This book, written by Wei Jiang, is volume 37 of the series “Studies in the History of Christianity in the Non-Western World,” edited by Klaus Koschorke and Johannes Meier.
Unfortunately, the book provides no information about the author, outside of their Preface – which really should have been called Acknowledgments. The author acknowledges the people who helped her during this project, especially the Malankara Orthodox Syrian Church. The author does mention that the project was funded by the German Research Foundation. She worked under Dr. Adrian Hermann’s supervision at the Department of Religion Studies, University of Bonn. She was a doctoral researcher there from 2017 to 2020. I had to look up more information about the author online and learned that she worked at Harvard University’s Italian Renaissance Center as an Ahmanson Fellow during 2020–2021. Her expertise is modern global Christianity, with an emphasis on Catholic missions in east and southeast Asia. Her PhD is in historical research, and she earned it from King’s College, London.
This book is part of what scholars of world Christianity are calling “the Munich School,” which is closely associated with Klaus Koschorke, who co-edits the series. It is an attempt to show the polycentric history of Christianity, rather than an interpretation that privileges the West.
This book is a study of dissident Catholic groups, mainly in colonial Sri Lanka, in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The groups observed include former Catholic priests, reformist movements within the church, cross-confessional rivalries, ecumenical networks, and the Old Catholics – who broke away from the Roman Catholic Church after the First Vatican Council due to controversies revolving around infallibility and papal supremacy.
The book contains seven chapters dealing with Catholicism in Ceylon (Sri Lanka), the Padroado (Portuguese cooperation with the Holy See), intra-Catholic ecumenism efforts in the nineteenth century, the Independent Catholic Mission in Ceylon, Indian involvement in many of these matters, and a trade-unionist monthly journal called The Independent Catholic, which the author claims has not received much attention until now.
The author’s goal is to present “… a little-known case of religious emancipation that emerged in colonial Sri Lanka between the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries” (p. 193). The key figure of the book is a Goan priest named Antonio Alvares (1836–1923). He was a former Roman Catholic and eventually became the archbishop of the Independent Catholic movement in Ceylon and India.
The book tells a story situated in Goa and Colombo. In 1888, around 3000 Catholics declared independence from the Holy See. They were led by excommunicated Catholic priests. They called themselves the “Independent Catholic Mission,” although they petered out in the first half of the twentieth century. Their congregations all merged with other churches, although occasionally held onto aspects of their glory days in the late nineteenth century.
The book is clearly written. It is extremely well-researched. In the Introduction, there is a five-page section detailing all of the archives and other sources the author accessed during her research. It is impressive, indeed. The author researched five countries: Portugal, the United Kingdom, Vatican City, and of course India and Sri Lanka. The author seems to be proficient in numerous languages, including English, German, Portuguese, Italian, Latin, and Chinese – her BA and MA are from Beijing Foreign Studies University.
The book raises fascinating questions about the relationship between the official Catholic Church and dissident – or, independent – movements that emerged far from Rome, in South Asia. The book is, essentially, a study of the “prehistory, development, and decline of the Independent Catholic movement” (p. 195). It is a complex story, to be sure, but the author does an outstanding job of contextualizing everything that is happening as she jumps back and forth between Ceylon, India, Rome, and Lisbon. Readers who specialize in this geographic region will find much to learn, as the author mines through archives, little-known newspapers, and letters in multiple languages. She carefully documents her sources and includes helpful appendices at the end. There are also 10 helpful photos with captions at the end of the book.
The volume succeeds in many ways. It is part of an emerging literature devoted to the polycentric history of Christianity. But it also looks at forms of Christianity that often go unrecognized due to their being absent today. It is in some ways a “lost history” kind of volume, that illustrates just how passionate migrant and indigenous Catholic communities could become outside the strong arms of Catholic power. However, in the end, the larger Catholic church seems to have won, as most of these Christians dissolved into either mainline Roman Catholic or Syrian Orthodox bodies.
