John C. H. Wu

John C. H. Wu (Wu Ching-hsiung) was born on the 17th day of the Second Moon in 1899 in Ningpo, China. The 17th day of the Second Moon falls between the birthdays of Lao Tsu and Kuan Yin, and the Second Moon was specially dedicated to Confucius' memory. John considered this a good birthday because the time was important to all three great religions of China (Taoism, Buddhism, and Confucianism). These three religions were his "spiritual nurses" which led him to the divine Logos, Christ. According to the Western calendar, John's birthday was March 28, birthday of his beloved Saint Teresa of Avila (1515).

The Vinegar Tasters Confucius, Buddha, and Lao Tsu

John had a great love for Ningpo. He wrote, "Now the Ningponese are not refined people, but they are warmhearted and honest, full of vitality and the spirit of adventure.... The best thing about the Ningponese, as far as I can see, is that they enjoy life wholeheartedly. God created the Ningponese, and the Ningponese saw that it is good to live. It is true that they are of the earth, earthy; but they never forget that the earth belongs to God, and they accept whatever grows on it as a gift from Him. In other words, they have a good appetite for the feast of life as it is offered by God for their enjoyment. I think it is not unreasonable to suppose that God likes such people more than those who show a finicky taste, as though they were invited to pass judgment on the dishes God has to offer them.... There is something rugged and untamed about a Ningponese. He is not a sissy and suspicious. He is full of animal faith, full of horse sense. He is humorous, although his humor takes the form of practical jokes rather than subtle stories. He is attached to the good earth, and smells of the soil. He finds himself at home in the universe. Nay, the sun, the moon, the stars, the winds and rains, the dogs and cats, the birds and flowers, seem to be more human in Ningpo than anywhere else. They seem to constitute familiar members of each household.... Thus I spent my childhood in fairyland.... I am an embodiment of Ningpo."

From his earliest days, John received a solid traditional education. He especially loved the stories and sayings of Confucius and his disciples.

John had an intense love of languages, and by the time he wrote his autobiography he could speak English, German, and French in addition to his native tongue. He attributed his multilingual capabilities to curiosity about translation: "When I was impressed by some of the pithy sayings of Confucius, I referred to the version of James Legge to see how Confucius would speak if he had been an English gentleman."

Although he began college as a student of science, he changed to law in 1916 because to his mind "law was the science of society just as science was the law of nature." The same year, he was married (by a parental arrangement) to a woman, Ah-Yu, he had never met before. For John, she was love at first sight. She thought him a "lunatic." Nevertheless, they were blessed with love and a wonderful marriage (albeit not without hardships).

In 1917, Ching-hsiung took the English name "John," chiefly because it sounded like Ching-hsiung (as pronounced by the Ningponese). "This name suited me like a glove. What if the glove were imported, so long as it fitted my hand? ....From thenceforward, I have been known as John Wu, and I hope I shall be John Wu to the end of my life." The same year, John began to read the Bible, which he loved immediately, and a book called The Christian View of God and the World. In these John discovered the Incarnation of God. Through his contact with the Bible and the edifying example of the Dean of the law school, John chose to become a Christian, and was baptized. Only then did he realize that "John" was the name of Jesus' beloved disciple, the author of the fourth Gospel, as well as the name of Saint John the Baptist. "John" means God has been gracious. When he later became Catholic, John further learned that his birthday was the feast of Saint John Capistrano, a lawyer.

In 1920, when John finished law school, he set sail for the United States, where he did graduate work at Michigan Law School and befriended Oliver Wendell Holmes. There, John was scandalized by the fact that Americans worshipped money, and drifted away from the Christian faith. He was disillusioned when his Christian mentor decided that the only truth was contained in the Bible. The Incarnation John had fallen in love with became unreal to him; his faith diluted. Looking back on this period, John wrote, "Protestantism carries the seed of disintegration within its own bosom.... This was what happened to me.... I had become like a lonely disembodied soul wandering through an empty universe and trying agonizingly to find a new body for itself." At times he tended to Unitarianism, other times to Pantheism, but these were unsatisfying.

