From the point of view of an American Catholic, the Chinese Catholic
church has three astonishing characteristics: the depth of its devotion,
the strength of its hierarchical culture, and the bitterness of its
divisions. It is at once inspiring and disturbing, and, in true yin/yang
fashion, the disturbing and inspiring aspects are closely interrelated.
The first and most important astonishing characteristic is the level of devotion found among Chinese Catholics.
In the northern port city of Tianjin, where Teilhard de Chardin once made his home and where I carried out ethnographic research on the church in 1993, the cathedral is filled to capacity every Sunday, starting with the 7:00 A.M. and ending with the 7:00 P.M. Mass. The morning liturgies are High Masses, which last about two hours, including Benediction of the Blessed Sacrament which follows. The singing is extraordinary. The whole congregation joins their voices with great gusto to the excellent choir, and the stone walls of the cathedral fairly reverberate with the music. On major feast days, worshipers spill out into the surrounding courtyard. For the Easter Vigil, many spend the whole night in the church.
As a sociologist, I would not have anticipated the vigorous revival of Catholicism that has emerged in the period of "reform and opening" begun by Deng Xiaoping in 1979. Christians were bitterly persecuted during the Cultural Revolution (1966-67). Church buildings were shuttered or torn down. Priests and nuns were imprisoned. Anyone who openly dared practice the faith risked personal calamity. I and most of my academic colleagues assumed that, for better or worse, this would have virtually wiped out Christianity in China. But the 3 million Catholics of 1949 have now grown to about 10 million.
Missionaries who had spent their lives in China often acknowledged that many in their flock were "rice Christians" who had joined the church mainly to get material benefits, and were in any case only superficially educated in the doctrine. Although some heroic missionaries like Vincent Lebbe (1877-1940) had pushed vigorously for the establishment of a national hierarchy, many other foreign missionaries resisted the idea on the grounds that most local Chinese clergy were neither well-educated nor reliable enough to take full responsibility for church leadership. How could poorly educated rice Christians survive brutal persecution and reemerge with an energy and enthusiasm that would put most American Catholics to shame?
Sociologically, the answer is linked to the "rites controversy" debacle of the eighteenth century. The Jesuits had advocated an accommodation between Catholicism and Chinese culture--in particular that Chinese Catholics could still carry out the rituals of ancestor veneration central to the Confucian tradition. The Franciscans and Dominicans argued that these rites amounted to ancestor worship and could not be permitted. In 1715, Pope Clement XI, ruling against the Jesuits, issued an edict that forbade Chinese Catholics from taking part in their traditional rituals. This was a disaster for the fledgling mission to China, for the emperor declared Catholicism a heterodox religion and expelled most missionaries.
The church only began to grow again in the nineteenth century, when evangelists worked under the cover of Western imperialism. But the price of being a Chinese Catholic was still to cut oneself off from the ritual customs of one's society. Although the Vatican ended the rites controversy in 1939 by declaring that Catholics could indeed participate in some of the Confucian rites (such practices are now carried out in Taiwan), Catholics in mainland China, especially in the countryside, refuse to take part in traditional funeral rites.
Funeral rituals define one's connection to the clans which are the basis of rural Chinese social structure. Anyone who cannot participate in such rituals will be truly alone in a world in which survival still depends on the solidarity of extended families. Thus, missionaries in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries refused to accept individual converts, for fear that the converts would quickly backslide. Instead, missionaries aimed to convert whole lineages, or even whole villages, all the members of which would be tied to a common chain of descendants commemorated through traditional Catholic sacraments. As a consequence, rural Catholics live in separate enclaves from non-Catholics.
Within these rural enclaves--and the vast majority of Catholics are rural residents--some Catholics are "true believers," while others are "lax." But even for the lax, their Catholicism is an indelible identity.
Even if one never prays or receives the sacraments, even if one leads a scandalous moral life, one will have to be buried as a Catholic. It will be the only way to express one's social identity as a member of a particular family and lineage. In a world defined by blood and belonging, Catholic identity is inescapable.
When people are persecuted and discriminated against for an identity they cannot discard, even if they want to, the persecution tends only to deepen their commitment to their identity. This is what happened to China's rural Catholics beginning in the 1950s with the establishment of the Catholic Patriotic Association, an effort by the Communist party to control the church. As a consequence of this attempt to subordinate the church, many lax Catholics became secretly defiant Catholics.
And true believers sometimes became genuinely heroic martyrs. Rural Catholicism developed the solidarity, the intense group consciousness, of a persecuted ethnicity. When the government relaxed its strictures on religious practice in 1979, Catholic communities often asserted themselves with great fervor, rebuilding and refurbishing churches and joyfully celebrating the formerly proscribed rituals.
This enthusiasm spilled over into urban Catholic communities. In contrast to their comfortable, individualist coreligionists in the United States, the persecuted Chinese Christians became much more vibrant in their faith. What from a liberal Catholic perspective seems like a disastrously wrong decision in the rites controversy became, ironically, the foundation for a heroically devout Chinese Catholic community.
