UA Historian’s Travels Uncover New Freedoms, New Fears Among Roman Catholics in China

TUSCALOOSA, Ala. – Roman Catholics and other Christians living in China today face a dilemma, says Dr. Anthony E. Clark, assistant professor of history at The University of Alabama. Changes in the communist state’s attitudes toward religion have allowed many Catholics to live in the open, but they live in terror — their freedom may be removed at any moment.

“You see this enormous restoration work on churches and this enormous freedom given to Protestants and Catholics,” says Clark, who teaches Chinese history and culture at UA. “Yet at the same time, you’ll see an arrest of an underground bishop, or a couple gets a warning from the party police about a visit they had with a foreigner. So the old powers are still there, and you don’t know when they will re-emerge. Chinese Christians are enjoying a freedom that causes an equal amount of anxiety. They’re terrified. They live in terror for the freedom that they have.”

Clark, who is a Catholic himself, returned in December 2008 from a semester studying the history of Christianity in China, particularly the stories of Roman Catholic martyrs and the destruction of Christian churches during the Boxer Rebellion from 1898 to 1900. He has been blogging about his experiences on the Ignatius Insight Web site. On the site, he discusses how the packed Catholic churches in Beijing reflect the growing numbers of Chinese citizens professing Christianity.

“Before the communist revolution, Christianity was a tiny little minority, and it’s still a minority, but it’s the fastest growing religion in China today,” Clark says. “Catholics were three-fourths of Chinese Christians, and Protestants one-fourth before the revolution; today it’s the opposite. Protestants are three-fourths of the Catholics in China and Catholics are one-fourth. The Protestant house churches are exploding. There are so many. It’s the fastest-growing religion in China.”

During his travels, he met with Roman Catholic priests, nuns and lay persons in several provinces. Since the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s and ’70s, when almost all Christian churches in China were wiped out, the Roman Catholic Church has been rebuilding. A new openness emerged in the early 1980s during the regime of Deng Xiaoping.

“During the years of closure, from the 1950s to early ’80s, some of the priests were dairy farmers or had regular jobs and would carry out their priestly duties at night,” says Clark, who is finishing a book about Catholic martyrs in China. “They kept in closed communities. One bishop said to me, in the 1960s and ’70s you didn’t even know who a Catholic was. They led private lives. You couldn’t see one from the next. Then when the churches reopened in the ’80s, suddenly you knew, wow, my neighbor is a Catholic.”

The Chinese government, however, discouraged links between Chinese Catholics and the worldwide Roman Catholic Church. The Roman Catholic Church was perceived as a foreign power, and the Communist Party did not want Chinese citizens to be subject to a foreign authority such as the pope. So the government formed the Patriotic Catholic Association, in which the Communist Party began to appoint bishops. The association professed no relationship to the Vatican. Meanwhile, underground bishops who had clandestine ties to the Vatican led a “secret” church. Both aboveground and underground bishops ordained priests. But since the late 1990s, however, the two churches have begun to merge.

“It used to be all patriotic bishops were disconnected with the Vatican,” Clark says. “At this moment, about 98 to 99 percent are what we’d call openly in communion with Rome, which means that there are probably only two or three bishops left in China who are not in open communion with the Vatican. The new complicated situation is that the so-called underground bishops literally live with or share the same building with the so-called patriotic bishops.”

Catholic Christians face many possible pitfalls in China, Clark says. For example, although books about the history of Christianity in China and Roman Catholic materials are available in churches and bookstores, Internet access to information on Pope Benedict XVI often is cut off, and photos of him are rare. Also, a couple who helped Clark and his wife in his travels were visited by party police.

“I got an e-mail later saying that the local party police had approached their church and had expressed to this couple that they knew everything that they did with the two foreigners, and that they were being watched,” Clark says. “They were terrified. So the claws are still out.”

The history department is part of UA’s College of Arts and Sciences, the University’s largest division and the largest liberal arts college in the state. Students from the College have won numerous national awards including Rhodes Scholarships, Goldwater Scholarships and memberships on the USA Today Academic All American Teams.