Paul Mariani has long been one of the most important historians of modern Chinese Catholicism. His Church Militant: Bishop Kung and Catholic Resistance in Communist Shanghai (Harvard University Press, 2011) offered a meticulous account of how Shanghai’s Catholic community responded to the People’s Republic of China’s (PRC) early attempts to control the Church. Centered on the imprisoned Bishop Ignatius Kung and those Catholics who refused to join the government-backed Patriotic Association—thus forming the core of the “underground” Church—Mariani’s previous study remains one of the few works to capture the drama of Catholic resistance in those formative years.
In the final pages of Church Militant, Mariani provided an extended meditation on Aloysius (Louis) Jin Luxian, a Jesuit priest who was arrested in 1955 and spent the next two decades in prisons and labor camps. After his release, Jin emerged as the leading figure of the state-sanctioned Chinese Catholic Patriotic Association (CCPA) Church in Shanghai. He remains one of the most polarizing figures in the Chinese-speaking Catholic world. To his critics, Jin’s decisions symbolized a surrender of Rome’s authority to the Communist Party; to others, they represented pragmatic choices that kept Chinese Catholic life alive under extraordinarily difficult conditions.
China’s Church Divided takes Jin as one of its central protagonists. Mariani—himself a Jesuit priest with direct access to Jin before his death and the Shanghai Catholic community—enters this fraught terrain with unusual empathy and restraint, refusing to reduce Jin or others like him to simple heroes or traitors. Bringing the story of Shanghai’s Catholics into the Reform era, he traces not only how the church rebuilt itself after Mao but also how that very process of reconstruction deepened the rift between the state-sanctioned church and the underground community, a division that continues to shape Catholic life in China today. By placing Jin’s story within this fractured landscape, Mariani illuminates the moral and institutional dilemmas that confronted Catholics on both sides of the divide. Taken together, Mariani’s two volumes outline a trajectory from repression to revival while revealing the costs of that revival. His books constitute major contributions to our understanding of religion in the post-1949 Chinese state.
China’s Church Divided begins in Rome. In the aftermath of Mao’s death, as the CCP appeared to liberalize its approach to religion, the Vatican recognized a possible opening. It also understood that China’s church had been devastated: bishops were imprisoned or compromised, sacraments were nearly impossible to administer, and communication with Rome was severely restricted. How to minister to millions of Chinese Catholics cut off from ecclesiastical authority? In 1978, the Congregation for the Evangelization of Peoples issued a directive granting priests and bishops “special privileges.” The document effectively suspended the normal chain of authority: priests could administer sacraments typically reserved for bishops, dispense with canonical requirements, and minister across jurisdictions. Recognizing the “grave circumstances” and “urgent necessity” to rebuild church leadership, the directive was designed to help members of the underground Church revive ecclesial life as quickly as possible (33). Notably, it did not grant authority to consecrate new bishops.
The CCP caught wind of the attempt to revive the ranks of the underground clergy, but what truly alarmed authorities were reports of a mass revival at Sheshan, long one of the most important pilgrimage sites in China. In 1980, thousands of Catholics and non-Catholics began converging on Sheshan in 1980 after hearing rumors of a Marian apparition. The pilgrimage shook CCP officials. “The CCP was supposed to speak for the people,” Mariani writes. “But now the people were turning to religion” (74). Over the course of 1980 and 1981, the government settled on a strategy: permit religious freedom under strict state control. Meanwhile, the state still sought to isolate Catholics loyal to Rome, arresting more than twenty underground leaders in 1981 in an act of “decapitation” (99).
Yet Mariani shows that the Party did craft new approaches to religion. The landmark 1982 “Document 19,” which Mariani calls “a quasi-religious document,” revised the Party’s basic approach to religious freedom (109). It portrayed the 1950s commitment to religious freedom as correct policy that had been subverted by “leftist errors” (111). Along with the revised 1982 constitution, the CCP promulgated an explicit policy of religious tolerance, as long as it was under the confines of the state sanctioned church. Now it needed someone to carry out the work.
Enter Louis Jin Luxian. Immediately after his release from prison, Jin was “seduced” by the CCPA to rebuild Catholic institutions from within the structures of the state. Urbane, multilingual, and trained in Rome before 1949, he was uniquely equipped to negotiate with both Party officials and the Vatican. Soon, Jin was “a rising star” in the state-controlled church (117).
The rest of the book details how Jin deftly played what Mariani calls a “double game” by seeking to re-establish communication with the Vatican and placate the CCP. His decision to accept episcopal consecration without papal approval in 1985 was the most controversial act of his life and the book’s hinge point. For underground Catholics, it represented betrayal; for Jin, it was the only way to restore the sacramental and educational life of the church. Mariani treats this moment not as moral failure but as tragic necessity—the inevitable outcome of two incompatible sovereignties, each claiming the church as its own.
Under Jin’s leadership, the Patriotic Church in Shanghai became an institutional success. Seminaries reopened, catechetical instruction resumed, and diocesan administration regained a measure of normalcy. International visitors returned, and Jin cautiously reopened channels with Rome. In 1986, Jin toured Europe, and one of the book’s pleasures is watching him work both audiences. Mariani balances European press reports against internal reports from Jin’s handlers. Jin emerges as a smooth operator who knew exactly what foreign Catholics needed to hear and what the Party wanted. Yet he was also a shrewd self-promoter who sometimes undermined the very diplomatic processes he appeared to advance.
