Fr. Buckley's Malatesta program talk text

Attached please find the text file of Fr. Buckley's Malatesta program talk.
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Thanks,

Tien-Pao

For more information: www.usfca.edu.ricci & ricci@usfca.edu
Malatesa Program
Ricci Institute
University of San Francisco
2130 Fulton Street, LM 280
San Francisco, CA 94117-0180

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THE MALATESTA PROGRAM

Thank you so much for the opportunity to be with you this afternoon to explain the Malatesta Program.  The program is named for Fr. Edward Malatesta, S.J., who I’m sure some of you knew before he died in 1998. Eddie was a great friend of China and of Chinese Catholics here in the Bay Area. He was trained as a biblical scholar and taught for many years at the Gregorian University in Rome. But he had always wanted to work in China. After the Cultural Revolution ended, the Jesuit Superior General, Pedro Arrupe, gave him permission to leave Rome and learn Chinese, which he did at the age of 48. He studied at the Monterey Language Institute.

Ed then began travelling back and forth to China where he helped Father (now Bishop) Aloysius Jin establish the Sheshan seminary. After his arrest in 1955, Father Jin spent 18 years in prison and 9 more in reeducation camps. When he was finally released in the early 1980s, he opened the seminary for the Shanghai diocese which has trained hundreds of priests and bishops for China.  It currently has about seventy students.  Ed offered courses there in scripture and biblical theology.  He also provided thousands of books for the seminary library. 

Fr. Malatesta was a man of many projects! He was a founder of the Ricci Institute for Chinese-Western Cultural History at the University of San Francisco in 1984. Meanwhile he continued going back and forth to China – in all he made more than thirty trips there. He died in January 1998 in Hong Kong.

Religious Studies in Chinese Universities:

By the late 1980s, Ed was developing yet another new project – working at Peking University in Beijing to expand their religious studies major, which had been established in 1983, into a full religious studies department. That department opened in 1995. Since then religious studies departments have blossomed at China’s best universities, and Peking University last year opened an academy of religious studies so that faculty members from other departments might also engage in the study of religion.

The Chinese government’s support for the study of religion may seem surprising in light of the fact that it professes to be Communist and atheistic.  But Chinese intellectuals, especially, scholars in the Humanities, tend to be positive towards Christianity.[1] This trend is a result of their change of vision, to a broader vision of culture. Even though they may be non-believers, they recognize two important realities:

First, they appreciate the convergence between Christian and Chinese, especially Confucian traditions. Historical studies made by Chinese scholars recently have revealed that Matteo Ricci and his Chinese colleagues, Xu Gangqi, Yang Tingyun, and Li Zhizao in the Ming Dynasty were correct when they recognized the convergence and compatibility between Christianity and Confucianism.[2] One can be completely Chinese and completely Catholic.

       Second, due to the post-modernist challenge against modernity, some Chinese scholars realized the limitation of scientism and the Enlightenment prejudice against Christian tradition. On the other hand, they are also skeptical of post-modernism. From their perspective, both post-modernism and modernism are characterized by a radical secularization of culture. In China this has resulted in skepticism, relativism, and finally, nihilism of values. The only way out of this predicament, some argue, is to supplement the secular values of modernity with values of pre-modernity. In this respect they regard Christianity and other religious traditions as capable of providing rich resources for modern culture and life.[3]
       This does not mean that most Chinese intellectuals upholding such principles are becoming Christians.[4] They are mainly concerned with the reconstruction of Chinese modern culture, the comparison between Chinese and Western traditions, and the integration of modernization with tradition. Yet, since it became clearer to them that Western civilization and culture could not be assimilated without a proper understanding of the Christian tradition, there is enormous interest in the study of Christianity.

How The Program Began:

In 2006, Fr. George Greiner and I from the Jesuit School of Theology at Berkeley (now JST-SCU), because of friendships developed through earlier contacts, were invited to lecture at Peking University in Beijing and at Sun Yat Sen University in Guangzhou. During this visit, I also made contact with faculty members at Fudan University in Shanghai and Zhejiang University in Hangzhou. Chinese scholars at all these institutions expressed enthusiasm for an exchange program that would emphasize religious studies and theology.  American and Chinese universities are already heavily involved in exchanges that emphasize business, engineering, computer science, and the social sciences. But the American Jesuit universities present a unique opportunity for interchange and cooperation for the growing Chinese centers for religious studies and theology.

              So in 2007, The Malatesta Program began as an initiative of the California Province of the Jesuits. The provincial Fr. John McGarry formally announced the program in February of this year. While the province oversees the program, it is also sponsored by Loyola Marymount University, Santa Clara University and the University of San Francisco.  Its offices are located in the Ricci Institute at U.S.F.

       It is based on the method of inculturation first promoted by an Italian Jesuit, Matteo Ricci. In the second half of the sixteenth century, Matteo Ricci and other European Jesuits began the inculturation of Christianity in China. Their methodology was founded upon a respect for Chinese culture and the formation of personal relationships between scholars. Following that same approach, the Malatesta Program is designed to promote academic collaboration through an exchange between faculty and graduate students at the three Jesuit universities of California and faculty and graduate students at selected Chinese universities. In particular, it seeks to support the development of religious studies programs in China and to enhance the state of theological investigation there and at the U.S. Jesuit universities. 