In 1921, John received an International Law fellowship and went to the University of Paris. He returned to America in 1923 to become a research scholar at the Harvard Law School. In 1924, he returned to China, where he became a judge; but he resigned to return to America to lecture at Northwestern and become a Research Fellow at Harvard (1929, 1930). Unhappy back in the States, he resolved to return to China.

John began practicing law in Shanghai in 1930, unhappy, dissatisfied, and drowning in despair. He became very "worldly." He loathed his wife and ignored his children. His daughter wrote in her diary, "our family life is simply miserable." At his low point, John considered taking a concubine. "With the advent of doubt, I have lost my peace forever.... Now the melody of life is lost, and the harmony is yet to be achieved. I, too, have tried dancing, chewing gum, drinking wine, reading stories, studying philosophy, playing mah-jong, and other desperate remedies, but so far they have not given me any real happiness.... I feel like a fallen angel! ...Eloi, Eloi, lama sabachthani?.... I have tried one substitute for religion after another; all of them have failed to satisfy me."

By his mid-thirties, however, John was disgusted by his degradation and the dominant individualism around him. He wanted to rebel. How could individual liberty be kept within the bounds of reason to maintain social stability?

In May of 1935, the T'ien Hsia Monthly, organized by John Wu, was born. It was to be a cultural and literary journal in English, to interpret Chinese culture to the West. The title was taken from the phrase T'ien Hsia Wei Kung, "everything under heaven should be shared with all people." Association with people on the project broadened John's intellectual interests. "I only hope I shall not cease learning until I cease breathing.... I have profited by my friends very much." Of this period John wrote, "God wanted to broaden my mind, to lift up my heart, to season my zeal with humor, and finally to make me rely upon His grace by driving me to my wits' end. All my attempts at synthesis by rising from one pair of opposites after another were but a tuning up for the great harmony which He Himself was to infuse into my soul. He unchurched me in order to lead me to the true Church. No matter how high I jumped, how far I ran, and how deep I dived, and in spite of all my somersaults, I found that I could never escape from... the Hound of Heaven."

John's "mental roamings" during this period became the raw material with which God built "the temple of the Holy Ghost." Here is a sample:

Chesterton says, "The only way to enjoy even a weed is to feel unworthy even of a weed." The same is true of your friends, books, wife, children, everything God has allotted to you. You are unworthy of them, and even your own achievements, humble as they may be. The sum of the wisdom of life, I agree with Chesterton, consists in "having a great deal of gratitude even for a very little good."

How wonderful is love! It is the creator of all things. It is the highest principle of the cosmos; it stands above Yin and Yang, for it brings them together. The commerce between Yin and Yang is holy, when inspired by Love, it is mere lust when unaccompanied by it. Lust is to Love what talent is to genius, what a politician is to a statesman, what fish's eyes are to pearls. Lust is a forgery and mimicry of Love; it is a mere husk with no living kernel inside; but like all hypocrisies, it pays homage to virtue by imitating its external incidents. Cultivate Love, and everything will be added to you. Joy is perfection, says Spinoza; I may add, joy and pleasure are as wide apart from each other as heaven and earth.

I think it is within limits to assert that on the whole the East has more of the feminine, and the West more of the masculine qualities. The hope of the future depends upon their mating, and the mating season is on even now!

The Sino-Japanese war broke out in mid-1937. John was living in the French Concession, meditating on life and death, war and peace, God and men, and many other problems. Annoyed with God, he picked up a Bible and opened it to Psalm 14, and could read no further than verse 3 before his conscience convicted him. He picked up The World's Best Prose to amuse himself, and opened to a selection from John Henry Newman's Apologia Pro Vita Sua. He was captivated by Newman's vision of the world's woes. What is the remedy for this extraordinary disease I can see before my own eyes? John implored of Newman. Newman, in return, suggested that it was fitting that God might provide the Catholic Church to rescue the world from its suicidal excesses. John decided to learn more about the Catholic Church, which he knew very little about, for he admired the man who recommended the idea. The statement which most struck him was this:

The Catholic Church holds it better for the sun and moon to drop from heaven, for the earth to fall, and for the many millions on it to die of starvation in extremest agony, as far as temporal affliction goes, than that one soul, I will not say, should be lost, but should commit one single venial sin, should tell one willful untruth, or should steal one poor farthing without excuse.

