Brotherly Connection in War and Exile (1936-1960): Fathers Wang Changzhi and Gaston Fessard

As Wang Changzhi (1899-1960), a Jesuit priest from Shanghai’s Catholic mission in Xujiahui, was preparing to leave France to return to China in December 1936, he entrusted the promotion of his newly published book, La philosophie morale de Wang Yangming (Geuthner, 1936) to Gaston Fessard (1897-1978), a longtime friend from the Jesuit Theologate in Lyon-Fourvière, then associate editor of the Jesuit journal Recherches de sciences religieuses and author of Pax Nostra (1936).  From that time until Wang’s death on December 28, 1960, Wang Changzhi and Gaston Fessard maintained their brotherly connection as Wang lived through war and exile a continent away. Their correspondence, partly lost or misplaced, nevertheless sheds light on the ways Chinese Catholic theologians interacted with their counterparts in Europe. This paper complements and enriches previous research on Wang Changzhi (Translingual Catholics, 2025) and analyzes the letters that Wang wrote to Fessard which have recently become accessible.

Fessard became an important interlocutor after Wang’s return to China and served sometimes as a messenger between Wang and their fellow Jesuits from Lyon-Fourvière. Together they shared two theological endeavors situated in their own life contexts:  Catholic response to communism and the commentary of Ignatian spiritual exercises. In the three letters written in 1937, Wang discussed with Fessard the promotion of La philosophie morale de Wang Yangming, the early draft of his Zhuangzi’s Mysticism (which was not published until 1941), the pending publication of his Saint Augustin et les vertus des païens (Beauchesne, 1938) and the challenges he faced in China, mainly his intellectual isolation, as his talent in theology did not seem to be valued by his superiors, a fact corroborated by the accounts of the late Bishop Jin Luxian, Wang’s most prominent student (Juechu Fengsheng, 2013). Those letters also show that Fessard wrote two letters to Wang and sent him books. At the time, Fessard was preoccupied with the Catholic position vis-à-vis the rising of nazism and communism.

The Japanese invasion of China and the war in Europe interrupted their correspondence, and at least one letter was lost during the war, as it was not in the collection kept by Father Michel Sales, but Fessard mentioned it in a letter he wrote to de Lubac (October 1, 1938).  After the end of the wars, their exchanges were renewed. On December 9, 1946, Fessard wrote a letter to Wang, brought to Shanghai by Father Georges Germain, procurator of the Jesuit mission in Shanghai. Fessard started again to send his books to Wang, including his influential France, prends garde de perdre ta liberté (1946) in which he took a position against communism in post-war Europe. Wang’s response, dated March 31, 1947, was filled with optimism injected by the visit of the Provincial superior of Paris (Marcel Bith).  Father Bith released him from a few of his various responsibilities so that he could devote some time to focus on writing books. Bith was also the one who arranged to send two of Wang Changzhi’s students, Zhu Shude and Jin Luxian, to further their theological training in Europe. Wang brainstormed with Fessard his plan to write tracts to respond to various atheist doctrines, a project that was to result in 50 tracts which sold 750,000 copies in Shanghai and Hong Kong by 1950 and eventually published as a book titled Xiandai wenti de jieda (Responses to Questions in Modern Times) in Taiwan Guangqi Press in 1957.

The last three letters from Wang Changzhi to Gaston Fessard were written in the 1950s, after he left Shanghai and settled in the Philippines with the Jesuit Novitiate and Juniorate. Each time, Wang’s letter was in response to a letter written to him by Fessard, a diligent correspondent. In his four-page handwritten letter dated April 24, 1950, Wang gave a detailed account of his life since he left Shanghai on February 15, 1949. After three and half months in Macau, Wang and his Jesuit seminarians arrived in the Philippines, first in Baguio, then in Araneta Farm, an isolated farm 30 kilometers north of Manila. On Christmas Day 1951, Fessard wrote a three-page letter to Wang, encouraging him to continue to write. Wang was then working on Tianzhujiao jiaoyi jiantao (Examination of Catholic Doctrine) but was then unable to secure a publisher as Catholic presses in Hong Kong did not want to publish books after losing the market in mainland China. Eventually this volume became the first book published by Guangqi Press (1954), founded in Manila before printing books first in Hong Kong and then in Taiwan.  Wang was the one who suggested the name Guangqi (Kuang Chi) for the nascent press, in memory of Paul Xu Guangqi, to Father Germain (“Souvenirs du P. Germain sur le P. Joseph Wang”).  Wang’s teaching responsibilities left him little free time to write, and his health was worsening. It took Wang a year and half to write back to Fessard, having received his book, La dialectique des Exercices Spirituels de Saint Ignace de Loyola. By then the Father Visitor had assigned him to work with Father Coathalem to translate the Exercices into Chinese, which was published in 1960, the year when Wang died.

At the time when Wang left France in 1936, he and Fessard had both published their first book.  Their lives were to take different trajectories in the decades to come.  Although both lived through the hardship and heartache of the war, Fessard was at the center of France’s theological and intellectual movements as a prolific writer (in addition to editing the Jesuit journals Recherches de sciences religieuses, Études, creating the series Témoignages Chrétiens, and befriending influential intellectuals such as Jean Wahl, Gabriel Marcel and Raymond Aaron) who eventually drew the attention of Pope Francis.  Wang, on the other hand, had little time to write and only with the approval of his superiors. Maintaining correspondence with Gaston Fessard constituted a way for Wang Changzhi to persist in his theological endeavors under precarious conditions.