Catholic Publishing Houses in China

It is not easy to publish a Catholic book in China. Bibles, for example, cannot be sold openly like in any other country. Bookstores cannot sell the Bible.

In the last years millions of Bibles were distributed in China. How was that possible? Here are the conditions: The book has to be approved by the government; it cannot be for profit; and the Bibles should be distributed from pre-approved places of worship (parishes approved by the government).

That is the way we distribute our Bibles in China. Slowly we see n opening, less restrictions, more flexibility, but still the process is slow.

Something similar happens with religious books. Used to publish up to 100 titles per year through Claretian Publications in the Philippines, the situation in China is completely different.

There are three Catholic publishing houses in China. And these past days we had important meetings with two of them: Faith Press (in Shijiazhuang) and Guanqi Press (in Shanghai).

Can we, then, publish a religious book in China?

Yes, if you follow the rules:

The manuscript has to be presented to the competent government authorities for their approval.

Distribution is “private”—that is though pre-approved parishes. Religious books cannot be sold normal bookstores.

The book has to be published by an approved publishing house. Claretian Publications, from Macau, cannot directly publish in Mainland… we have to go through one of the Catholic publishers.

New publishing projects

Projects are always plenty. The most important one is to prepare a new translation of the Bible into Chinese similar to the “pastoral Bible” we have in other languages. A translation faithful to the original languages; using today’s Chinese common language (easy to understand for the people); and—as the Church asks from us—with pastoral commentaries to help the reader to connect life and faith following the big Tradition of the Church.

This new edition will also have the Lectio Divina guide *following the style of the recently published by us “The Catholic Prayer Bible”. We shall publish by parts/books. Already out of the press is Luke and Acts of the Apostles. The other Gospels are ready for the press now.

With P. Joseph Zheng Wenxi an Fr. John Fei. Both of them are teaching Bible at the seminary in Shijiazhuang, The largest seminary in China.

Fr. Zheng Wenxi is the first Chinese from Mainland to get a Doctorate in Biblical studies. He just graduated from The Catholic University of America (USA). He is our good friend and he is already part of our editorial team. Fr. Fei, also a biblical scholar, is also helping in the final editing of the Chinese biblical text.

The first published volume of this project can be found in our web page: www.bibleclaret.org (go to ‘Chinese’).

The Spanish Bible “Our People’s Bible” in Chinese

Following the Gospel’s instruction that “new wine should be placed in new wineskins” we have decided to present the new Bible text along with the commentaries of the Spanish Bible that we have also published recently. There are about 1000 computer pages, single space, of commentaries and before translating them to Chinese, we had to translate them into English… the common known language of Chinese translators.

The English translation is already finished; and we already have translated into Chinese several of the commentaries… but we still have a long way to go.

Guangqi Press, in Shanghai, is one of the Ccatholic publishing house. They will soon publish 9 booklets about Consecrated Life. This is the work of Claretian Fr. José Cristo Rey García, and already published in English.

New presentation of our WEB page

Take a look at our new presentation of: www.bibleclaret.org Now you can select your language as you enter the page: English, Spanish or Chinese. And, as it has always been, everything there is for free. This is how the entrance to our new web page looks like:

Only one child policy in China?

China has over 1.3 billion people. The 30 year old disposition to have one child per family is slowly changing and we see many exceptions. In my last trip to Shijiazhuang, capital of the Province of Hebei, I stayed with a family friend of ours. As you can see in the picture, there are three children: a girl of 8 years old, and two naughty twins of five.