The first and most important astonishing characteristic is the level of devotion found among Chinese Catholics.
In the northern port city of Tianjin, where Teilhard de Chardin once made his home and where I carried out ethnographic research on the church in 1993, the cathedral is filled to capacity every Sunday, starting with the 7:00 A.M. and ending with the 7:00 P.M. Mass. The morning liturgies are High Masses, which last about two hours, including Benediction of the Blessed Sacrament which follows. The singing is extraordinary. The whole congregation joins their voices with great gusto to the excellent choir, and the stone walls of the cathedral fairly reverberate with the music. On major feast days, worshipers spill out into the surrounding courtyard. For the Easter Vigil, many spend the whole night in the church.
As a sociologist, I would not have anticipated the vigorous revival of Catholicism that has emerged in the period of "reform and opening" begun by Deng Xiaoping in 1979. Christians were bitterly persecuted during the Cultural Revolution (1966-67). Church buildings were shuttered or torn down. Priests and nuns were imprisoned. Anyone who openly dared practice the faith risked personal calamity. I and most of my academic colleagues assumed that, for better or worse, this would have virtually wiped out Christianity in China. But the 3 million Catholics of 1949 have now grown to about 10 million.
Missionaries who had spent their lives in China often acknowledged that many in their flock were "rice Christians" who had joined the church mainly to get material benefits, and were in any case only superficially educated in the doctrine. Although some heroic missionaries like Vincent Lebbe (1877-1940) had pushed vigorously for the establishment of a national hierarchy, many other foreign missionaries resisted the idea on the grounds that most local Chinese clergy were neither well-educated nor reliable enough to take full responsibility for church leadership. How could poorly educated rice Christians survive brutal persecution and reemerge with an energy and enthusiasm that would put most American Catholics to shame?
Sociologically, the answer is linked to the "rites controversy" debacle of the eighteenth century. The Jesuits had advocated an accommodation between Catholicism and Chinese culture--in particular that Chinese Catholics could still carry out the rituals of ancestor veneration central to the Confucian tradition. The Franciscans and Dominicans argued that these rites amounted to ancestor worship and could not be permitted. In 1715, Pope Clement XI, ruling against the Jesuits, issued an edict that forbade Chinese Catholics from taking part in their traditional rituals. This was a disaster for the fledgling mission to China, for the emperor declared Catholicism a heterodox religion and expelled most missionaries.
The church only began to grow again in the nineteenth century, when evangelists worked under the cover of Western imperialism. But the price of being a Chinese Catholic was still to cut oneself off from the ritual customs of one's society. Although the Vatican ended the rites controversy in 1939 by declaring that Catholics could indeed participate in some of the Confucian rites (such practices are now carried out in Taiwan), Catholics in mainland China, especially in the countryside, refuse to take part in traditional funeral rites.
Funeral rituals define one's connection to the clans which are the basis of rural Chinese social structure. Anyone who cannot participate in such rituals will be truly alone in a world in which survival still depends on the solidarity of extended families. Thus, missionaries in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries refused to accept individual converts, for fear that the converts would quickly backslide. Instead, missionaries aimed to convert whole lineages, or even whole villages, all the members of which would be tied to a common chain of descendants commemorated through traditional Catholic sacraments. As a consequence, rural Catholics live in separate enclaves from non-Catholics.
Within these rural enclaves--and the vast majority of Catholics are rural residents--some Catholics are "true believers," while others are "lax." But even for the lax, their Catholicism is an indelible identity.
Even if one never prays or receives the sacraments, even if one leads a scandalous moral life, one will have to be buried as a Catholic. It will be the only way to express one's social identity as a member of a particular family and lineage. In a world defined by blood and belonging, Catholic identity is inescapable.
When people are persecuted and discriminated against for an identity they cannot discard, even if they want to, the persecution tends only to deepen their commitment to their identity. This is what happened to China's rural Catholics beginning in the 1950s with the establishment of the Catholic Patriotic Association, an effort by the Communist party to control the church. As a consequence of this attempt to subordinate the church, many lax Catholics became secretly defiant Catholics.
And true believers sometimes became genuinely heroic martyrs. Rural Catholicism developed the solidarity, the intense group consciousness, of a persecuted ethnicity. When the government relaxed its strictures on religious practice in 1979, Catholic communities often asserted themselves with great fervor, rebuilding and refurbishing churches and joyfully celebrating the formerly proscribed rituals.
This enthusiasm spilled over into urban Catholic communities. In contrast to their comfortable, individualist coreligionists in the United States, the persecuted Chinese Christians became much more vibrant in their faith. What from a liberal Catholic perspective seems like a disastrously wrong decision in the rites controversy became, ironically, the foundation for a heroically devout Chinese Catholic community.
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