Making Catholicism Chinese: The Catholic Church in a Modernizing China (2026)

Stephanie M. Wong’s Making Catholicism Chinese analyzes how a coalition of foreign-born and Chinese Catholics attempted to indigenize Catholicism in early twentieth-century China. During this period, China transformed from a semi-colonized empire to a tentative republic to an increasingly militarized one-party state. As religious communities were externally and internally driven to modernize, the Belgian-born Lazarist missionary Vincent Lebbe advocated for a Chinese Church that could take up this task. He was joined 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.

The book documents the challenges that the pro-indigenization movement faced: legal pressure from the French civil government, explicit racism from some European missionaries, frequent relocations by warlord militias, opposition from anti-Christian cultural movements, invasion from the Japanese Army, and a widening ideological rift between Chinese Communists and Nationalists.

Wong argues historically and theologically that the Catholic indigenization movement, though significant for de-foreignizing the Church, did not sufficiently take up the structural and habitual norms of Chinese religiosity. Lebbe and his colleagues initially aimed to make Catholicism “Chinese” and endeavored to do so in personnel, culture, and aesthetics. Later, as China was caught up in war, the movement shifted to serve a more powerful current of Chinese modernity: militarization, party centralization, and state-building. These advocates began but never realized the indigenization of Catholicism in the way that mattered most, the ecclesiogenesis of the local Church as a Chinese religion, among others.