The Catholic Invasion of China: Remaking Chinese Christianity by D. E. Mungello (review)

D. E. Mungello is a distinguished scholar of China who has written or edited several books as well as important articles, mainly about Christianity in that country. Here he presents a nuanced argument about how the modern history of Catholicism in China (that is, from 1800) should be evaluated. Although he is critical of an earlier generation of Western interpretations of Catholic missions for judging the whole effort a failure, he readily acknowledges the errors and damages incurred, as suggested by his use of invasion in the title. From the beginning, however, he states his position that the ultimate achievement of an indigenous form of Catholicism, after centuries of European local management, was more important than the deleterious short-term effects of “this invasion” (p. 1).

He pursues this position through a series of essays on selected aspects of the modern history of the Chinese Catholic Church. He provides brief sketches of the larger narrative but offers considerable detail about a few limited topics. Among these essays is an engaging account of the contested return of the Jesuits in 1842, after a sixty-nine-year absence, to the Yangzi delta area, centering on Shanghai. He also closely examines charges in recent Chinese official diatribes of sexual malfeasance by three Catholic missionaries who were killed locally at widely separated moments and were beatified as martyrs in 2000. A particularly meticulous account is given of the case of the priest Auguste Chapdelaine, whose execution in 1856 became the justification for France joining Britain in a war with the Chinese government. Mungello is evidently skeptical of the charges against Chapdelaine but judiciously accepts that such misbehavior (although not in the extravagant manner in the hostile Chinese accounts) cannot be excluded in all cases. One might add that missionaries occasionally made charges of this sort against their own confreres.

Catholic missions were often accused of abuse of the children in their orphanages and even of exploiting their moribund bodies for outrageous purposes. The communist government revived these accusations in the 1950s. As an illustrative case of this and of the role of the female religious in the missions, Mungello elaborates the history of the Canossian Sisters in Shaanxi province from 1891. He notes that the suspicion of mistreatment of children was an ineluctable by-product of the frequently weak health of the abandoned children taken in by the charitable orphanages, with resulting high death rates. Perhaps he does not make enough of the practices of purchasing children for the orphanages and of seeking, quite apart from the orphanages, to baptize non-Catholic babies on the point of death.

Under the heading of critiques from within the Catholic Church of the form of the “invasion,” the book focuses especially on two prominent Chinese Catholics, Ma Xiangbo and Ying Lianzhi. Ma’s career is narrated fully, including his role in founding various major educational institutions. Ying, who launched an important newspaper, joined Ma in the campaign for better Catholic schools. They both had moments of conflict with the European Catholic hierarchy in China. Mungello holds that Ying’s writing influenced Pope Benedict XV’s apostolic letter of 1919, which rededicated the Vatican to the ultimate indigenization of the Chinese Church.

A section is devoted to the tribulation of the Chinese Church after the Communist Party came to power in 1949. The author selects Shanghai as a case. It was a dramatic one, including mass arrests and some heroic leaders. But Catholics re-emerged and increased in numbers when politics relaxed somewhat after Mao Zedong’s death. The 3.5 million Catholics of 1949 nationally became 12 million Catholics in 2012. The Protestants had grown much more in those same years, from about 500,000 to 23 million (estimates vary widely). One factor in the disparity, writes Mungello, was “the consequences of the Catholic invasion of China from 1834 to 2000…” (p. 14). Still, he emphasizes the positive...