Stories passed down for three hundred years by Christian villagers in the isolated mountains of China's Shanxi Province provide the foundation for Henrietta Harrison's The Missionary's Curse and Other Tales from a Chinese Catholic Village, a history of Catholic presence among the people of this North China region. Using oral history combined with archival research in Rome and China, Harrison situates the history of Chinese Catholic life within the larger contexts of Catholic history and global Christianity. She also analyzes the effects upon Shanxi's Chinese Catholics of events unfolding in China from the seventeenth century to the present day. She further establishes that an indigenous Chinese Catholicism developed in Cave Gully, the remote village central to her book.

The work progresses in a chronological survey of Catholic presence in the hill villages of Shanxi, starting with accounts of the introduction of Christianity by village merchants who converted as traders to places such as Beijing, then returned to the villages, where they introduced their families to their new faith. Waves of Catholic missionaries followed, beginning in the seventeenth century. Harrison chronicles important events that shaped the Catholicism of Cave Gully and surrounding villages, including the late eighteenth century government persecutions of Christians that led some European missionaries to seek refuge in Shanxi's isolated villages, the Boxer Uprising of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the Cultural Revolution of the mid-twentieth century, and the arrival of Vatican II influence in the 1990s.

As each chapter begins, a story introduces the events or themes about which the chapter will focus. The individual stories, told in the forms of Chinese folktales, such as those of heroes undergoing many trials, inspire Harrison's interpretations of Catholic life among the Christians of Cave Gully. The villagers' story of the heroic priest Wang Tingrong, who presented himself in Rome in the nineteenth century to complain to the pope about the Catholic missionaries' subordination of Chinese priests, provided the context for Harrison's analysis of the relationships between the Chinese priests, some of whom were educated in Italy, and the European missionaries, who presumed ecclesiastical superiority as bishops and often thwarted the traditional activities of Chinese priests, such as Wang Tingrong.

Harrison convincingly argues for the synthesis of southern European Catholicism with Chinese religions. The Catholics of Shanxi developed a Christian ethic resting upon the Ten Commandments and readily associated their values with the ethical values emphasized in Confucianism, especially honoring one's parents (filial piety). The practice of listing one's sins according to one's violation of a specific commandment was similar to the Daoist practice of moral accounting in ledgers of merits and demerits. The colorful vestments, ritual language, and the separation of the priest from the worshippers in Catholic life bore similarities to Daoist and Buddhist religious life.

While the stories reveal the Chinese character of Catholicism in Shanxi's mountain villages, they also disclose the effects upon these villages of events, such as the Boxer Uprising. While the hill villagers do not have stories about Boxer massacres, from which they were spared, they do have stories about the souls in purgatory (understood as the souls of their ancestors) that sheltered them from the Boxers' violence. In the aftermath of the Boxer Uprising, from which other Christians in central Shanxi Province suffered greatly, indemnity monies given to the survivors of the uprising created tensions among Catholics, increasing discord between the European missionaries and the Chinese Catholics. Interestingly, Harrison notes that the protestant Christians escaped such tensions by using the monies to pay the families most affected by the uprising and to build a university, while among Catholics the money was forwarded to the diocesan bishop, with very little money reaching the families who suffered the greatest losses in the uprising. The more prosperous villagers of central Shanxi never recovered their wealth, and the poor villagers of Cave Gully and the hill region just remained poor.

The effects of the Cultural Revolution linger today, producing the contemporary division between the official churches and the underground churches. During the years of the Cultural Revolution two categories of Christians emerged: those who never renounced their Christian faith and those who worked with the government authorities, thus denying or, at best, compromising their Christian identity. After thirteen years without any public religious life, Shanxi's Catholics grew suspicious of the priests who had cooperated with government officials. Mistrust led some villagers to form underground Catholic congregations distinguished by its lay leadership and the use of older liturgies, rather than those reflecting the reforms of global Catholicism.

The Missionary's Curse and Other Tales from a Chinese Catholic Village concludes with the resurgence of Catholic life in Shanxi since the 1980s. Young men and women have become priests and nuns. New church buildings and shrines have been constructed. Devotion to the Virgin Mary has grown. The influence of Vatican II has brought new rituals and liturgy, linking the church in China to broader changes in the global Catholic Church, despite the prohibitions against official ties to the global Catholic community.

Henrietta Harrison's oral and local history actually widens the reader's perspective on Chinese Catholicism. Harrison argues that Catholics in Shanxi have had global connections beginning with the merchants travels in China and beyond that introduced Christianity among the hill villages and extending to the education of some Chinese priests, such as Wang Tingrong, in Italy. Harrison portrays a distinctly Chinese Catholicism that developed as the villagers combined elements of their culture with their religious life, often creating tensions between European and Chinese Catholics over the centuries.

Harrison's scholarly portrait of Catholic life in Shanxi's hill villages joins another recent local study of Chinese Christianity, that of activist and journalist Liao Yiwu's God Is Red (trans. Wenguang Huang, New York: Harper One, 2011) which is based upon interviews of Christians in Dali, Yunnan Province in southwest China. These two studies of widely divergent locations in China, nevertheless present stories and portraits of Christians who have persevered in the face of great adversity. Both books describe a vibrant contemporary Chinese Christianity, with global connections.