The Vatican's Asian Vexation.(World Affairs)

Byline: David Gibson

Catholicism is thriving in the East. But for the Holy See, all roads to salvation must go through Rome.

For nearly a quarter century before his election as pontiff, Joseph Ratzinger served as the Vatican's guardian of Roman Catholic orthodoxy, earning a tough reputation for his campaign to quash the Marxist-tinged movement known as liberation theology. Cardinal Ratzinger's success in that crusade won him few plaudits in Latin America, the cradle of liberation theology and home to nearly half the world's 1.1 billion Roman Catholics. So in April 2005, when he was introduced to the world as Pope Benedict XVI, many feared the worst. Instead, the Pax Romana that Ratzinger helped impose on "the popular church" in Latin America, along with the end of Soviet communism, made increased Vatican pressure unnecessary and unlikely.

But now the focus of Benedict's anxieties -- and Vatican sanctions -- has shifted to Asia, Catholicism's largest untapped market. At issue is the fear -- for Rome -- that too many Asian Catholics see other religions not only as bearers of truth, but as alternate pathways to salvation or spiritual insight. In Asia, God -- or the gods -- are everywhere, while Rome wants to stress the exclusivity of Catholicism. To Benedict, Asian theologians and church leaders are attempting to win converts by translating a Western religion -- Christianity -- into an Eastern idiom, relating Christ to Confucius, the Buddha or the variety of Hindu deities, transforming Jesus, as Benedict put it, into "one religious leader among others." To the Vatican hierarchy, says Thomas C. Fox, author of "Pentecost in Asia: A New Way of Being Church," the teachings of these theologians are "clearly unacceptable, even incomprehensible."

The most recent and dramatic sign of Benedict's distaste for the Asian flavor was the revelation in September that the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, the powerful Vatican office that Ratzinger led for more than 23 years, was investigating Father Peter C. Phan, a Vietnamese-born theologian, now at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C., who has argued for a less Eurocentric church. Such an investigation is a chilling prospect: the CDF proceedings are held in secret, and Phan is prohibited from confronting the "experts" who will determine whether his work is heretical. Phan's odds for redemption appear long. According to secret correspondence obtained by the National Catholic Reporter in September, the CDF earlier this year declared some of his best-known work "notably confused on a number of points of Catholic doctrine." Such charges could bar him from teaching theology in the Catholic world. Phan has asked Rome for clarification, but has received no word on his fate.

Asia has long presented both tantalizing opportunities and potent challenges. Franciscan missionaries established churches in China in the 1200s, but along with brutal shoguns and fickle emperors, they faced suspicion from Roman authorities, who thought they were too eager to downgrade both the "Roman" and "Catholic" aspects of the church. Yet Asian Catholicism survived, and indeed thrives today even as European Christendom shrinks. ...