Building academic friendships with people in China

(L to R) - Bishop Marcelo Sánchez Sorondo, Mary Evelyn Tucker, John Grim and Dan Troy in Beijing. Photo: Fr Dan Troy SSC

During a recent meeting with Mary Evelyn Tucker and her husband John Grim in Beijing, I was delighted to see how they maintain their great commitment to building academic friendships with people in China and sharing their insights in the areas of indigenous cultures, philosophy, theology and ecology. Since our previous meeting in 2019, they have continued to lead the US-based Yale Forum on Religion and Ecology. Through international cooperation facilitated by institutes in China and the US, their visits to China are supported by the Yale-China Association, an initiative that includes well-known academic institutions, including the prestigious Beijing University.

Mary Evelyn and John’s links to China have a number of unique features. For over forty years they were close friends and collaborators with the Passionist priest Thomas Berry, one of the 20th century’s most prominent thinkers in the areas of history, culture and theology as he sought to bring the attention of people to questions about what human activity is doing to our fragile planet. Thomas Berry always kept both eyes on the wider context, pointing out that the unfolding of the life of our planet needs to be understood within the widest context of history, namely the universe which has been unfolding for over 13 billion years. That wider context is wonderfully outlined in his groundbreaking book The Universe Story, written in collaboration with evolutionary cosmologist Brian Swimme in 1991.

In the late 1940s, Thomas Berry came to China to study language and culture, expecting that it was the beginning of a long missionary life for him in this vast country. Unfortunately, political changes of that time resulted in him returning to the US within a year. However, his interest in China and its culture endured for a lifetime. In recent years several of Thomas Berry’s writings have been translated and printed in Chinese, a deeply meaningful contribution by him in latter years to the people of his first mission.

A further connection for Mary Evelyn and John with China is through the life of Teilhard de Chardin, the French Jesuit missionary priest who lived in China from 1923 to 1946. Teilhard was a specialist in fossil research. His vast work laid the foundations for the development of this area of scientific research in China among subsequent generations. Multiple references to Teilhard’s work can still be seen in several Chinese museums.

For many years Mary Evelyn and John held the lead roles in the American Teilhard Association, seeking ways to highlight the insights of Teilhard as well as showing how China was such a crucial part of his life experience. With such deep links to China through Thomas Berry and Teilhard de Chardin, Mary Evelyn and John’s visits stir immediate interest for Chinese people who appreciate the ongoing discussion that happens when people come together to seek common ground on the major issues facing our world.

Their 2024 visit to China involved four weeks of lectures and workshops, each being an opportunity to share their experience and their enthusiasm for genuine reflection of how we live our lives on this unique planet. The religious dimension of this question is discussed in settings where faith is respectfully approached from different perspectives. An emphasis is placed on how people of different cultures understand the sacred in different ways, a pathway that always allows the possibility of finding agreement on a multitude of shared concerns in a broad ecumenical approach.

While Mary Evelyn and John continue to seek creative ways forward for their involvement in academic discussions, it was also noticeable that they enquired from me about what was happening in the Columban engagement in China. They expressed genuine encouragement for our commitment to facilitate ecology workshops for Church personnel in China and the setting up of ecology spaces in parishes, convents and retreat houses as a means to encourage deeper reflection upon the vast story of creation. These initiatives are part of the Columban response to what Pope Francis encourages in his 2015 encyclical Laudato Si’, his groundbreaking writing that calls all people to reflect on our duty to care for our common home, this unique part of the immense universe that is still unfolding within God’s activity of creation.

During the lunch break at their final workshop in Beijing, I was pleasantly surprised when Mary Evelyn suggested that we move around the big table to sit beside Bishop Marcelo Sánchez Sorondo. As a visitor to China for these academic discussions, he was head of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences and the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences at the Vatican from 1988 to 2022. Bishop Sorondo’s participation at this symposium on the philosophies of Confucius and Aristotle allowed him to represent the Church’s viewpoint as he engaged with Chinese academics in a unique setting.

An unexpected Columban contribution to Bishop Sorondo’s visit to China was the arrangement for one of our friends to bring him to see three of Beijing’s architecturally unique churches the following day, their existence being something he was not fully aware of before our conversation at lunch. Those visits assured that his return to Rome the following week would include the opportunity to tell people at the Vatican about the active communities of believers that he met at the churches, all of it resulting from Mary Evelyn and John’s awareness of the importance of people meeting each other and learning from each other whenever the opportunities arise.

Presumably, the creative providing of such an opportunity would have pleased Thomas Berry and Teilhard de Cahrdin, each of whom cooperated with the possibilities that emerged for them during their respective times in China, all seeking the deepest good of the people they served in response to the surprising and unique ways that God presented to them.

Columban Fr Dan Troy lives and works in Wuhan, China.