`What about Rath farnham Castle? Is it turned into tearooms?" These were the unlikely opening questions from Shanghai's official bishop, Dr Aloysius Jin Luxian, as he welcomed me last month to his residence behind that vast city's Catholic cathedral of St Ignatius.
I wondered whether there was a twinkle of playful irony in the eyes of the spry 87-year-old prelate as he prepared to regale me with figures, and sober but encouraging facts, about the continuing growth of the church in China. In contrast, perhaps, to the current state of the church in Ireland?
Bishop Jin learned his now-flawless English as a young priest in 1950 in the then-Jesuit student centre at Dublin's Rathfarnham Castle. I was talking to perhaps the most talented and informative of China's "open-church" bishops.
He is regarded as a pivotal figure in the complex drama which marks the delicate relationship between his country's official church and Rome, and between the government-sanctioned Catholic Church and the so-called underground church of 60 bishops. They make up the inclusive leadership of China's 10 million Catholics, a threefold increase since the 1950s.
Bishop Jin, though himself not in full communion with Rome, is nevertheless in informal contact with the Vatican's secretariat of state, as attempts to nurse reconciliation continue.
His record of positive diplomacy has endowed him with a measure of worldwide Catholic support. There is a growing number of young priests and sisters in the Shanghai diocese, which numbers 160,000 Catholic faithful, with the astonishingly high rate of religious practice of around 90 per cent.
Bishop Jin presides over a regional seminary with 160 young men preparing for ordination. There are some 100 local diocesan nuns from a nationwide total of 30,000. Twenty-two young women are in training for religious profession in the Shanghai diocese alone.
The dapper and engaging Bishop Jin has "seen the two days", as they say. During a harsher era he spent 27 years in prison, which included periods of severe deprivation without even a bed to lie on.
This considerably enhances his credibility. Nowadays his personal attitudes and aspirations could be said to embody the delicate, ambiguous and fluctuating fortunes of a church within Chinese society, now itself in a fascinating process of transition.
Today the Catholic Church in China shows two faces to the outside world. There is the underground church, staunchly loyal to the Papacy in every respect, led by its 60 bishops whose appointments are explicitly ratified by Rome. Often harassed by government, with some of its leaders imprisoned, it sees itself as the authentic face of Catholicism.
The "open" church, officially supervised by government, is allowed to grow and flourish. Complexity arises, however, in that many of the official bishops have clandestinely arranged their endorsement by Rome. This is necessarily a confidential process.
It is therefore impossible to know exactly who and how many are in this category. The two churches' jurisdictions co-exist: in some places in opposition to one another; in other places both enjoy an uneasy but mutually co-operative relationship. In Shanghai, for example, Bishop Jin is a friend of his underground counterpart, who is also a Jesuit.
Moreover, both of them are old men and have agreed that one bishop will follow in the see. There are several dioceses whose bishops have engineered a dual mandate, from both Rome and the government.
The root of the problem is twofold. First, China is historically suspicious of anything it deems to be interference in its sovereign affairs. The colonising propensity of the West is imprinted on its psyche. Unfortunately, even Rome is thus construed as yet another intervening outsider.
In recent years negotiations between China and Rome have come close to resolving the problem of episcopal appointments. This process suffered a dramatic reverse with the unexpected government-sponsored ordination of five new bishops on January 6th last, the feast of the Epiphany. It was regarded as a rebuff to the Vatican's best efforts towards solution of its long-standing dilemma.
The second root of the Chinese church problem is, of course, that ultimately its Communist government sees no merit in religion and will tolerate it only as a social ingredient of its fundamentally atheistic policies.
These two root obstacles stand in the way of normalisation for the life of the Catholic Church in China.
In these circumstances the question may legitimately be asked whether it is better for the church to row in, at least overtly, with the government and maximise the pastoral opportunities this provides, or to oppose the government and choose the riskier and more restricted role.
The late President Deng Xiaoping famously spoke the parable: "It doesn't matter whether you are a black cat or a white cat as long as you catch mice."
A pragmatic application of this advice to religious affairs might be the option to press on with pastoral life, even at the price of government patronage and supervision.
Father Tom Stack is parish priest at Milltown in Dublin and a columnist with the Irish Catholic newspaper
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