The Virgin Mary and Catholic Identities in Chinese History

Introduction: Chinese Catholic identities in the modern period

The Catholic Church in China is surprisingly large, comprising millions of believers. The figure of more than twelve million is not a large number in Chinese terms, given the immensity of China’s population.1 Nonetheless, it represents a substantial number of adherents. Some of these Catholic communities can trace their history some 400 years back to the entry of European missionaries during the late Ming dynasty (from 1583 onwards). The history of these communities defies simplistic renderings, involving such things as the interplay of transnational politics with domestic power struggles, and the effects of rising Chinese national consciousness on the growth of local theologies . The intricacies of this history are especially evident from the beginning of the modern period, which commences with the First Opium War (1839–42). During this epoch, Chinese Catholic communities emerged from the protection of the French government to become a church that governed its own affairs.2 This transition took place in 1926, with the first consecration of Chinese bishops since the seventeenth century.3 From this point onwards, the communities were no longer missionary jurisdictions solely under foreign leadership. And since 1949, Chinese Catholics have experienced the various cycles of control and loosening imposed by the ruling atheistic Chinese Communist Party. Believers from the four other legal religions in China have likewise endured these conditions.4 The narrative strands around which an historical account of these communities can be woven are therefore many. The interactions both within the Catholic communities and between these communities and other groups and institutions are so complex that, rather than representing only a few different yet intertwined discursive threads, they can be more properly described as being like a snarled clump of yarn. Introduction: Chinese Catholic identities in the modern period 2 The Virgin Mary and Catholic Identities in Chinese History Doreen Massey used this strangely apt conceptualization to describe the complex relationships that arise where a small minority is affected by outside forces: Whatever view one has of domination/resistance, there is somehow an implied spatial imaginary. Thus the view (a), which envisages an opposition of domination and resistance, might take the form of a central block under attack from smaller forces. In contrast, the view (b), which envisages entanglement may call to mind a ball of wool after the cat has been at it, in which the cross-over points, or knots or nodes, are connected by a multitude of relations variously of domination or resistance and some only ambiguously characterisable in those terms.5 Since the beginning of the modern period, many works about the history of the Catholic communities in China have relied on the type of binary imaginings mentioned as view (a) by Massey.6 Not all these books and articles are based on a “domination/resistance” binary; some other formulations include “colonial/indigenous”, “Catholic/Communist” and “foreign/local”.7 Themes such as the strong rural nature of the Chinese Catholic church or the place of the communities in the context of emerging civil society are considered.8 Other works choose to evaluate the communities according to the amount of religious freedom they enjoy.9 Such formulations draw attention to otherwise under-studied aspects of this period of history. At times, nevertheless, the narratives built around these constructions ignore, or pay scant regard to, other factors, thereby obscuring complexities . To avoid the dangers of such frameworks, some authors have written micro-histories, focusing on a particular individual or region.10 To be fair, the sheer size of the country, the immense population, the differences among the communities and the diversity of the historical accounts all combine to make a complex whole. It is hard for any narrative to avoid all the difficulties presented by this conglomeration of factors. Let us consider, for instance, an historical narrative that uses the colonial/ indigenous binary to analyse the Chinese Catholic communities. Such a narrative describes the growth of the church communities in terms of a local church seeking to overcome the colonial impulses of its missionary leaders. The interactions between Chinese priests, seminarians, sisters and lay catechists, on the one hand, and their foreign congregational leaders, vicars apostolic and bishops, on the other, are characterised as unequal and humiliating. The Chinese religious are portrayed as weak individuals on the periphery, while the Introduction 3 strong foreign leadership figures constitute a fixed centre, what Massey calls a “central...