Catholic Missionaries in China

12 Key excerpts on "Catholic Missionaries in China"

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  Trans-Pacific Interactions

  The United States and China, 1880-1950

  • V. Künnemann, R. Mayer, V. Künnemann, R. Mayer(Authors)
  • 2009(Publication Date)
  • Palgrave Macmillan

    (Publisher)

  Christian Mission and the Internationalization of China ● 143 instructors, preachers, and school teachers. It was mainly with their help that Catholic and Protestant missions were able to create an institutional structure that by 1900 included nearly all of China. Missionary interactions with Chinese local society were complex and varied. For the purpose of this paper I have singled out the confronta- tions usually known as “missionary cases” [jiao’an]. Although the relationship between Chinese society and Christianity was not always, and maybe not pri- marily, conflictual, these incidents provide a very good illustration of how Christianity contributed to China’s internationalization. Missionary work in nineteenth-century China would have been impossible but for the political, legal, and military framework provided by imperialism. The emperors of the ruling Qing dynasty (1644–1911) had outlawed Christianity in the eigh- teenth century, and it was only after the disastrous Opium Wars of the 1840s and 1850s that the Beijing court was gradually forced to allow missionaries to preach the Gospel in the interior of China. Like all other foreigners, Christian missionaries enjoyed the privileges of extraterritoriality and consular jurisdic- tion that the imperialist powers had obtained in the “unequal treaties,” as they came to be called since about 1920. More specifically, Catholics (and at a later date also Protestants) enjoyed the right to reside in the Chinese hinterland and to acquire real estate there. At the behest of France, whose protectorate over Catholic missions in China remained undisputed until the late 1880s, the Chinese emperor issued several toleration edicts on behalf of Chinese Christians. The most far-reaching of these edicts, issued in 1862, exempted Christians from donations to “heathen” religious activities (Tiede- mann 1996).

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  Catholic Missionaries in Early Modern Asia

  Patterns of Localization

  • Nadine Amsler, Andreea Badea, Bernard Heyberger, Christian Windler, Nadine Amsler, Andreea Badea, Bernard Heyberger, Christian Windler(Authors)
  • 2019(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Introduction Localizing Catholic missions in Asia

  Nadine Amsler, Andreea Badea, Bernard Heyberger, and Christian Windler

  Since the sixteenth century, the narratives of mission history have been shaped by the Catholic Church’s claims to universality and have been connected with the history of European expansion. It was at that time that the Latin term missio gained its double meaning of spreading faith among non-Christians and intensifying faith among Christians.1 The missions became a central motif in the self-fashioning of the papacy, religious orders, and secular Catholic rulers, as they facilitated a demarcation from the churches that emerged from the Protestant Reformation, which were less active in this field.2 Members of religious orders wrote the histories of the missions of their communities, in order to legitimate their claims to a well-respected position within church and society. The Jesuits were especially successful in this, but less well-known orders, such as the Discalced Carmelites, also tried to emulate their example.3

  The varying levels of self-promotion of missionary orders make their effects felt even today in the one-sided focus of research on the Jesuits. However, it has been research on this very order, which has fundamentally changed our view of the Catholic missions in recent times. During the last decades, scholars have increasingly read the mission orders’ self-representations against the grain and started to question their universalist-expansionist framework. As a result, the trajectory of the history of religious missions has moved away from the Eurocentric history of religious orders, and toward broader questions of cultural history. These questions are facilitating a renewal of the research on the Catholic missions of the early modern period, which, in turn, offers stimulating impulses for the investigation of intercultural communication.4

  Research on early modern Catholic missions in China has been a case in point. The controversies about the admissibility of local ritual practices – specifically in the Chinese rites controversies – had already found broad resonance with European contemporaries in the seventeenth century, whose interest in the Chinese missions increased steadily. In the course of the twentieth century the practices of accommodation to local sociocultural contexts associated with the Jesuits have become a central line of historical inquiry. While this research was still mainly focused on missionaries, research from the 1990s onwards has become increasingly focused on the study of the local Christian communities. Their practices are now being redefined as expressions of specific forms of Christianity, which took shape through the interactions between missionaries and locals.5 Linked with this development is the broadening of the research perspective beyond the urban, courtly milieu of the male literati, to include rural Christian communities,6 as well as the domestic sphere associated with femininity.7

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  A Star in the East

  The Rise of Christianity in China

  • Rodney Stark, Xiuhua Wang(Authors)
  • 2015(Publication Date)
  • Templeton Press

    (Publisher)

