LOU TSENG-TSIANG (Peter Celestine), Abbot. - B. in Shanghai on June 12, 1871, d. in Bruges (Belgium) on Jan. 15, 1949. He was appointed interpreter at the Chinese legation in St. Petersburg in 1892, where he remained for fourteen years and married a young Belgian woman, in 1899, with a dispensation from the impediment of mixed religion, because he was Protestant and the young woman Catholic. Appointed minister in Holland, he moved to Amsterdam and in 1911 returned to St. Petersburg as minister and there embraced the Catholic religion, receiving Baptism conditionally on Dec. 23, 1911.
After the founding of the Chinese Republic he was called to be the first minister of Foreign Affairs of the new Republic. He held this office with brief interruptions from 1912 to 1919 and after the Versailles Peace Conference he retired from political life. Later, he accepted only for a short time the post of minister plenipotentiary in Switzerland in 1926. When his wife died, he asked to enter the abbey of St. Andrew in Bruges, where on Jan. 15, 1929 he took his vows and on June 29, 1935 he received priestly ordination. On May 18, 1946 he was appointed titular abbot of St. Peter in Ghent and received the abbatial blessing on the following Aug. 12. He was a man of the highest uprightness and of valuable political experience. He cultivated a deep filial piety toward his parents and in his monastic life he transformed this Confucian piety into a filial love toward the Divine Father and toward the Madonna. He hoped for the meeting of Eastern civilization with Western civilization through Christianity. He left two writings: a brief autobiographical history Souvenirs et pensées (Paris 1945, Italian trans. Brescia 1947) and a brief philosophical-theological reflection: La rencontre des Humanités et la découverte de l'Évangile, posthumous, Paris 1950.
Bibliography
Stanislao Lokuang