The Search for Chinese Christianity in the Republican Period (1912–1949)

2004 ◽  
Vol 38 (4) ◽  
pp. 851-898 ◽  
Author(s):  
LIAN XI

For more than a century after its introduction into China in 1807, Protestant Christianity remained an alien religion preached and presided over by Western missionaries. In fact the Christian enterprise, both Protestant and Roman Catholic, was given protection as Western interests by the Qing court after China's defeat in the Opium War of 1839–42. According to the treaty signed with the United States in 1858, for instance, the Qing government was to shield from molestation ‘any persons, whether citizen of the United States or Chinese convert, [who] peaceably teach and practise the principles of Christianity.’ In the Convention of 1860 signed with France, the imperial court promised that in addition to the toleration of Roman Catholicism throughout China, all Catholic properties previously seized should be ‘handed over to the French representative at Beijing’ to be forwarded to the Catholics in the localities concerned. By the time of the Boxer Uprising of 1900, Protestant converts numbered about 80,000 and the Catholic Church (whose modern missions to China had begun in the late sixteenth century) claimed a membership of some 720,000—a following that was perhaps disappointing to the Western missions yet aggravating to those who saw both the Confucian tradition and Chinese sovereignty eroded by the coming of the West. As a perceived foreign menace the Christian community became the target of the bloody rampage by famished North China peasants known as the Boxers. Before the revolt was quelled in August by the eight-power expedition forces, it had visited death on more than 200 Westerners and untold thousands of native converts.

1973 ◽  
Vol 42 (2) ◽  
pp. 257-270
Author(s):  
James P. Gaffey

The inevitable tension between freedom and order within the Roman Catholic Church has ever been an attractive and rich subject of comment. Perhaps nowhere can this issue be studied with more seriousness and clarity than in the fragile equilibrium between American bishops and priests. The balance within clerical ranks in the United States has long represented a singular combination of authority and obedience which has sought to reconcile itself in a society historically egalitarian and devoid of feudal relationships.


2009 ◽  
Vol 13 (4) ◽  
pp. 547-568 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrew Higgins

AbstractThough Evangeline has long been considered simply a love story, this article reads the poem as one deeply involved in both the theological and cultural struggles between the Catholic and Protestant churches in the antebellum period. The essay argues that Longfellow's poem about the Acadian Expulsion of 1755 imagines those Catholic refugees as successful immigrants to America. Further, the article argues that Longfellow's vision of Philadelphia at the end of the poem is that of an ideal, ecumenical Christian community, in which Catholicism is able to coexist with various Protestant churches. Thus the poem counters anti-Catholic nativist rhetoric that portrayed Catholics as fundamentally foreign and a threat to the Republic. However, the ecumenical nature of this vision is limited by the fact that Longfellow cannot imagine a fully-realized Catholic Church in the United States; his Catholic community lacks ecclesiastical hierarchy. As such, it reflects Longfellow's connection to the Unitarian Moralists, as group of Harvard Unitarians who sought to transform other denominations rather than to convert individuals to Unitarianism.


2007 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 88-95 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Szporer

This article provides a critical review of Oczami Bezpieki (Through the Eyes of the Security Service), an overview of post-1945 Poland based on secret police files by Slawomir Cenckiewicz. The essay sheds light on the ongoing controversies surrounding the secret police files that still can cause turmoil in Polish politics. The article discusses the aggressive strategies of the Communist-era security apparatus in three areas considered in the volume: penetration of émigré communities in the United States; attempts to neutralize opposition to the Communist regime from 1968 through the 1980s; and the manipulation of the Roman Catholic Church. The documents demonstrate how obsessively the security forces kept track of opposition activities.


ICR Journal ◽  
2010 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 205-207
Author(s):  
Christoph Marcinkowski

It is certainly not easy these days to break a lance for dialogue with the scandal-ridden Catholic Church: ...paedophile ‘predator priests’, seemingly roaming freely through the Western (and developing) world; rampant moral decay among large segments of the Roman Catholic priesthood, while - at the same time - continuous preaching to other cultures and civilisations of the merits of Christian virtues; the alleged beating up of innocent orphan children, sometimes to unconsciousness, by a certain former German bishop who had been accused of lying under oath and invoking the name of God when questioned by legal authorities; the attempts to hush up such crimes; the financial (not to mention moral) bankruptcy of entire dioceses throughout the United States due to the compensation claims running into millions of US dollars by tens of thousands of victims - the list could be continued endlessly...


1948 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 13-34 ◽  
Author(s):  
Thomas T. McAvoy

No minority group in the United States is probably as formless and yet at the same time as rigid as the American membership of the Roman Catholic Church. The rigidity of the Catholic organization arises from the fact that there has never been a real heresy during the three centuries and more of Catholic life within the boundaries of the present United States. Even the so-called heresy of Americanism existed more in the minds of European theologians than in the Catholics of the new world. There have been divergencies among American Catholics on such questions as the application of Gregory XVI's condemnation of the slave trade, the timeliness of die declaration of papal infallibility or the extent of the papal condemnation of secret societies, but there has been no difference on the essential doctrines involved in these disputes.


1997 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 121-159 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter R. D'Agostino

Philip Gleason has observed that the Roman Catholic church in the United States has been an “institutional immigrant” for much of its history. The idea of an “institutional immigrant,” posed in the Singular and distinguished from “the immigrant peoples who comprised the Catholic population,” presupposes a basic if undefined unity to American Catholicism. The nature of that unity has always been a highly contested issue. Gleason's formulation also suggests that the experience of the Catholic church is illuminated by considering its history in light of the processes that have occupied students of immigration—Americanization, generational transition, assimilation, the invention of ethnicity, and the like. The nature of these processes has also given rise to debates as Americans grapple to understand their cultural identity. In short, Gleason's idea lends itself to debate about the normative significance of American Catholicism, American culture, and their relationship to one another. In the interest of enriching this debate, I would suggest that the Roman Catholic church in the United States has also been an institutional emigrant.


Horizons ◽  
1983 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 72-85 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daniel C. Maguire

It should warm the self-righteous cockles of Catholic hearts to read Protestant theologian Emil Brunner's remark that “while the Catholic Church, drawing on centuries of tradition, possesses an impressive systematic theory of justice, Protestant Christianity has had none for some three hundred years past.” The cockles, however, are in for a chilling with the realization of how little we have done, particularly in the United States, to give this noble tradition salience and application in Catholic thought, or to give it voice and currency in national and international political discourse. With such an in-house treasure as Brunner noted, why were we content to live as misers responding so little to the poverty in justice theory that scars our national setting? There were some notable exceptions, but they never became mainstreamed in American Catholic life. Why?The principal reasons, I submit, are these: Catholic thought was (I) prone to conflate the just and the juridical; (II) distracted by charity to the neglect of justice; (III) insufficiently nourished by the justice preoccupations of the Bible; (IV) inattentive to the need to clarify and develop the theories underlying our social justice tradition.


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