  CHRISTIAN MISSIONS TO CHINA : 1860-1950

  HISTORIES OF Christian missions to China always begin with the impressive efforts of the Jesuit scholar Matteo Ricci, who arrived in 1582. But the remarkable early success of Catholic missionary activities, resulting in as many as “200,000 or more [Chinese converts] in the early 1700s,”1 was greatly impeded when, in 1724, the emperor outlawed Christianity as an evil cult. Nevertheless, a score or more of foreign Catholic missionaries remained active in China and most members of their flocks, many of them of high status, remained faithful. The Catholic Church also began a program of ordaining Chinese clergy, and by 1800 there were nearly fifty of them. But the prohibition of Christianity continued, and in 1814 the emperor issued a draconian new edict: those spreading the gospel “shall be sentenced to death by immediate strangulation,” while those “who are merely hearers or followers of the doctrine . . . shall be transported to Mohammedan cities and given to be slaves of the beys.”2 Although this led to the martyrdom of several foreign Catholic priests, tightly knit groups of Chinese Catholics persisted.

  In 1859 and 1860, treaties were imposed on China by Western powers that enabled Christian missionaries, Protestants as well as Catholics, to enter China and openly spread the gospel—a huge effort and investment that lasted for ninety years until all the missionaries were forced to leave by a hostile Communist regime. That is the often-amazing story to be told in this chapter.

  Unfortunately, it is not possible to provide nearly as much statistical evidence and detail for the Roman Catholic mission efforts in China as for those of the many Protestant missions. The Protestants were very statistically minded (in part to convince their donors back home to continue their contributions) and frequently published elaborate statistical reports including data for all Protestant denominations with China missions. A few of these Protestant volumes offered brief reports on Catholic missions, but whatever statistics the Catholic Church published are difficult to locate. This is particularly unfortunate because, given their extensive head start, there always were far more Chinese Catholics than there were Protestants, at least until well after the Communist rise of power in 1949. It is very difficult to excuse or comprehend the very frequent practice of describing a statistic as to the number of Protestants in China in a particular year as the number of “Christians” in China, thereby not merely excluding the Catholics, but also greatly understating the extent of Chinese Christianity. In what follows, we include Roman Catholic statistics whenever possible.

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  Eurasian Encounters

  Museums, Missions, Modernities

  • Carolien Stolte, Yoshiyuki Kikuchi, Carolien Stolte, Yoshiyuki Kikuchi(Authors)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • Amsterdam University Press

    (Publisher)

  Traditionally, the history of Christianity in China has largely been described as one of conflict, owing to the social, cultural, and ethnic dif ferences between foreign mis-sionaries and the Chinese population. This chapter critically evaluates 156 CINDY YIK-YI CHU Chinese-foreign relations in the development of Christianity in modern China. It addresses the Catholic Church and elucidates both the cooperative nature of Chinese-foreign relations, which casual viewers were prone to overlook, and contemporaneous disputes, which af fected both the Chinese people and the foreign missionaries. This chapter examines an important contribution of the Catholic Church to China. It focuses on the concerted ef forts of the Church in establishing and developing two institutions of higher elite education, which were Zhendan University (Aurora University, 1903-1952) in Shanghai and Furen University (1925-1952) in Beijing. It examines their missions and visions in providing higher education for the young generation. The two universi-ties undertook the task of cultivating the elite for contributing to China’s modernization and upholding Catholic beliefs and values for the future. In addition, this chapter studies the interactions between Chinese intel-lectuals and foreign missionaries in the establishment and progression of the two universities. It shows that the history of Chinese Christianity was that of cross-cultural relations and mutual exchange as mentioned in recent scholarly works, such as Daniel H. Bays’ edited volume Christianity in China . 1 Another example is Stephen Uhalley Jr. and Xiaoxin Wu’s edited book China and Christianity: Burdened Past, Hopeful Future. 2 The subtitle well illustrates the coexistence of attachment and animosity in the account of Chinese Christianity. Uhalley notes that ‘this grand story of such an exceptional and historic intercultural encounter, featuring as it does such a provocative religious cutting edge, remains one of epic proportions’.

