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Removing the SplinterHow an American program bridged the gap between China's divided Catholics.

By Adam Minter Posted Friday, June 29, 2007, at 1:46 PM ET

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Daniel Engber explained what language Catholic cardinals use to speak to one another. In 1997, Gary Bauer and Wendell Willkie III dialogued about U.S.-China relations. In 2005, Jack Miles wrote about the then-new Pope Benedict XVI.

Maryknoll continues to coordinate the project—which the Vatican has now explicitly approved—with oversight from Cardinal Theodore McCarrick of Washington and Cardinal Archbishop Francis George of Chicago. Numerous U.S. Catholic orders and universities give support by contributing in various ways, including tuition subsidies at the University of Notre Dame, Catholic University, Boston College, St. John's Abbey and University in Collegeville, Minn., and other American Catholic institutions. Project participants have earned advanced degrees in scripture, liturgy, church history, theology, and other areas. Most important, 90 percent of those who have earned degrees have returned to China. Fifty now serve the Chinese Catholic community as teachers, academic deans, rectors, spiritual directors, retreat house directors, and bishops' secretaries. Four have been named bishops with the blessing of the pope, and one serves as the superior to a large congregation of nuns. It is difficult to approximate or overestimate the influence of this group—odds are strong that any registered Catholic seminarian or sister undergoing training will come into contact with a project participant and his or her American education.

I'm familiar with four project participants, all of whom are willing to challenge the status quo within the Chinese church, particularly its affinity for hierarchical, traditional, pre-Vatican II roles for sisters. In Shenyang, Fabian Han Fengxia, a determined 35-year-old sister with an M.A. in pastoral counseling from Fordham University, is running an innovative AIDS home-care program that partners her with the local municipal government and Catholic charities from overseas. Conservative factions in her diocese are uncomfortable with her work, but the program is popular with the local Center for Disease Control—which refers patients to her—and serves as an example to nuns eager to expand their roles beyond serving priests.

Han's balance between two Catholic worlds—the government-supervised one in China and the universal church outside—is shared with the other project participants, and it is one reason that she and her American-trained colleagues are finding themselves tapped for leadership positions within the Chinese church. In 2005, in a first for a project participant, the Rev. Joseph Xing Wenzhi was named auxiliary bishop of Shanghai in a ceremony attended by high-level CPA officials and the Maryknoll superior general. Not coincidentally, the ordination was approved by both the pope and the CPA, thus providing a possible, informal road map to an eventual solution to disagreements over how to select China's bishops.

In either case, hopes are high in China, Rome, and elsewhere that Xing and his U.S.-educated colleagues will play a leadership role over the coming decades in defining what it means to be Chinese and Catholic. Today, with Chinese seminary education much improved, the project is focusing increasingly on nuns and laity to improve their educations and strengthen their ties to the universal church. The most recent group of project participants was eight people strong and included five nuns and two lay members. Ideally, this emphasis will bring the project even closer to the pastoral concerns of average Catholics in China and—Lewis hopes—eventually render the project obsolete.

Yet even if the project comes to an end, its legacy is secure with the priests and nuns who are today connecting the universal church with the Chinese church in a manner that the pope's letter can speak about only in theoretical terms. Whether or not diplomatic relations are ever restored between the Vatican and Beijing, Chinese Catholicism will continue on its distinctly Chinese path, led by well-trained, indigenous clergy who focus on pastoral concerns, and not diplomatic ones—not unlike the American Catholics who taught them.