John continued his reading over the next few days with Papini's Life of Christ. Its style appealed to his Eastern sense:

It was not by chance that Christ was born in a stable. What is the world but an immense stable where men produce filth and wallow in it? Do they not daily change the most beautiful, the purest, the most divine things into excrements? Then stretching themselves at full length on the piles of manure, they say they are "enjoying life." ...First to worship Jesus were animals, not men. Among men He sought out the simplehearted: among the simplehearted He sought out children. Simpler than children, and milder, the beasts of burden welcomed Him.

William James' Varieties of Religious Experience diagnosed John's "sick soul" and introduced him to many Catholic saints for the first time. Next to Saint John of the Cross' saying "To possess all things, resolve to possess nothing; to be all things, be willing to be nothing" John happily wrote "Taoistic!" He was impressed that the Catholic Church had been mother to so many saints like Teresa of Avila, John of the Cross, Augustine, and Francis of Assisi.

John next turned to T. S. Eliot's Selected Essays and read an essay on Dante's Commedia. Though John had never particularly enjoyed Dante before, he hunted up a copy on the advice of this great literary critic. Dante's Commedia held him spellbound.

In November of 1937, Shanghai, where John was living, was isolated. His friend Yuan Chia-huang suggested that John come to stay with him, because there was a rumor that the Japanese militarists were out to liquidate their opponents, among whom John was. From Yuan's house, maybe John could escape to Hong Kong.

The Yuans were Catholics, and John often heard them praying the mysteries of the Rosary together. When he asked about a picture of Saint Therese of Lisieux, they gladly offered him her book Story of a Soul. In this work he found "the living synthesis between all pairs of opposites, such as humility and audacity, freedom and discipline, joys and sorrows, duty and love, strength and tenderness, grace and nature, folly and wisdom, wealth and poverty, corporateness and individuality. She seemed to me to combine the heart of the Buddha, the virtues of Confucius, and the philosophic detachment of Lao Tsu. Here was a young Sister who died at twenty-four, and had attained such perfection. What was the secret? How could she realize individuality so fully if she were not an integral member of the Mystical Body of Christ?" Upon finishing Story of a Soul, John decided to become Catholic.

John became a Catholic on December 18, 1937. There was no immediate great emotion. Only five days later was John's joy expressed.

In mid-January of 1938, John escaped to Hong Kong. He continued to write for T'ien Hsia and began to translate Chinese poems into English. "In addition to these, I contributed my translation of the Taoistic classic, the Tao Teh Ching. From the standpoint of literary output, that was perhaps the most active period of my life." Two years later John was confirmed, and entered spiritual direction. He studied and met many Carmelites, and read many classics of spirituality like Saint Francis de Sales' Introduction to the Devout Life, Scupoli's The Spiritual Combat, and A Kempis' Imitation of Christ.

By 1940, John's wife and their twelve children were all baptized into the Catholic Church (a thirteenth child was born and baptized later). Mrs. Wu took the baptismal name Mary Teresa. Over time, the family became stronger and closer.

In 1941, John was imprisoned by the Japanese when the British surrendered Hong Kong. Bishop Robert Kotewall, however, managed to liberate him to return to his family in Kowloon in time for the birth of his son. In May they all escaped to Free China, and moved to Kuelin. Though the house they lived in was a "pigsty," John remarked "Where there is love, even a pigsty is paradise: where there is no love, a palace is no better than hell."