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  From Christ to Confucius

  German Missionaries, Chinese Christians, and the Globalization of Christianity, 1860-1950

  • Albert Monshan Wu(Author)
  • 2016(Publication Date)
  • Yale University Press

    (Publisher)

  In this book I explore the consequences of the missionary sense of failure. How did the experience of failure influence thoughts about mission work? What happened when parts of the missionaries’ world-view and theological outlook became partially untenable? Did they cling 6 introduction more fervently to their faith, or did they abandon it? Did they modify their beliefs and think about Christianity differently? WHY CHINA ? Almost no part of the world has gone untouched by Christian mission-aries, so why focus, as I do in this book, on China? Partly, I followed the interests of my missionary subjects. Ever since Marco Polo’s travels to China in the thirteenth century, Europeans have been fascinated by that vast country. To European observers, its powerful civilization, shrouded in mystery and glamor, possessed complex systems of belief that rivaled Christianity. Tales of the Middle Kingdom enthralled European mission-aries, and from the Jesuits in the seventeenth century to the Protestants in the nineteenth, they poured resources into China, with the hopes of gaining a foothold in the empire. Furthermore, I am interested in how the Chinese encounter with Christian missionaries sheds light on key themes in the history of modern China, such as the relationship between the Chinese state and religious minorities, the place of religion in modern Chinese society, and the contact between China and the West. Indeed, the interactions between Christian missionaries, the Chinese state, and Chinese society intersect with key moments in modern Chinese history, from the Qing dynasty to the present. Qing rulers of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries viewed the Jesuits as curiosities, useful in introducing the empire to Western commodities and ideas, but not a civilizational alternative. To the Qing, Christianity seemed a religion that could supplement Chinese civi-lization, not supplant it.

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  A History of Christian Missions in China

  • Kenneth Scott Latourette(Author)
  • 2009(Publication Date)
  • Gorgias Press

    (Publisher)

  They were, too, experts in Chinese etiquette and refrained as far as possible from offending Chinese sensibilities. When they pre-sented their Christian message they emphasized its similarities 185 186 A HISTORY OF CHRISTIAN MISSIONS IN CHINA to the existing beliefs of the educated classes, pointing out the passages in the classical books which seemed to teach of God, and conformed as far as possible to Chinese religious conven-tions. They endeavored, in other words, to come as those who would fulfil and not destroy the best of the nation's heritage. They hoped by so doing to make contacts with the dominant class, to obtain its respect, and by winning the nation's leaders to gain access to the masses. No better form of introduction could have been devised to a people which held in such honor learning, literary form, and courtesy, and had such pride in its culture and its past, and which had so acknowledged through the centuries the leadership of its educated men. In the course of time this approach was confined almost exclu-sively to the missionaries in Peking. After the papal decision on the rites it became in part impossible and after the dissolution of the Society of Jesus its remaining features were less and less stressed. The declining influence of the missionaries at court and the increasing severity of persecution must probably be ascribed in part to the gradual abandonment of this method. The branches of knowledge most emphasized by the mission-aries were astronomy and the attendant science, mathematics. Map-making, painting, architecture, and the construction of mechanical devices as diverse as clocks, fountains, and cannon, all played their part. 1 The majority of the Chinese and Manchus at court probably looked upon most of the missionaries as inter-esting barbarians who in some matters displayed an amusing and even useful skill, but who in religious and other questions were not to be taken too seriously.

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  God and Caesar in China

  Policy Implications of Church-State Tensions

  • Jason Kindopp, Carol Lee Hamrin, Jason Kindopp, Carol Lee Hamrin(Authors)
  • 2004(Publication Date)
  • Brookings Institution Press

    (Publisher)

  Church-State Interaction II  T he Christian presence in China has a long but broken history, shrouded by the mystery of time. Legend has it that St. Thomas trav-eled to China from India, converted some Chinese, and then returned to Meliapur on the coast of southeast India, where he died. Studies claiming that Jewish communities were already prospering in China during the first century raise the possibility that Christian merchants of Jewish and Syrian extraction traveling to the Far East brought the Christian message to com-munities along the Silk Road. Legends are only legends, however, and pos-sibilities do not make history, unless solid evidence can be found to substantiate their claims. 1 What is beyond dispute is that missionaries brought the Christian mes-sage to China on more than one occasion. They came in four major suc-cessive waves. Monks of the Syro-Persian Church of the East—often referred to as Nestorians by other Christian churches—arrived in the sev-enth century and left in the mid-ninth century. Monks from the same church returned in the thirteenth century, together with Franciscan friars, but were gone by the end of the following century. The Jesuits and other Roman Catholic societies arrived in the late sixteenth century and retained an institutional presence until the first half of the eighteenth century. With the dawn of the nineteenth century, Protestant missionaries appeared and Catholic groups returned, but by the early 1950s, few of either group remained on Chinese soil. A simple explanation would be that religious motives led to the arrival of missionaries and religious persecutions resulted in their departure and  Setting Roots: The Catholic Church in China to 1949 5 -   -  expulsion. Yet a closer look at the facts reveals a more complex story. Other factors—economic, social, cultural, and political—played an important part in the ups and downs of relations between Christianity and China.

