Church Militant: Bishop Kung and Catholic Resistance in Communist Shanghai

by Paul P. Mariani

By 1952 the Chinese Communist Party had suppressed all organized resistance to its regime and stood unopposed, or so it has been believed. Internal party documents―declassified just long enough for historian Paul Mariani to send copies out of China―disclose that one group deemed an enemy of the state held out after the others had fallen. A party report from Shanghai marked “top-secret” reveals a determined, often courageous resistance by the local Catholic Church. Drawing on centuries of experience in struggling with the Chinese authorities, the Church was proving a stubborn match for the party.

Mariani tells the story of how Bishop (later Cardinal) Ignatius Kung Pinmei, the Jesuits, and the Catholic Youth resisted the regime’s punishing assault on the Shanghai Catholic community and refused to renounce the pope and the Church in Rome. Acting clandestinely, mirroring tactics used by the previously underground CCP, Shanghai’s Catholics persevered until 1955, when the party arrested Kung and 1,200 other leading Catholics. The imprisoned believers were later shocked to learn that the betrayal had come from within their own ranks.

Though the CCP could not eradicate the Catholic Church in China, it succeeded in dividing it. Mariani’s secret history traces the origins of a deep split in the Chinese Catholic community, where relations between the “Patriotic” and underground churches remain strained even today.

Genres: History

310 pages, Hardcover

First published October 24, 2011

Reviews

[Hank Pin · Rating 4 out of 5]

Cardinal Kung Pinmei was one of the few Catholic hierarchs who stayed behind in the aftermath of the Revolution, while others fled to Taiwan, Hong Kong, or the West. The book paints a vivid portrait of the rise and fall of Shanghai Catholic community and their complex relations with the Communist Party in the immediate aftermath of the Revolution, between those who sought to cooperate with the authorities, and those who sought to passively resist it. In a lot of ways, the story of Shanghai Catholic community is a microcosm of the church-state relations that continue to plague the Chinese Catholic community to this day.

[Wendy Wong Schirmer · Rating 4 out of 5]

Sobering, heartbreaking, and yet hopeful. One of the real takeaways (and antidotes to complacency) is how even "well catechized" and "strong" Catholics were broken.