Book review: The Virgin Mary and Catholic Identities in Chinese History, by Jeremy Clarke
This book is about the interaction of history, theology and art and the iconography of the Virgin Mary in China from the Yuan dynasty to the early 20th century. The Catholic Church has a long history in China punctuated by societal and political upheavals.
by Jeremy Clarke
Hong Kong University Press
5 stars
Kerrie MacPherson
This book is about the interaction of history, theology and art and the iconography of the Virgin Mary in China from the Yuan dynasty to the early 20th century. The Catholic Church has a long history in China punctuated by societal and political upheavals.
Author Jeremy Clarke, a Jesuit scholar, makes an argument based on the unique relationships between pastoral care and local circumstances. After all, as he reminds us, "the faith of a community is revealed in the manner in which the community comes together in worship".
Marian devotion was and is critical to understanding the process of "inculturation" (indigenisation) that distinguished Catholic communities on the mainland.
Clarke asks: "How can it be possible to be Chinese and Catholic?" and its corollary, how may "Chinese Catholic identity be best represented via images?" It is a long debate within the Catholic Church itself about imagery. This becomes more complex when transposed to cultures with different views of visual images and the messages that they represent. It was a process of adaptation where European images were remade in Chinese materials and sensibilities, a collaborative process between European missionaries and their Chinese counterparts.
Much of the analysis proceeds from the church's re-establishment after the Opium Wars and China's forced opening to Western influences. The French Jesuits had jurisdiction for the faithful around Shanghai and despite their expulsion and the proscription of Christianity in the 18th century, small Catholic communities endured. With the opening of China to foreign trade and residence, Protestant missionaries joined the mix and what seemed to separate them from Catholics was the absence of Marian pieties in their devotional practices. This led to a quixotic notion that Catholics were not "Christian", a misapprehension that persists today on the mainland as well as in Hong Kong.