Enshrining the Mission: The Bishop Sheehan Memorial Museum and Vincentian Visions of China

In 1923, the Western Province of the Congregation of the Mission (Vincentians) began to send missionaries to Jiangxi Province in China at the behest of a French Province no longer in position to continue with its China Mission following World War I. As the years progressed, the China Mission came to hold a significant role in sustaining a community stretching from the missionaries’ home seminary of St. Mary’s of the Barrens in Perryville, Missouri to their vicariate in China. In 1935 the Vincentians established a museum at St. Mary’s to honor the memory of Bishop Edward T. Sheehan, the first American Vincentian bishop in Jiangxi. This museum performed an important role in maintaining the connections between the seminarians in Missouri and the missionaries in Jiangxi as the China Mission became more important within the Vincentian community. It was a shared physical space that housed evidence of Vincentian achievement in China while both educating seminarians and allowing them to participate in the celebration of that achievement; a nexus between coexisting and connected Vincentian communities of the midwestern United States and southern China that sustained an overarching social group identity that ignored geographic separation.