Catholic Church In China

This book explores the Chinese Catholic Church as a whole as well as focusing on particular aspects of its activities, including diplomacy, politics, leadership, pilgrimage, youths, and non-Chinese Catholics in China. It discusses Sino-Vatican relations and the rationale behind the decisions taken by Pope Francis with regard to the appointment of bishops in China. The book also examines important changes and personalities in the Chinese Church, the Catholic organizations, and the Catholic communities in the Church, offering a key read for researchers and graduate students studying the Chinese Catholic Church, the Church in Asia, and religion in contemporary China.

In spite of difficulties posed by a hostile socialist government, the Catholic Church in China has shown remarkable perseverance and growth since the end of the Cultural Revolution in 1979. The essays contained in The Catholic Church in Modern China inform readers of the major issues facing the Catholic Church in China today. Their insights should be welcomed by everyone from the Catholic layperson contemplating a trip to China to scholars and specialists in China and religious studies.

The culmination of D. E. Mungello’s forty years of study on Sino-Western history, this book provides a compelling and nuanced history of Roman Catholicism in modern China. As the author vividly shows, when China declined into a two-century cycle of poverty, powerlessness, and humiliation, the attitudes of Catholic missionaries became less accommodating than their famous Jesuit predecessors. He argues that “invasion” accurately characterizes the dominant attitude of Catholic missionaries (especially the French Jesuits) in their attempt to introduce Western religion and culture into China during the nineteenth and early twentieth century. Elements of this attitude lingered until the end of the last century, when many Chinese felt that Pope John Paul II’s canonization of 120 martyrs reflected the imposition of an imperialist mentality. In this important work, Mungello corrects a major misreading of modern Chinese history by arguing that the growth of an indigenous Catholic church in the twentieth century transformed the negative aspects of the “invasion” into a positive Chinese religious force.

This edited volume starts from the perspectives of Beijing in how it sees that religion should serve the interests of the state. From China’s viewpoint, religion should act as a stabilizing force of society, or else the Christian Churches will lose their reason for existence. This might be incomprehensible to Western Christians, who believe in the freedom of religion and their right to embrace their faith. This collection of articles represents the concerted efforts of Chinese, Italians, and an American—who live in China, Europe, and the United States and belong to different disciplines, such as History, Religious Studies, and Language Studies—to promote a better understanding of the Catholic Church in the world and in China.

After suffering isolation and persecution during the Maoist era, the Catholic Church in China has reemerged with astonishing vitality in recent years. Richard Madsen focuses on this revival and relates it to the larger issue of the changing structure of Chinese society, particularly to its implications for the development of a "civil society." Madsen knows China well and has spent extensive time there interviewing Chinese Catholics both young and old, the "true believers" and the less devout. Their stories reveal the tensions that have arisen even as political control over everyday life in China has loosened. Of particular interest are the rural-urban split in the church, the question of church authority, and the divisions between public and underground practices of church followers. All kinds of religious groups have revived and flourished in the post-Mao era. Protestants, Buddhists, Daoists, practitioners of folk religions, even intellectuals seeking more secularized answers to "ultimate" concerns are engaged in spiritual quests. Madsen is interested in determining if such quests contain the resources for constructing a more humane political order in China. Will religion contribute to or impede economic modernization? What role will the church play in the pluralization of society? The questions he raises in China's Catholics are important not only for China's political future but for all countries in transition from political totalitarianism.

The French Religious Protectorate was an institutionalized and enduring policy of the French government, based on a claim by the French state to be guardian of all Catholics in China. The expansive nature of the Protectorate's claim across nationalities elicited opposition from official and ordinary Chinese, other foreign countries, and even the pope. Yet French authorities believed their Protectorate was essential to their political prominence in the country. This book examines the dynamics of the French policy, the supporting role played in it by ecclesiastical authority, and its function in embittering Sino-foreign relations. In the 1910s, the dissidence of some missionaries and Chinese Catholics introduced turmoil inside the church itself. The rebels viewed the link between French power and the foreign-run church as prejudicial to the evangelistic project. The issue came into the open in 1916, when French authorities seized territory in the city of Tianjin on the grounds of protecting Catholics. In response, many Catholics joined in a campaign of patriotic protest, which became linked to a movement to end the subordination of the Chinese Catholic clergy to foreign missionaries and to appoint Chinese bishops. With new leadership in the Vatican sympathetic to reforms, serious steps were taken from the late 1910s to establish a Chinese-led church, but foreign bishops, their missionary societies, and the French government fought back. During the 1930s, the effort to create an indigenous church stalled. It was less than halfway to realization when the Chinese Communist Party took power in 1949. Ecclesiastical Colony reveals the powerful personalities, major debates, and complex series of events behind the turmoil that characterized the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century experience of the Catholic church in China.

This volume is the product of scholars of various backgrounds, specialties and agendas bringing forth their most treasured findings regarding the Chinese Catholic Church. The chapters in this book covering the church from 1900 to the present trace the development of the Church in China from many historical and disciplinary vantage points.