LOU TSENG-TSIANG (PIETRO CELESTINO), abbot. — Born in Shanghai on 12 June 1871, died in Bruges (Belgium) on 15 January 1949. He was appointed interpreter at the Chinese legation in St Petersburg in 1892, where he remained for fourteen years; in 1899 he married a young Belgian woman, with a dispensation from the impediment of mixed religion, since he was Protestant and the young woman Catholic. Appointed minister to the Netherlands, he moved to Amsterdam and in 1911 returned to St Petersburg as minister; there he embraced the Catholic religion, receiving conditional Baptism on 23 December 1911.
After the foundation of the Chinese Republic, he was called to become the first minister of Foreign Affairs of the new Republic. He held this office, with brief interruptions, from 1912 to 1919; after the Versailles Peace Conference, he withdrew from political life. Later, he accepted the post of plenipotentiary minister in Switzerland in 1926, but held it only briefly. After his wife’s death, he asked to enter the Abbey of St Andrew of Bruges, where he professed his vows on 15 January 1929 and received priestly ordination on 29 June 1935. On 18 May 1946 he was appointed titular abbot of St Peter at Ghent and received the abbatial blessing on 12 August of the same year. He was a man of the highest integrity and rich political experience. He cultivated a profound filial piety toward his parents and, in his monastic life, transformed this Confucian piety into filial love toward the Divine Father and the Madonna. He hoped for the meeting of Eastern and Western civilization through Christianity. He left two writings: a brief autobiographical history, Souvenirs et pensées (Paris 1945, Italian version Brescia 1947), and a brief philosophical-theological reflection, La rencontre des Humanités et la découverte de l'Évangile, published posthumously in Paris in 1950.