John C. H. Wu has been highly praised for his paraphrase translation of the Psalms and New Testament into Chinese, which was done during this period. Though he was most pleased with his translation of Paul's epistles, Abbot Dom Pierre Celestine Lou preferred the Gospel of Saint John, "The whole evangelical account and exposition of Saint John attains for us Chinese, in this so faithful version of Mr. Wu Ching-hsiung, a beauty and a profundity that the ver sions in alphabetic languages could never equal for us! It offers to us the announceme nt of the Good News in such a manner that, as I am intimately assured, Saint John himself would have presented and written it, if God had disposed that he should be a Chinese and had made him one." Dom Lou also said, "Wu's use of the classical phrases and idioms furnishes the key to a living synthesis of East and West, a synthesis like a seamless cloth, like the pieces of coal melted into one fire in the furnace of Divine Love." General Yang Tsin has been quoted as saying, "I have read the four Gospels several times and Dr. John C. H. Wu's translation of the Psalms twice, and I feel that nothing in our Confucian classics is comparable to the religious and moral doctrines contained therein."

In 1946, while his family was living in Chungking, President Chiang asked John to be the Republic of China's Minister to the Vatican. In 1947 they made that journey to Rome to meet Pope Pius XII, who glorified the Chinese Martyrs. John was the first Catholic to ever represent a non-Catholic nation to the Holy See. While they were there, the Wus had the honor of being photographed with Pius XII. In an expression of filial piety, John asked the Pope to be seated, as a father. This was the first time the Pope has ever been photographed sitting with a private family, as John later learned. The entire Wu family was given an Apostolic Blessing, and the family made their home in Rome.

John returned to China (without his family) to accept the Minister of Justice position in the Chinese Cabinet in 1949, when the Cabinet was reaching the peak of unpopularity. His acceptance was conditional, one condition being that prisoners be educated. As the Communist threat got worse, he was advised to return to Rome. He made a trip to say goodbye to Ningpo, and to visit Chiang Kai-shek and give him a copy of the New Testament. He told the retired President that he was going to give up politics to devote himself to education and the spiritual life. He then returned to Rome.

In 1949, John and his family went to the University of Hawaii to become a visiting professor of Chinese Philosophy. Before their departure from Rome, he was appointed a Papal Chamberlain of the Cape and Sword. In Honolulu, Beyond East & West (Sheed & Ward, 1951), John Wu's spiritual autobiography was written, and he considered his life there very fruitful on many levels.

Some of John's thoughts about Christianity:

"Only Christianity has satisfied all the aspirations of my heart and confirmed all the thoughts of my mind, and woven the two strains of my inborn nature [the spirit of his mother, Taoism; the spirit of his father, Confucianism] into a perfect harmony, which is the music of the spheres rather than that of the earth or of man."

"I was initiated early into the mysteries of paradox, and my paradoxical turn of mind played no small role in my acceptance of Christianity."

"Whenever I think of Confucius and Mencius, Buddha and Lao Tsu, I am inclined to call them--as Saint Justin Martyr called Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle--'Pegagogues to lead men to Christ.' [Saint Maximilian] Kolbe, in his little book on The Art of Life, has written:

The light that enlighteneth every man coming into this world must have shown with special strength into the souls of those who so earnestly felt after the Truth, Goodness, and Beauty, which, whether they knew it or not, is God: and every human response to this Divine shining is of the nature of faith. "The Spirit of the Lord hath filled the whole earth"; and I cannot but think that it is with some degree of the virtue of faith helping their natural insight that such men as Buddha and Plato reached their moral level. There is something very touching in these early efforts after perfection, and like all early art they sometimes produce simple effects which are beyond our reach in these more conscious days.

"Embracing the true Church of Christ, I have lost nothing, but gained all."

"What fascinated me in Buddha was not his teaching upon the nature of reality but his great personality, his generous love for all creation, his heroic renunciation of the world, his singlehearted search after the Truth. He did not succeed in finding the Truth, for it has to be revealed from above; but he is to be judged by his aspirations rather than his accomplishments. It was these aspirations which jerked me into a kind of spiritual wakefulness which prepared me remotely to return to God like the prodigal son. Buddha was one of the pedagogues to lead me to Christ.... I owed to the Mahayana Buddhism the ideal of being in the world but not of it."

"There is no denying that without the light of Revelation a Chinese is in danger of becoming a fatalist, just as an Occidental who has forgotten his Christianity is in danger of becoming an activist."

