Jesus in China

The pews of Shanghai's St. Ignatius Cathedral are empty except for two elderly women stooped over rosaries, bathed in morning sunlight turned blue by stained glass. Their prayers are strong and insistent, but as their words rise to the gothic arches framing this century-old church, they soften and disappear. Across the transept, Father Thomas Lucas, a Jesuit and University of San Francisco art professor, looks up with pinched impatience. He paces and stuffs his thick hands into the pockets of his black jeans. "What's taking so long?"

Suddenly, high above the tile floor, a rendering of what one of the cathedral windows will soon look like edges into the clear glass panels of the window's frame. Wo Ye, the Beijing-born artist working with Lucas to replace the stained glass that was smashed during the Cultural Revolution, rushes in with shuffling feet and a ho-ho-ho laugh. She flips open her cellphone and dials the laborers she has conned into climbing onto the steep roof to put the rendering in place. She directs them left, then right, until images of bamboo shoots sprout behind the glass. "What do you think?" Lucas asks Wo as they stand side by side, arms crossed.

Lucas is the latest California Jesuit to work in and around Shanghai's great cathedral, completed in 1910 and ransacked in 1966. For almost 80 years, the Los Gatos-based California Jesuit mission has had strong ties to China, founding universities, sending teachers to seminaries and promoting a Chinese identity for Catholicism. Lucas' mission--the design and installation of roughly 2,500 square feet of stained glass--is as important to his Jesuit superiors as it is to China's Catholics as they emerge from decades of suppression and isolation.

Today, with 20% of the work complete, the windows in the first level of the 85-foot-high, 300-foot-long French gothic cathedral blaze with Chinese iconography, characters and designs. These windows are radical, and they have angered conservative Chinese priests who favor the Caucasian gospel characters depicted here when the church held its first Mass, long before communism arrived. Wo and Lucas, with the support of Shanghai's bishop and leading foreign clerics, have so far persevered against the opposition. And Lucas says he understands why the Chinese Church conservatives are unnerved. "It is Chinese flesh on European bones," he likes to say of the windows. "It is a dialogue between East and West." Something that isn't always accepted here.