Heaven in Conflict: Franciscans and the Boxer Uprising in Shanxi, written by Anthony E. Clark, 2014, and God’s Little Daughters: Catholic Women in Nineteenth-century Manchuria, written by Ji Li, 2015
Since at least the 1990 encyclical Redemptoris Missio, Roman Catholic teaching has endorsed a multi-faceted mission platform, thus giving official recognition to the work of Catholic women missionaries, who were formerly referred to as “auxiliaries.” A look at women's experiences in two recent mission gatherings and examples from mission economics, companioning, and martyrdom illustrate both the contribution Catholic women made to a holistic approach to mission and the lingering nineteenth century themes of domesticity and “woman's work for women” as reshaped by U.S. Catholic women missionaries today.
This chapter analyzes several rarely seen letters written in 1871 by three Catholic women from a village in Northeast China. The letters were addressed to a member of the Société des Missions Etrangères de Paris who had been the priest of their church. In these letters, the author detects the underlying sense of feminine piety mingled with the Du women’s purposeful borrowing of religious vocabularies to articulate personal feelings and emotional requests. The displacement between the spiritual devotion to Jesus and the sensible attachment to an absent Western priest signifies the new boundary of Christian religiosity being shaped by these village women. Private writing became an alternative means of self-empowerment for them to redefine faith, passion, and collective identity in late Qing society.
Carmen M. Mangion, Contested Identities. Catholic Women Religious in Nineteenth-Century England and Wales
