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Making Catholicism Chinese examines a little-known chapter of Catholic life in China, when a coalition of foreign-born and Chinese Catholics strove to make the Church indigenously "Chinese." This book demonstrates how the indigenization movement, begun as a bid to render Catholicism a Chinese religion, came to support Chinese state-building instead.
In the first half of the 20th century, China transformed from a faltering and semi-colonized empire to a tentatively pluralistic republic to an increasingly militarized one-party state. Religious communities were driven to "modernize" for the sake of the new nation. In the case of Catholicism, the Belgian-born Lazarist Vincent Lebbe most publicly advocated for a Chinese Church, though the wider movement was guided by an array of Chinese clergy, newspaper magnates, scholar-politicians, artists, and army medics and combatants striving in various ways to be both faithful Catholics and patriotic citizens. Their indigenization project coincided with a national embrace of modernity as an ideal, leading Catholics to take up a variety of causes: promoting Chinese clergy as bishops in opposition to French dominance in the missions, experimenting with new forms of education and mass media, and ultimately joining the right-leaning Nationalist regime's war effort against Japan. Stephanie Wong thoroughly documents this history and definitively shows that the movement failed to establish the local Church as a distinct Chinese religion
List of contents
- PART 1. Setting the Stage
- Chapter 1: Catholic Witness and Chinese Religion in Republican Era China
- Chapter 2: Transnational, National, and Local: Catholicism in Semi-Colonized China
- Part 2. Making the Church Chinese
- Chapter 3: The Early Life of Vincent Lebbe
- Chapter 4: A Church Like Any Other-Lobbying for a Chinese Episcopate
- Chapter 5: Race and the Local Church: Theological Analysis
- Part 3. The Church in Service of Nation
- Chapter 6: The Later Life of Vincent Lebbe
- Chapter 7: A Church for Chinese Culture: Shaping Aesthetics
- Chapter 8: A Church for the Modern State: Defending the Nation
- Chapter 9: Mission and Politics: Theological Analysis
- Chapter 10: Conclusion: Indigenization Beyond Nationalization
About the author
Stephanie M. Wong, Assistant Professor of Theology and Religious Studies at Villanova University, is a scholar of East Asian religions, especially Chinese Catholicism. She has published in a range of journals and books in the fields of World Christianity, Chinese Christianities, interreligious studies, and comparative philosophy. She earned her doctorate at Georgetown University and her master's degree from Yale Divinity School.