              This program is envisioned as a a person to person exchange on the Ricci model of establishing friendships among Chinese and American scholars and providing an opportunity for intellectual and cultural exchange.

What do we want to do?

More specifically, the program aims to:

     1. Expand the curriculum/program support in departments of religious studies and related disciplines at select Chinese universities and the Jesuit schools in California by guest lectures and courses taught by visiting professors and advanced graduate students from Jesuit institutions of higher education in California and the Chinese universities.  Last year, for example, Fr. Tom Rausch of LMU taught Christology at Sun Yat Sen University.  He couldn’t teach that course at U.C. Berkeley.

     2. Provide significant opportunities for research and consultation by Chinese faculty and Ph.D. students through semester and summer stipends at the Graduate Theological Union (GTU) in Berkeley, of which the Jesuit School of Theology of Santa Clara University is a member. Right now we have a request from a Chinese doctoral student, who wants to come to JST next year to write his dissertation on Latin American liberation theology. He has already learned Spanish and read extensively in Latin American theologians. And we have theologians at Berkeley ready to help him. We need to find a way to bring him here and support him.

    3. Promote collaboration between Chinese and American scholars through attendance and participation at conferences, team-teaching, and joint research and publication. We’ve already begun doing this. For the past two years, we have been invited to the Beijing Forum. I spoke there on Fr. John Courtney Murray and the case he made for religious freedom in America and the Catholic Church.

     4. Enhance the awareness and understanding of Christianity in China by faculty and students at American universities through regular guest lectures by Chinese scholars. Last year we had two Chinese professors in residence at JST.  This year we have one, and at least one is expected to come next year.

We need Your Help:

     This program began with financial support from the California Province and that will continue.  We have also received some financial help from the three California Jesuit universities and from funding sources at the Chinese universities and some Asian foundations. We are planning to ask American foundations for grants.

But one of the reasons I am here today is to ask for your help as well.  We would like, for example, to be able to rent an apartment or apartments at the Jesuit School to house visiting Chinese professors and graduate students.  We would like this program to expand with endowed chairs for American and Chinese theologians and scholarships for Chinese students who want to study Catholic theology here in the United States.  Now we have the three California Jesuit universities involved, but eventually this could develop into a national program engaging theologians and church historians and religious sociologists at all twenty-eight Jesuit universities with their counter-parts at all the major universities in China.  There are two Jesuits on the faculty now at Sun Yat-Sen and one has just been hired to work at Fudan.  He will teach and administer the new Xu Guangqi Matteo Ricci Research Center for the Dialogue among Civilizations and Religions, abridged as Xu-Ricci Dialogue Institute.[5]  They need our help. We need your help.

Next month on May 11, 2010 is the four hundredth anniversary of Matteo Ricci’s death.  He is buried in Beijing, but his spirit is alive and well in China. When I visited Bishop Jin in Shanghai and explained what we hoped to do, he was enthusiastic in his support, and he told me, “This is the way to be missionaries in China today.” On behalf of the California province, I invite you to join us in this work.  Thank you.

7

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[1] Li Pingye, “A Brief Analysis of the Mentality of Contemparary Chinese Intellectuals’ Agreement with Christianity”, in Christian Culture and Modernization, edited by Gao Shining, Press of Chinese Social Scientific Academy, pp.259-270.

[2] See Sun Shangyang, Christianity and Confucianism in the Late Ming Dynasty, East Press, 1994; Xia Guiqi, “On Yang Tingyun as the First Chinese Catholic Theologian”, in Religion and Culture, ed. by Chen Cunfu, I, Jilin People’s Press,1993, pp.167-205.

[3] 

“A Circle of Transcendence: the Transaction among the Three Cultural Types of Christianity, Modernity and Postmodernity”, in Christian Culture and Modernization, pp. 23-34.

[4] 

Chen Zemin, “Modernization’s Challenge to Chinese Christianity,” in Christianity and Modernization, ed. by P.L. Wicker and L. Cole, (Dage Press, Hongkong,1995) 29.

[5] At Fudan University, the School of Philosophy includes a department of religious studies, the development of which has proven to be particularly vigorous. Therefore, the Institute wishes to serve in a special way the qualitative progress of religious studies at Fudan. It does so by focusing on 'religious dialogue' as an academic topic. Its point of departure is that the study of the interaction between different religious and spiritual traditions is particularly fruitful for understanding the nature, history and dynamics of each tradition when independently considered. Furthermore, in a period where the religious landscape of China is changing rapidly, the interaction (or lack of it) between the different religions of contemporary China has become a topic of special relevance.
- By referring to the friendship that developed between Xu Guangqi and Matteo Ricci, the Institute is indeed making a statement: Xu Guangqi and Matteo Ricci fostered a cross-interpretation of different canonical traditions, namely the Confucian and Christian ones; they anchored their common quest into their shared passion towards scientific truths; ultimately, their dialogue flourished into a deep and genuine friendship, which reminds us of the humane dimension of all the dialogical endeavours in which we engage.