African Art

Catholic Church in Sichuan

The presence of the Catholic Church in the southwestern Chinese province of Sichuan and city of Chongqing dates back to 1640, when two missionaries, Lodovico Buglio and Gabriel de Magalhães, through Jesuit missions in China, entered the province and spent much of the 1640s evangelizing in Chengdu and its surrounding areas. The Paris Foreign Missions Society assumed full responsibility for the Sichuan Mission in the 18th century. The Basset–Su Chinese New Testament produced in Chengdu by the French missionary Jean Basset and the Sichuanese convert Johan Su during the first decade of the 18th century, became the prototype for Protestant Bible translations done by Robert Morrison, the first Protestant missionary to China in the early 19th century, which paved the way for the entire Protestant missionary enterprise in the country. In 1724, Yongzheng Emperor's "Amplified instructions on the Sacred Edict" proscribed Christianity in the Manchu-led Qing empire and declared European missionaries personae non gratae. Catholics in Sichuan found a way to muddle through without ordained priests. When the imperial authorities became increasingly paranoid and were convinced that Catholics were members of a "heretical" organization—as contrasted with state-supported Confucianism—which might threaten the empire's order and rule, district magistrates found it convenient to manipulate non-Catholic communities against the Catholics, leading to discrimination as well as social and political pressure against Catholic families. In consequence of this persecution, a considerable number of Catholics withdrew into the remote mountains and hinterlands of western Sichuan, becoming "hidden Christians" whom were mistaken for Buddhists by European missionaries after the legalization of Christian missions in 1858. Nevertheless, by 1870, the Catholic Church in Sichuan had 80,000 baptized members, which was the largest number of Catholics in the entire country. By 1911, the number increased to 118,724 members.

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See also

• ▸1761
• ▸Frostwork (geology)
• ▸Gustav Conrau

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Text from Wikipedia; plate via Wikimedia Commons. Text CC BY-SA 4.0; plate freely licensed (see Commons). Source record. Images and catalogue data are reproduced from open-access collections.