Rethinking indigenization and Christianity in China: the development of Catholicism in northeast China before 1952

Abstract

On October 22, 1951, Bishop André-Jean Vérineux, a missionary from the Mission Étrangères de Paris (MEP) and the last vicar apostolic of the Catholic Manchuria Mission, disembarked in Hong Kong. Together with five other missionaries, Vérineux and his colleagues were the last cohort of Catholic missionaries expelled from Shenyang, northeast China. Until then, the Catholic Church has been established in northeast China for more than a century since 1838 when Emmanuel-Jean-François Vérrolles became the first vicar apostolic of the newly founded Manchuria-Mongolia Mission. Based on my ten-year work on the development of Catholicism in northeast China before 1950s, this paper re-examines one of the key issues in the history of Christianity in China, namely, indigenization in terms of acculturation. It asks how to define indigenization in different historical periods and what indigenization means in different political contexts. Scholars of the field have argued that in the past four centuries, Christianity has in fact become an indigenous and resilient Chinese religion. However, other scholars, including myself, began to demonstrate that the nineteenth century has in fact witnessed the systematic development of a global Catholic Church in China. Relying on church records and missionary writings, this paper investigates the century-long development of Catholicism in northeast China and the creation and persistence of Catholic identity in a particular Catholic community. It argues that since the nineteenth century, the local religious identity was created, expressed, and persisted through institutionalized Catholic ritual performance; Christianity was indigenized in China essentially through the introduction of a globalized Catholic Church in the modern era.