China's Church Divided

Paul P. Mariani charts China’s fraught Catholic revival after the Cultural Revolution, as Catholics loyal to Rome clashed with a state-sanctioned church. Focusing on Shanghai, where the state-appointed Bishop Louis Jin Luxian found himself at odds with underground church leaders, Mariani details a community perilously divided.

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An illuminating portrait of how Shanghai’s Catholic community surged back to life after the Cultural Revolution—and of a Church divided between allegiance to the Vatican and loyalty to the Communist party-state.

During the Cultural Revolution, the Chinese state sought to eradicate religious life throughout the country. But by 1978, two years after the death of Mao Zedong, the Communist Party under Deng Xiaoping cautiously embraced the revival of religion. At the same time, in Rome, the newly elected Pope John Paul II made a point of renewing outreach to China. Paul P. Mariani tracks the fate of Chinese Catholicism in the wake of these transformative leadership changes, focusing on the influential Catholic community in Shanghai.

Even as Chinese Catholicism came back to life in the 1980s, the way forward was hardly an easy one. Earlier policies of the 1950s had fractured the Catholic community into a state-approved “patriotic” church that answered to the government and an underground church loyal to Rome. Even after the Cultural Revolution, Mariani shows, this divide remained firmly intact. The resulting tensions were on vivid display in Shanghai, owing to the leadership of the Jesuit priest Louis Jin Luxian. Formerly a member of the underground church, Jin realigned with the state church during the revival and was consecrated bishop of Shanghai without papal approval in 1985. Bishop Jin used his position to revitalize the local Catholic community, but his cooperation with the party put him ever at odds with underground church leaders.

Sensitive to the ideals, compromises, and disappointments of Catholics on both sides of the rift, China’s Church Divided reveals how the community navigated the irreconcilable differences between a worldwide Church centered in Rome and a regime wary of foreign spiritual authority.