page_title: Catholic Church in China
section_title: Republic of China
hierarchical_section_title: Catholic Church in China / Republic of China
caption_attribution_description: English: From the Catholic magazine StadtGottes 1927
context_page_description: The Catholic Church in China has a long and complicated history. Christianity has existed in China in various forms since at least the Tang Dynasty in the 8th century AD. Following the 1949 takeover by the Communist Party of China, Catholic, Orthodox and Protestant missionaries were expelled from the country, and the religion was vilified as a manifestation of western imperialism. In 1957, the Chinese government established the Chinese Patriotic Catholic Association, which rejects the authority of the Holy See and appoints its own bishops. Since September 2018, however, the Papacy has the power to veto any Bishop which the Chinese government recommends.
context_section_description: After the Rites controversy of the late 17th century and early 18th century ended in the expulsion of missionaries from most of China, access to the people of China was difficult for the Catholic Church. The controversy revolved around the reluctance of the Church to recognize local Confucian customs of honouring deceased family members. To the Chinese, this was an ancient ritual; to the Vatican it was a religious exercise which conflicted with Catholic dogma.
  In the 19th century, the French government had taken control of Catholics in China, and the Catholic Church almost exclusively appointing French citizens as priests. The French also effectively blocked efforts of Pope Leo XII to establish direct relations with the government. After the Revolution of 1911, which led to the founding of the Republic of China, reform-minded priests such as Vincent Lebbe and prominent Catholic laymen such as Ma Xiangbo and Ying Lianzhi protested to Pope Benedict XV that the French who made up 70% of clergy and controlled the Chinese Church were chauvinist and disdainful of China. Chinese priests were discriminated against and many left the clergy, as Ma Xiangbo himself had done. Benedict directed the establishment of the Catholic University of Peking, which opened in 1925.
  Within months of his election, Pope Pius XII issued a further change in policies. On 8 December 1939, the Sacred Congregation for the Propagation of the Faith issued — at the request of Pope Pius — a new instruction, by which Chinese customs were no longer considered superstitious, but instead an honourable way of esteeming one's relatives and therefore permitted by the Catholic Church. The government of the Republic of China established diplomatic relations with the Vatican in 1943. As the Church began to flourish, Pope Pius established a local ecclesiastical hierarchy and elevated the Archbishop of Peking, Thomas Tien Ken-sin, SVD, to the Sacred College of Cardinals.
  After WWII, about four million Chinese were members of the Catholic Church. This was less than one percent of the population but numbers increased dramatically. In 1949, there existed:
  20 archdioceses,
  85 dioceses
  39 apostolic prefectures
  3,080 missionaries
  2,557 Chinese priests.
  Catholic scholar John Witek, SJ appraises the situation of Western missionization in the development of Catholicism in China and its impact on Chinese Christians in later eras:
  Today there are villages in China that are very Christian. How and why is it that these people have rooted themselves despite the Cultural Revolution?" says Witek. Such endurance is evidence that Chinese Christians identified strongly with the teachings of Jesuit and other missionaries, and as such were not just passive subjects of Westernization.
caption: Monseigneur Theodor Buddenbrock conducts missionary work in China 1927
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