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  China and the West

  Society and Culture, 1815-1937

  • Jerome Ch'en(Author)
  • 2018(Publication Date)
  • Taylor & Francis

    (Publisher)

  Chapter 2

  Missionaries and converts

  The Catholic Church

  Immediately after the French Revolution Christian evangelical work in China entered a dark age. The Catholic revival in France early in the nineteenth century slowly revived the various orders in China. The 1843 Whampoa Treaty with France restored to the Catholics* the right to construct churches and they gained further rights to practise their religion and had their confiscated church property renditioned to them by two imperial edicts, in 1844 and 1846. The work of proselytization was largely revitalized all over China, where it had once flourished early in the eighteenth century. Not satisfied by the limited rights to buy or lease land for constructing churches in the treaty ports, Fr Delamarre abused his position as the official translator of the French delegation at the Tientsin negotiations in 1858 by inserting a few words of his own in the Chinese version of the Treaty which granted the Catholics the right to buy or lease land in the interior of China as well. In 1870 the Church had nearly 400000 converts in the pastoral care of 250 priests. But the end of the second empire did not end French support for the Catholic missions. The great famine in North China in 1877 saw the Catholics insisting on conversion as a precondition for giving aid to the famine refugees. This quite improper insistence swelled the number of Catholic converts to 558980 in 1885. On the eve of the First World War the Church claimed no less than 1.5 million baptized Chinese and in 1924 over two million. Throughout the century under discussion the Catholic missions always had four or five times the numerical strength of the Protestant missions in China.

  The financial resources of the Roman Catholics, derived mainly from investment in land, could never match the wealth of the Protestants, derived mostly from the voluntary contributions of the wealthiest nations of the world. As a result, priests and nuns enjoyed no furloughs and very few worldly comforts. To be sent to China was virtually banishment for life. As time went on they became depressed, overtaken by their nostalgia for Europe, while their calling still compelled them to discharge their duties with vigour. By an imperial decree issued in March 1899, the Catholic priests acquired yet another extraordinary privilege – official status, which enabled them to communicate and deal with Chinese officials of comparable rank as equals. Even before gaining this advantage, Catholic priests, the worse offenders by far in this respect than their Protestant colleagues, had already begun to interfere with Chinese local administration and jurisdiction. The French Bishop of Kweichow, for example, gave his personal guarantee to the Muslim rebels there that they would be leniently treated if they surrendered to the government. Fortunately the decree of 1899 was rescinded in 1908 and thereafter the priests behaved with greater circumspection.

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  The Catholic Church in China

  1978 to the Present

  • C. Chu(Author)
  • 2012(Publication Date)
  • Palgrave Macmillan

    (Publisher)

  2 Historians specializing in Christianity in China may choose to write a history of the Catholic Church in China since 1978. As historian Jean- Paul Wiest remarked, “What a surprise then, when in the early 1980’s, the West discovered that the Christian faith not only had survived [in China] but was growing.” 3 Akira Iriye, professor emeritus of Harvard 2 The Catholic Church in China University, has encouraged historians to venture into new areas, which are usually examined by political scientists and nonhistorians. While Iriye believes the works of political scientists and others are valuable, he urges historians to broaden their research dimensions. Iriye points out that his- torians would be able to trace the continuing chronology and provide a different perspective to these areas of study. 4 According to him, history is “the one perspective that seeks to look at the phenomenon whole,” and historians’ objective is “to help our readers unify the various ways of see- ing . . . into one connected vision.” 5 The present author has been inspired by Iriye’s works. This book is a history of China’s Catholic Church during slightly more than three decades to the present and on various levels: dip- lomatic, political, societal, and individual. It is the first book to attempt such a history. This book looks at how Sino-Vatican relations developed over the course of more than thirty years. It also studies the Chinese Catholic Church, its organization and personnel, its relations with overseas churches, and the situation of Chinese Catholics. The book critically evaluates the Chi- nese Catholic Church on a number of different levels. First, it addresses the diplomatic level through an analysis of Sino-Vatican and Sino-foreign relations. Second, the governmental level is explored by examining the control over the Catholic Church by the Beijing government and the Chinese Catholic Patriotic Association.

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  Early Encounters between East Asia and Europe

  Telling Failures

  • Ralf Hertel, Michael Keevak, Ralf Hertel, Michael Keevak(Authors)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • Taylor & Francis

    (Publisher)

  11 resulted in the gradual disappearance of Christianity in China’s metropoles. These combined factors also led to the first major ‘failure’ of the foreign missionaries in China, namely their fall from grace at the imperial court and amongst the Manchu elite.