"It is not fair to Christianity to call it 'Western.' Christianity is universal. In fact, the West has something to learn from the East, for, on the whole, the East has gone farther in its natural contemplation than the West has in its supernatural contemplation. To take just one instance, the average Buddhist in China knows something about the three stages of Abstention, Concentration, and Wisdom; while the average Christian has no idea of the three ways, the purgative, the illuminative, and the unitive. The spiritual education of the Christian is sadly neglected.... It is most gratifying to see the importance of the mystical element in religion is being more and more recognized in the West. It is to be hoped that the mysticism of the saints [like Teresa and John of the Cross] will gradually leaven the whole lump of Christendom."

"When I read Saint Therese of Lisieux, I said to myself, 'How Chinese she is!'"

"One of the greatest charms of the Catholic Church for the Chinese soul is its monastic tradition. The Chinese people are on the whole more attached to the world; but they have a secret admiration for those who have heroically sacrificed all their worldly pleasures and relations in order to devote themselves to a life of union with God. At the bottom of their heart, the Chinese realize that all honors and riches will soon pass without leaving a trace; and therefore they admire those who abandon what is temporary in singlehearted pursuit of what is eternal.... When the love of God reigns supreme in a family, the family itself becomes a cloister and the duties of vocation constitute a cell for each member of the family. If one performs one's domestic, professional, and social duties for the love of God, one is a monk or nun in spirit."

"Another thing about the Catholic Church that makes me feel at home is the Liturgical Year.... Since my embracement of the true Faith, the year has become a living presence again.... It often reminds me of the 'tree of life' in the Apocalypse of Saint John, bearing twelve fruits, yielding its fruit according to each month, and the leaves for the healing of the nations (22:2)."

"The Catholic enjoys the peace and happiness of the Pantheist at their very Source."

"Have I lost anything by becoming a Catholic? Absolutely nothing. On the contrary, I have gained Christ, and in gaining Christ I have gained all.... The sorrows are the sorrows of the ages; but the joy is the Joy of Eternity!"

"Grace is all.... To anyone who has tasted the infinite goodness and wisdom of God, the whole New Testament is an understatement of the truth."

"To be Catholic is to be a member of a big family, a family co-terminous with the whole universe."

"Oh the fun of being a Catholic!"

Books by John C. H. Wu worth reading:

The Science of Love: A Study in the Teachings of Therese of Lisieux by John C.H. Wu online!

Beyond East & West - spiritual autobiography
The Interior Carmel - a summary of Carmelite Catholic mysticism, with frequent reference to Eastern philosophers like Lao Tsu, Confucius, and Buddha in addition to Catholic sources like St. Teresa of Avila, St. John of the Cross, and St. Therese of Lisieux
Fountain of Justice - John C. H. Wu's book on natural law
Tao Teh Ching - by Lao Tzu, translated into English by John C. H. Wu
Also related:
From Confucius to Christ by Paul K. T. Sih, John Wu's godson & editor of his Tao Teh Ching translation

Sadly, most of these are out of print. (John Wu's translation of Tao Teh Ching is currently published by Shambhala.) They are worth finding in a library or secondhand bookseller, however. We recommend searching through Bibliofind. The Interior Carmel will probably be of greatest interest to those seeking union with the Eternal Tao, Jesus Christ.

Icon & Book Service 800-ASK-ICON Eastern Catholic & Orthodox books, icons, incense, prayer ropes, CDs, etc.	Newman Bookstore 800-936-3962 one of the largest Catholic bookstores in the United States	Pauline Books & Media 800-836-9723 international chain of Catholic bookstores, Daughters of St. Paul	Bibliofind search for out-of-print and used books
These suggestions are intended to be helpful and are entirely unsolicited.

Documents by Pope Pius XII related to the life and times of John C. H. Wu:
Pope Pius XII's 1954 Encyclical to the Chinese People on the Supranationality of the Church
Pope Pius XII's 1958 Encyclical on Communism and the Church in China

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John Augustine
Catholic Taoist
"It takes a John to recognize a John!" -John C.H. Wu