Making Catholicism Chinese

Know about the book -

Making Catholicism Chinese is written by Stephanie M. Wong and published by Oxford University Press. It's available with International Standard Book Number or ISBN identification 0197623697 (ISBN 10) and 9780197623695 (ISBN 13).

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