  Europe Looking at the Manchus

  Whereas the Jesuit mission had been conceived as the intellectual vanguard of the global counter-reformation, its mendicant counterparts (as well as the contemporary trend for public clerical performances) borrowed heavily from Baroque drama, with satanic and angelical impersonations, as well as the combined effects of early modern theatrical technology. The dramatic techniques rediscovered during the Renaissance, combined with recent technological discoveries such as gun powder, as well as an unending cataclysm of Reformation, Counter-Reformation and religious warfare, gave the genre of the morality play a magnetic attraction from the villages of Sicily to pre-Revolutionary Paris. Fuelled by the same evangelical call, the Catholic missionaries operating at village level frequently made use of the same conversion techniques which the Counter-Reformation proffered in Europe. Enacting the gospels, the lives of saints, and, importantly, scenes of Christian martyrdom, had the same appeal and liturgical function to the illiterate commoner as the paintings adorning mediaeval churches.12 Most of these popular morality plays were staged by priests belonging to mendicant orders, often peasant boys, who knew the lingering taste of poverty all too well. Directly parallel to the performances of their Buddhist counterparts, the European mendicants blended perfectly into the popular religious tapestry of Late Imperial China.13 Whether, however, any Manchus were reached by this transmission of the Christian message is, to my knowledge, not attested. Pastimes amongst the Manchus and Mongols tended to be physical (ice skating, boxing), rather than the Buddhist morality plays so popular in late imperial China.14

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  Taiping Theology

  The Localization of Christianity in China, 1843–64

  • Carl S. Kilcourse(Author)
  • 2016(Publication Date)
  • Palgrave Macmillan

    (Publisher)

  27 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2016 C. S. Kilcourse, Taiping Theology, DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-53728-7_2 CHAPTER 2 Before we turn to the theology and religious culture of the Taipings, this chapter will look at Christian missions and examples of localization in Chinese history. The three missions that will be discussed in this chapter (Nestorian, Jesuit, and Dominican) are from markedly different time peri- ods (Tang, Ming, and Qing) and their activities centered on diverse regions within the Middle Kingdom. Despite these differences of time and space, the missions have a shared analytical value in revealing how the Chinese cultural world has affected the strategies of missionaries and the shape of the Christian religion in China historically. The first part of this chapter will discuss Nestorian Christianity in China during the early Tang dynasty (618–907). Although information on the Nestorian mission is limited, the available materials reveal a number of significant cultural adaptations in the religious message of the monks. The second and third sections will focus on the Catholic (Jesuit and Dominican) missions of the late Ming (1368–1644) and early Qing (1644–1911) dynasties, analyzing the character and extent of the missionaries’ and local converts’ attempts to reconcile the Christian religion with the cultural world of China. The analysis of these three missions will highlight not only historical patterns of adaptation and localization, but also some of the specific strategies and cultural instruments that have contributed to such transformations historically. The significance of those strategies of adapta- tion and instruments of localization (at least for the present study) lies in the fact that they were later employed by the architects of the Taipings’ Missions and Localization in Chinese History

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  Civilizing Missions

  International Religious Agencies in China

  • M. Hirono(Author)
  • 2008(Publication Date)
  • Palgrave Macmillan

    (Publisher)

  74 Civilizing Missions in China from the mid-nineteenth century to the end of the treaty system in 1943. The unequal treaty system shaped inter-state rela- tions between China and the Western states. Much literature dealing with Christian missionaries in China emphasizes this close associa- tion with their own imperial Western governments, and therefore assumes that the inter-state relationship significantly affected the interaction between individual missionaries and China’s local people (Cuthbertson 1988; Pyenson 1985: 312–16; Nan 1971: 56–7). In order to properly understand the interaction between the Christian mission- aries and ethnic community members, it is important to investigate how the privileges arising from the unequal treaty system actually affected local interaction. Second, I highlight the complex nature of the civilizational ideology that the Christian missionaries sought to spread in China. Such ideology was comprised of various layers relating to Christianity and “Western civilization.” The way in which they became inter- twined in practice affords us an important insight into the nature of the “civilizing mission.” Then I use a case-study approach to focus on the work of British Protestant missionary Samuel Pollard in Stone Gateway (Shimenkan) in Western Guizhou. It investigates how he interacted with certain ethnic community members living in this area, using the three frames of interaction. There are two reasons for focusing in this chapter on British Protestant missionaries. The first is that the British Protestant missions formed a large percentage of Protestant missions overall in the period in question. 1 American missions also made up a substantial portion. However, Britain’s influence on China during this period was more significant than that of the United States. The second reason for focusing on Protestant missionaries, as opposed to Catholic missionaries, derives from my attempt to ensure historical consistency.

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