These achievements deepened the divide within the Chinese Catholic community. Underground Catholics, led by figures such as Joseph Fan Zhongliang, saw Jin’s cooperation with the state as capitulation. Mariani treats Fan as Jin’s mirror image: the two men began their novitiates on the same day. As Jin experienced a meteoric rise, Fan lived in a “converted barn loft” with no running water or toilet (220). It is here that Mariani’s sympathies emerge most clearly—while he is empathetic toward Jin’s tightrope, his admiration for the suffering the underground Church endured is undeniable.
Mariani shows that, on the eve of the Tiananmen massacre of 1989, the PRC was closer than ever to normalizing relations with the Vatican. The massacre set back Sino-Vatican relations for years. Throughout the 1990s, the church continued to grow—new parishes, publications, and vocations appeared throughout Shanghai—but growth bred competition. Patriotic and underground clergy often ministered to the same neighborhoods, sometimes even the same parishioners. Many believers moved fluidly between both worlds, confessing to one priest and receiving Communion from another. Bishops sought private reconciliation with Rome while remaining publicly registered with the Patriotic Association.
In the late 1990s and 2000s, a slow thaw began. The Vatican quietly recognized some bishops consecrated without papal mandate, while the PRC state tolerated limited consultation over new appointments. Jin himself, once the embodiment of rupture, secretly reconciled with Rome—a gesture that transformed him into a living bridge between two systems that still refused formal reconciliation. When Joseph Xing Wenzhi, Jin’s successor, was consecrated auxiliary bishop in 2005, he publicly stated that he had the papal mandate. It was a major development: Xing had both the approval of the Chinese government and the blessing of the Vatican (276).
Jin’s later years, marked by declining health and cautious recognition from both Rome and Beijing, exemplify the strange normality of divided Catholicism. In Mariani’s telling, Jin appears as a “bundle of contradictions” (280): at times a progressive pushing for Vatican II reforms, at times nostalgic for the pre-1949 church; a Chinese nationalist who felt more at ease among foreign visitors than his compatriots; above all, he was a shrewd politician.
Developments since Jin’s death offer little reason for optimism. Under Xi Jinping, the state has tightened its grip on all religious activity, promoting “Sinicization” and sharply constraining both the underground church and the already narrow space for local negotiation. Pope Francis, meanwhile, pursued diplomatic engagement—most notably the 2018 provisional agreement on episcopal appointments—but his conciliatory approach often left underground Catholics feeling abandoned. Through it all, one constant remains: the CCP’s “enduring desire to show that it alone is in control” (293).
Yet this very framing also highlights my central quibble with the book: Mariani tends to accept the binary between loyalty to Rome and collaboration with the state. Throughout the book, Jin’s pro-Patriotic statements appear as self-serving performances extracted through blackmail rather than as sincere conviction. This skepticism extends even to Jin’s formative years. Mariani doubts many of the encounters Jin claims in his memoirs to have had during his European sojourn in the late 1940s. Yet one wonders whether this skepticism forecloses other, more generous readings.
Jin belongs to a broader generational cohort of Catholic leaders who came of age in the 1940s and rose to prominence in the 1980s—a cohort shaped by wartime suffering and by a global Catholic moment in which many earnestly explored ways to reconcile the faith with socialism. In the summer of 1947, Karol Wojtyła (later Pope John Paul II) traveled through France; at the same time, Jin arrived in Paris for his Jesuit tertianship. Both were exposed to the worker-priest movement, whose members urged clergy to take up factory labor as a means of winning the trust of workers. Jin’s memoirs recall an encounter with a Jesuit worker-priest whose words profoundly influenced him. Mariani, however, glosses over this episode. Whether Jin embellished the memory or later framed it to satisfy Party expectations, the intellectual milieu he describes, as well as the widespread influence of the worker-priest movement, was real and formative.
Recent works on global Catholic history, such as Piotr Kosicki’s Catholics on the Barricades and Elizabeth Foster’s African Catholic, offer other possible comparative frames. Kosicki’s empathetic reading of figures like Bolesław Piasecki, long dismissed as a mere political opportunist, reveals intellectuals who were both compromised and genuinely invested in rapprochement with socialism. Foster similarly examines African Catholics, such as Alioune Diop, who sought to articulate a Catholicism that was fully Christian and fully African. Approached through these lenses, Jin’s accommodation might appear less as capitulation and more as part of a wider global Catholic engagement with revolution, anti-imperialism, and nationalism. Mariani gestures toward comparisons with Eastern Europe and Vietnam but does not pursue them, a choice that reads less as a flaw than as an invitation for further work. His analysis opens space for future scholars to map a broader global intellectual landscape of Catholic accommodation with nodes in Shanghai, Kraków, and beyond.
This quibble, however, should not detract from the major achievements of the book. The strengths of China’s Church Divided are manifold. Mariani’s research is exhaustive. Party documents, Vatican correspondence, diocesan archives, oral histories, and decades of interviews and access to key figures inform his account. His story-telling is gripping. Readers encounter a book that moves fluently between institutional analysis and human drama.
China’s Church Divided is, finally, a profoundly humane book. It refuses both triumphalism and despair. Mariani neither romanticizes the underground Church nor excuses the Patriotic clergy; rather, he demonstrates how each crafted distinct modes of religious life within the limits imposed by the state. The result is a history attentive to local conditions while shedding light on challenges shared across the global Catholic Church. It is difficult to imagine a more balanced or penetrating account of the post-Mao Catholic revival.
