By Eve Johnson
BEIJING – The head of the world’s Anglican church held a service in Beijing for the first time on Sunday and welcomed Christians playing a role in China in discussions on issues ranging from censorship to the death penalty.
During his two-week visit, Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams had discussions with national and local government officials on areas such as the environment, an ageing society, censorship and the death penalty, and is encouraged that such debates are beginning to develop.
“There is great opportunity for Christian leaders and Christian intellectuals to play their part in these responsible discussions,” the spiritual leader of 77 million Anglicans worldwide told a church gathering of about 700, mostly Chinese.
Human rights groups say China executes more people each year than the rest of the world combined and has recently intensified a crackdown on the media and the Internet.
Williams said some of the most moving and important experiences he had had in China was to see how people responded to the needs of children, especially orphans, and the work done with children whose parents were in prison or had been executed.
“In the years to come I can see enormous possibility for the church, and for groups like that, to come together more and more in more and more places,” Williams said, referring to NGOs and charity groups.
International human rights groups have accused China of jailing many Catholic priests and Tibetan Buddhist monks and nuns for remaining loyal to the Pope and the Dalai Lama, respectively, instead of Beijing. A Protestant minister was jailed for three years in 2005 for illegally printing Bibles.
CHRISTIAN AND CHINESE
But China says that religious freedom is enshrined in its constitution and its citizens are free to attend ceremonies at churches, mosques and temples under state control with clergy vetted by the state.
“It is no longer true — if it ever was true — that being Christian is to stop being really Chinese,” Williams said in a sermon at the Chaoyang Protestant Church in Beijing.
“So we are encouraged to see a church that is trying to find its own way forward honestly, to find a language that really belongs to this place,” he said. “It is no kind of (sic) imported Christianity — whether conservative or liberal — that will answer the questions of China.”
China has 40-80 million active Christians evenly divided between state-run and underground churches, experts believe.
Beijing has taken steps to soften its reputation on religious tolerance and has held talks with the Vatican and the Dalai Lama’s envoys. For the first time since 1949, China this year hosted an international religious meeting, the World Buddhist Forum.
The country’s leaders have long feared religion as a force for subversion. But in recent years they have sought to control rather than stifle religion in a post-Mao Zedong society where an ideological vacuum has spawned corruption and eroded ethics.
President Hu Jintao has embraced a doctrine of building a “harmonious society” to try to bridge a yawning gap between urban rich and rural poor, between affluent coastal areas and the impoverished hinterland.
“Harmony is difference woven together. And in a healthy and flourishing society there will be what I shall call responsible disagreement — people who are thoughtfully exploring different solutions to the problems and the choices that are ahead,” Williams said.
