Imagine, long before the coming of Jesus, Mo Zi, a brave « pagan » of the Old China, believed with all his soul in universal love! He was advocating what nowadays we call social justice, considering it as directly willed by Heaven (in China, the word «Heaven» refers to God, the Divinity or the gods).

He would object to any clannish attitude and denounce the social classes. He would fight against war in all its forms, refuse hatred and would not admit even getting angry.

For more than two centuries, Moïsm succeeded in working its way among the thinking trends of China, but found fierce adversaries among the Confucians.

Those Confucians, despite the fact that they were deeply humanistic, had a world vision diametrically opposed to the one of Mo Zi.

According to them, Heaven wanted before all else an ordered society, neatly structured and strongly hierarchical, of which the great unifying principle would be the absolute submission (xiào) to the father of the family and to the emperor.

In their eyes, the Moïsts who were followers of universal love and of equality among human beings, were simply subversives, heretics or atheists. And so, the Confucians made it their duty to fight them to the extent of having any trace of them vanish from the face of the earth. They succeeded marvelously in doing so after two centuries of fierce persecution.

Recalling the drama of Mo Zi and of his disciples brings me to jump two millennia and bring me back in Argentina where I lived from 1977 to 1992. At that time, hundreds of thousands of women and men of Latin America believed that universal love proclaimed by Jesus had to go out into the streets and be translated into a power for the radical transformation of the mentalities and of the structures of the Church and of society.

That great and heroic liberation movement instilled an enormous hope within the Church and, in particular, among many countries of the Third World; on the other hand, it was savagely fought against as a terrible subversion by the upholders of «law and order» in the Church as well as in society in general.

Those good «Confucians» of our times won hands down. They were and are still the fiery apostles of the new world order that neo-liberalism is actually establishing by overexploiting the resources of the planet and by more and more choking strongly many peoples who already have a hard time to breathe.

I believe that similar forces were behind Jesus' assassination and emasculated his great movement for the liberation of the human beings. Those forces were the ones that have emptied our Church of her best leaven and very often have reduced her, especially in affluent countries, to be only some kind of large funeral parlor.

The drama of Mo Zi is not finished...Some day in the future we will understand maybe that universal love, justice and freedom are not the enemies of law and order, but simply the opposite.

Eloy Roy

Translated from the French by Jacques Bourdages