This article examines how the policy of “religious freedom” has been used to enable the CCP to retain institutional and ideological control over the religious sector of Chinese society. In particular, it looks at how the clash between religious and communist ideologies has evolved, first in the Maoist period and then in the context of reform and openness with the attendant growth of materialism and social change since 1978. A softening in the control of religion to encourage national reconstruction and foreign investment led to a proliferation of religious activity that alarmed Party leaders and triggered a tightening of ideological control and important changes in religious policy. The new policy of “accommodation” and emphasis on “legality” became the watchwords of the Jiang Zemin era. With further development they remain important in the new regime of Hu Jintao.
Although sociologists have argued that religious orders fulfill the same creative functions within Catholicism that sectarian groups perform for Protestantism, no research has examined whether the orders can serve this function in non-Western societies where Catholics are a minority. This article examines Catholic religious orders of women in mainland China today. Both internal and external factors prevent Chinese sisters from gaining the power and autonomy they would need to serve as change agents in the Chinese Catholic Church. The effectiveness of external attempts to ameliorate the sisters' difficulties is evaluated.
The Catholic Church could not compromise with Communist states due to ideological incompatibility between atheist Marxism-Leninism and religious beliefs. Christianity, in the perception of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), had been closely linked with "foreign cultural imperialism." This study examines the clash of authority between the CCP and Catholic Church over seminary training, elucidating the CCP's desire to retain institutional and ideological control over this particular sector of Chinese society. The findings highlight the ideological conflict between the dialectic materialism of the CCP, combined with the economic materialism (i.e., to get rich is glorious) mentality of the Deng Xiaoping-Jiang Zemin era, and religious idealism.
The classical works of Troelsch and Niebuhr suggested that sect movements had been the origin of reform and revitalization of the church. More recently, Finke and Wittberg supplemented that thesis by suggesting that the Catholic Church was able to reform itself not through the sect development, but through the establishment of religious orders within the Catholic Church itself. This article suggests, from historical and contemporary archival sources, that the revitalization of the Catholic Church in China was through indigenization of the Church. The vitalization has been achieved despite tensions between the underground church committed to Rome and the national church, which advocated self-government without political and financial ties to the Catholic hierarchies outside China. Both the Chinese government's accommodation of the ecclesiastical authority of the papacy, and the Vatican's silence in response to the underground church's pleas to disregard the national church, had helped the indigenization process and the growth of the church without a possible schism.More than three-quarters of a century ago, Troeltsch (1911) and Niebuhr (1929) suggested that sect movements had been the origin of reform and revitalization of the Protestant church. Their thesis spearheaded a long discussion of the functions and characteristics of religious sects as well as of cult movements over the years by Johnson (1957Johnson ( , 1963Johnson ( , 1971, and Stark and Bainbridge (1985), among others. In short, these authors argued that it would be difficult for an established church to initiate major cultural shifts or promote revivalism within its own institution without the risk of eroding the very value basis of the institution itself.In a recent paper, Finke and Wittberg (2000) demonstrated that the Catholic Church managed to maintain its vitality in the past two millennia without having to follow the sect process as suggested by Troeltsch and Niebuhr. Instead, they showed that revival and reform of the Church Universal came primarily through the establishment of religious orders under a single ecclesiastic authority. Members of these religious orders were "compelled by their very belief structure to remain within the church," to develop new ideas and values and at the same time create new forces of cohesion (Finke and Wittberg 2000:155-56).Both the church-sect process and the creation of religious orders hypotheses have focused primarily on the institutional structure of the church itself, the revival process had in either case been invigorated from within the institution. Neither hypothesis was particularly concerned with the external environment of different political and cultural systems.In this article, we will attempt to use the revival of Catholicism in China as an illustration of our hypothesis and to present evidence that the revival and reform of the Catholic Church in China was a result of conflict and competition of an underground church loyal to the Holy See, and a national church created by the Catholic Patriotic As...
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