Organizational Revivalism: Explaining Metamorphosis of China’s Catholic Church

Abstract

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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