This Suffering Is My Joy: The Underground Church in Eighteenth-Century China By D. E. Mungello. Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 2021. 174 pp. ISBN: 9781538150290 (cloth).

Field: Arts and Humanities (Social Sciences)

One might be tempted to assume, judging by the title, that this book is a hagiographical history of the persecuted Catholic church in eighteenth-century China. It is not. The narrative is far more complex. It is a story of the remarkable survival of Christianity as a proscribed, heterodox religion in Qing China. In This Suffering Is My Joy, D. E. Mungello shows that, much more than the luminous efforts of the pioneering Jesuits, it was the mundane and haphazard work of lesser-known priests, especially Chinese, that enabled an underground, mostly rural Christianity to endure the persecutions, deprivations, and other hardships after 1724. By the second half of the eighteenth century, Chinese priests were in the majority. Mostly trained in the Lazarist, the Missions Étrangères de Paris (MEP), and the Sacred Congregation for the Propagation of the Faith (Propaganda Fide) seminaries, they were active in remote villages and often flexible in their enforcement of the papal ban on ancestral rites (pp. 86–90).The six chapters of this book are arranged thematically for the most part. After a brief overview of Chinese Catholicism, Mungello devotes the first half of the book (chapters 2 and 3) to the extraordinary, if also troubled, story of the Collegio dei Cinesi (Chinese College) in Naples. Founded in 1732 by Father Matteo Ripa of Propaganda Fide, it trained 106 Chinese missionary priests over a period of a century and a half (p. 21).Ripa had spent most of his fourteen years in China working in the Kangxi emperor's court. His most notable accomplishments as a missionary were probably the copperplate engravings of views of Kangxi's summer retreat in Rehe, based on the paintings of a court artist. When he left China in 1724 to return to Europe, he brought with him four students—the youngest was ten years old—and their teacher to be trained as priests, convinced that an indigenous clergy was needed for the faith to flourish in China (pp. 42–45). It was a mixed success. Ripa's controversial, high-handed method of indoctrinating his students—some of whom he dismissed as “bird-brains” (pp. 67, 71)—prepared several for competent ministry upon return, but the loneliness, cultural dislocation, and homesickness also drove others into rebellion. One student repeatedly fled the college, possibly became mentally deranged, and spent the last eighteen years of his “scandalous life” in a Rome prison (pp. 76–77).The second half of the book (chapters 4–6) tells the story of the underground church, which was led, for the most part, not by heroic, saintly figures but by fallible priests, both European and Chinese. While Christianity stagnated in general under persecution, the work of indigenous priests did enable the faith to grow steadily in some parts of the country, such as Sichuan (p. 113). The returned Chinese priests, likely assisted by catechists and other local lay leaders, traveled through remote, mountainous villages to administer the sacrament and baptisms. They kept the Catholic faith alive in the underground (p. 91). They also struggled with such prosaic problems as the constant lack of funds, racial tensions between European and Chinese priests (the former received almost twice as much in annual stipends as the latter and manifested feelings of superiority), and the scandalous behavior of some priests, not to mention periodic persecutions and apostasies under torture (pp. 93–98).There were, on the other hand, acts of remarkable dedication: an MEP-trained priest serving 130 communities in Sichuan—“spread over an area the size of France”—for almost forty years (p. 118); the Christian Virgins in Sichuan teaching Catholic doctrines to women and children, performing baptisms, and helping the sick and dying (p. 120); and an aged priest in Shaanxi (trained at the Chinese College) turning himself in to the authorities to protect his flock during the great persecution of 1784, and dying on his way to exile in Yili, Xinjiang (pp. 69, 102). As a whole, the mendicant orders, with their “hard-line approach, which extols martyrdom,” proved “better suited to the underground Church's survival” (p. 139). Some European missionaries suffered martyrdom by execution. Among Chinese priests, the common pattern was not valiant deaths, but tireless service despite financial hardships, exhaustion, and ailments (pp. 145–46).Previous works on the subject by Robert Entenmann, Henrietta Harrison, Eugenio Menegon, Lars Laamann, and Mungello himself have offered glimpses of an emerging indigenous Catholicism in various parts of the Ming-Qing Empire.1 In this book, Mungello provides a convincing empire-wide, if still brief, narrative of Chinese Catholicism of the eighteenth century. It draws on both rare primary sources and recently published works. Among the former are Matteo Ripa's memoirs, whose condensed English edition was first printed in 1844, as well as diaries and letters of foreign-educated Chinese priests written in Latin and sent to Europe. On the other hand, the scarcity of Chinese-language materials (which Mungello notes toward the end) continues to limit our understanding of the development and expressions of homegrown Chinese Catholicism. This difficulty is compounded by the uncertain nature of some of the surviving historical accounts that at times take on a hagiographical tinge—as reflected in the book's title, which is possibly a variation of the quote “This torture is my joy” found on page 145.The present work could have benefited from more rigorous copyediting and proofreading to rid it of minor typos and occasional mistranslations of Chinese terms. Also, throughout the book, Chinese characters for the names of people and places are inserted, sometimes repeatedly but not at first mention. A glossary at the end would have been useful, as would a critical overall evaluation of underground Catholicism during this period. In all, this new monograph by a leading historian of Chinese Christianity makes a major contribution to our understanding of the development of indigenous Catholicism in pre–Opium War China.