China's Catholics: Tragedy and Hope in an Emerging Civil Society.

Richard Madsen

University of California Press, $27.50, 191 pp.

Commonweal readers may already know Richard Madsen as co-author of Habits of the Heart (1985) which examined, among other things, the tensions between individual and communitarian values in American life. Scholars of China know him also as author and co-author of two superb studies of a south China village through the vicissitudes of the Cultural Revolution and the reforms that followed (Chen Village [revised edition, 1992] and Morality and Power in a Chinese Village [1994; both University of California Press]).

As readers of Habits know, Madsen is committed to a democratic polity in which associations such as churches can temper the nature of rampant individualism and an unfettered market through a vision of breadth and humaneness. This same vision informs his book on Chinese Catholicism, part of a larger study undertaken by the Luce Foundation to examine whether a true civil society might emerge in China. It leads also to his somewhat pessimistic conclusions, for neither the emergence of such a society nor the church's ability to play a constructive role in its making is by any means assured. That the persecution of Chinese Catholics, both under Maoism and in its less severe form later, has hardened the resolve of most believers to maintain their faith he finds beyond dispute. He notes that since 1949 the number of Catholics has grown from roughly 3 million to 10 million, keeping pace with the larger growth of China's population. Yet in many cases the experience of those years also intensified tendencies - inherited from the Counter-Reformation theology of the earlier missionaries - toward parochialism, a dependence on hierarchy, a concern with purely personal salvation, and a fear of modernity.

Madsen (a former Maryknoll missionary in Taiwan), shows the ways in which these aspects of a particular kind of Catholicism earlier found a resonance in traditional Chinese society (Confucian, for want of a better word). Though especially true in the countryside, he suggests that even in the cities when Catholics founded colleges and universities (like Shanghai's Aurora, or Beijing's Fu Ren) the aim was not to turn out critical intellectuals (as the Protestant institutions were doing) but a patrician elite, possessors of a knowledge which it was their duty to impart to others, yet in a way that neither questioned it nor encouraged questions from others.

The paradox is that the very qualities that gave Chinese Catholics the strength to resist persecution (surely a Christian virtue) now may stand in the way of their working with others to bring about a more humane and tolerant society (surely also Christian virtues). Nor is it as if all Catholics clubbed together against a dangerous outside world, for they also turn against themselves, particularly but not exclusively in the case of the underground church and the official church (the so-called Catholic Patriotic Association, dismissed by many as collaborationist). Persecution and discrimination have, Madsen suggests, only increased such tendencies, and an opportunist atheist regime apparently does what it can to make them worse.

Add to this the fact that the teachings of Vatican II, with their long overdue views of the church's openness to the world, have only recently begun to make their way into China. Add also the disquieting evidence that the weakening of Catholicism that Maoism could not bring about is being accomplished by the new economic openness. Many would agree with Madsen that the dog-eat-dog, acquisitive society of what Beijing likes to call "socialism with Chinese characteristics" is untempered by either the old Confucian morality (which the Communists destroyed), or a newer socialist morality (which they also managed to destroy, particularly during the Cultural Revolution of 1966-76). The moral and spiritual vacuum thus created is exacerbated by an unjust state which is also thoroughly corrupt.

Are there any grounds for optimism, then? Madsen admits the shortcomings of his research, since he was not allowed really free access to his sources. He has primarily studied the North; in the South, he says, his findings might have been somewhat different (nearly everything, he suggests, looks better in the South than in the North). And he has found, in the cities like Shanghai and Tianjin, some slight evidence of the coming of a Catholic outlook more willing to engage a modernity that, like it or not, is here to stay, and the harsh edges of which Catholicism has the resources to temper for the better, if it will only use them.

If it will only use them. For, though Madsen does not explicitly make the argument, the reader here may find in the church's situation in China an analogue for the larger conundrum of the church's role in the world at large. Questions of parochialism, after all, or an unwillingness to cooperate with others, and a fear of change, are by no means restricted to the Middle Kingdom. Anyone following the doings of China's ruling party is struck by the ways in which a small group of aging powerholders try to control the terms of public discussion and to forbid the raising of contentious questions. "Bourgeois liberalism" and "spiritual pollution" are condemned, and just last year Xinhua, the government news agency, called for the nation's cultural sector to be "put under the guidance of the party leadership in the next century" so that a "powerful management and operations mechanism" can maintain for it an "explicitly socialist focus," and ensure adherence to the party orthodoxy.

As Western Catholics know, however, such signs of fear are not Beijing's alone, and the silencing of "dissidents" and condemnation of writings have taken place closer to home, even though the Vatican puts no one under arrest nor sends tanks into the streets against the unruly. Still, Madsen shows that we have much to learn from China, for the world at large needs a church not just revivified but resurrected, giving sinful and estranged and fearful people everywhere a hope. "Watching the signs of the times, a church that dares to continually reform itself may make that hope present not just in China but in the United States and in modern worlds everywhere groaning for reform."

Nicholas R. Clifford is the author of The House of Memory (1994), among other books.