaning. This stance affirmed that no Catholic doctrine had changed, just the judgment about what a gesture meant.

What remained, however, was a scintillating question: Is Confucianism a religion, a religious philosophy, a cultural good, or something beyond such Western categories altogether?

Confucians themselves give different answers.

Father Gianni Criveller, PIME, who took part in the Seoul meeting, noted on AsiaNews that Confucianism enjoys public or national recognition as a religion in South Korea, Indonesia, Malaysia, Taiwan, and Hong Kong. In mainland China it is not among the five official religions, even as authorities promote it as the original core of Chinese thought.

The pace of friendship

On the ample evidence of the last 400 years, friendship between the two traditions might look like a matter of slow progress over centuries — but the pace may be quickening.

The Aug. 4-5 gathering was the third step in a sequence, after an expert study group and then a workshop at Fu Jen Catholic University in Taiwan that began drafting formal guidelines. Delegates already know when they will meet again: in Indonesia in 2028 and Hong Kong in 2030.

In Seoul, Cardinal George Jacob Koovakad told participants the two traditions converge in what they hope for and differ at the foundation.

Ricci put the method more simply, in a line the Holy See still quotes: “Before engaging in friendship, one must observe; after engaging, one must trust.”