China’s Church Divided: Bishop Louis Jin and the Post-Mao Catholic Revival by Paul P. Mariani. Harvard University Press, 2025, 352 pages. ISBN-10: 0674297652; ISBN-13: 978-0674297654. Available from Press and Amazon.
In the fall of 2001, some friends and I embarked on a road trip from Beijing to Pingyao, a well-preserved Qing-era city in Shanxi Province. After checking into our courtyard hotel inside the city walls, we set out to explore the city. Maps were hard to come by in those days, so we found ourselves wandering around the streets and alleyways. After a while, a man approached us and asked if we needed help. He showed us a card indicating that he was a certified tour guide and offered to give us a walking tour of the city. Of course, we agreed.
Much to our surprise, the first place our impromptu tour guide took us was the Catholic church, which was part of the state-sanctioned patriotic church. He proudly told us that he and his family were parishioners at the church. After showing us around the church, he took us next door to meet his family. I was surprised to see a picture of Pope John Paul II hanging on the wall since Catholics in China are not supposed to revere the Pope or attach any significance to him. The government considers him to be a foreign political leader. When I asked him about it, he cautiously looked around and said quietly, with a thumbs-up, “We love the Pope!” I thought about this encounter a lot while reading this book.
China’s Church Divided tells the story of the fraught relationship between the Chinese Catholic Church, the Vatican, and the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), focusing on the post-Mao reform era that began in the late 1970s. What has emerged is a divided church, with two distinct entities: the Patriotic Church, which is officially recognized and controlled by the state, and the Underground Church, which remains loyal to Rome and operates outside state approval.
Mariani argues in the introduction to the book that “when a strong state and a strong church vie for control in a place like China…the best possible outcome is probably a divided church.” (p. 8) “The church,” he says, “had survived, but not solely as a national ‘Catholic’ Church controlled by the Chinese government—the “patriotic” position. Nor did it survive solely as the local Catholic community of the universal Catholic Church that answered only to the Vatican—the underground position. It was now a deeply divided church that ran the spectrum between these two extremes.” (p. 8)
Yet, while this division is, in his view, inevitable, it also satisfies neither side. The Chinese government failed to compel underground Catholics to sever ties with the Pope. At the same time, the Vatican and many Catholics were dismayed by the compromises made by some patriotic bishops—compromises that seemed to border on schism. And so, the divide persists.
He uses the personal story of Bishop Louis Jin and the Shanghai Catholic community as a vehicle to tell the broader story of this division. In the early years of the People’s Republic of China, Jin (a Jesuit) was initially active in the underground Catholic church. During a particularly harsh crackdown in 1955, he was arrested and imprisoned. While in prison, he was actively recruited by the state religious affairs authorities to switch his allegiance and join the patriotic church. Upon his release from prison in 1982, he was appointed the rector of the Sheshan Seminary near Shanghai. In 1985, he was, without papal approval, ordained bishop.
The portrait of Bishop Jin that emerges from these pages is both compelling and exasperating. He is a master tactician—both a spiritual leader and a savvy politician. The accusations that he was two-faced were not entirely unfounded. Yet Bishop Jin believed that his willingness to work within the system instead of outside and against it was the most effective means for the survival and flourishing of the church in China. Mariani quotes Bishop Jin as saying that “he would always find the maximum amount of freedom within the limits he was given” (p. 132), a statement that encapsulates the survival logic of many Chinese Catholics.
I appreciated Mariani’s even-handed treatment of Jin and the other players—the CCP officials, patriotic church leaders, underground bishops, and Vatican officials. He states up front that his sympathies are with the underground church, yet he avoids demonizing others. Instead, he strives to uncover their motivations and constraints.
I also found his explanation of how religion is managed in China through what he calls the “unholy trinity” of government oversight helpful. The United Front Work Department (UFWD) is a CCP organization whose job is to co-opt and control any non-Communist groups that might challenge CCP rule. The Religious Affairs Bureau (recently rebranded as the State Administration of Religious Affairs) is charged with implementing the government’s religious policies. The Ministry of Public Security, which oversees the state’s vast security apparatus, is responsible for protecting the Party-State from internal and external enemies. Working together, this bureaucracy serves to ensure the church functions within the boundaries set by the state.
Mariani’s insights are also a good reminder that the recent Sinicization policies of Xi Jinping are nothing new. They are just a repackaging of older strategies. The regime’s aim has always been the same: to ensure that religious loyalty remains subordinate to political loyalty.
This exploration of the divide in the Catholic church echoes the similar split in China’s Protestant churches between the registered churches (Three-Self Patriotic Movement) and the unregistered house churches. Both communities struggle under the same authoritarian constraints, and both grapple with issues of legitimacy, compromise, and survival.
China’s Church Divided is an essential book for those wanting to understand the complexity of religious faith in China. It is both a significant historical study and a deeply personal account of a man and his community’s efforts to navigate this tension.
Revealing both intellectual rigor and compassionate insight, Mariani helps me understand the courage of our impromptu tour guide’s simple act of loving the Pope.
Our thanks to Harvard University Press for providing a copy of China’s Church Divided by Paul P. Mariani for this review.
