Charles Mccarthy, SJ, and China's Jesuit Mission in Transition

CHAPTER 7 Adjustment and Advocacy: Charles McCarthy, SJ, and China’s Jesuit Mission in Transition Amanda C. R. Clark Introduction Charles J. McCarthy, SJ (1911–1991), travelled to China “for life,” as was expected of all Jesuit missionaries living abroad in the early twentieth century [figure 7.1]. Commissioned never to abandon his flock and to more closely identify with the people of his mission field, and to adapt to their customs, loves, and be- liefs, the missionary in China took his post until death.1 Catholic publications in the West indulged in an almost propagandistic program of representa- tion, depicting missionaries living in poverty in far-off jungle or desert lands, Figure 7.1 Father Charles J. McCarthy, SJ, and Archbishop Thomas Tien Ken-sin, SVD, in Beijing (1947). Source: McCarthy Family Collection 1 Peter Fleming, SJ, “Chosen for China: The California Province Jesuits in China 1928–1957: A Case Study in Mission and Culture” (PhD diss., Berkeley Graduate Theological Union, 1987), 21. © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ��7 | doi ��.��63/9789004345607_009 200 CLARK sitting atop horses or camels, or beside crude huts surrounded by smiling children—Jesuits were often pictured in their long, black cassocks among the natives, or sometimes clad in local attire. These images fueled the imagination of readers in America and supported a mission-minded culture back home.2 Inspired by those photos of Chinese babies, toddlers, and altar boys, deep devotion to the Church was encouraged that laid the foundation for the future of Catholicism in China. This chapter examines the transition from mission Church to indigenous Church through the pivotal life of the Jesuit China missionary, Charles McCarthy. Papal Progress: Instigating Indigenization McCarthy followed in the footsteps of the sixteenth-century proto-missionary to Asia, Saint Francis Xavier, SJ (1506–1552). Xavier’s renowned sense of focus and determination, leading him through India and Japan on his route to China, only to die on Sancian Island before reaching his destination, remained a vivid portrait of the dedicated missionary for later Jesuits who envisioned his effort through a largely hagiographic lens. Despite his failed attempt to reach China, Xavier was known as a patron to the missions and remained particularly close to the hearts of China missioners. The later Jesuits who settled in China imag- ined their work as a fulfillment of Xavier’s unsuccessful intention to mission- ize the Middle Kingdom. The missionary call was seen as a vocation within a vocation, one that suggested a lifetime commitment of enduring sacrifice as both missionary and priest.3 But it was a sacrifice that promised great re- wards, one particularly celebrated in the twentieth century by Pope Benedict XV (r. 1914–1922). In November of 1919, Benedict XV promulgated his famous Maximum Illud, initiating a dynamic shift in Church mission policy by encour- aging a decolonialization of the mission enterprise, and a movement toward a deeply rooted indigenous Church.4 Motivating Benedict XV’s writing of Maximum Illud was a growing realiza- tion in the twentieth century that the efforts of the mission apostolates were incompatible with those goals of the colonial enterprise indulged by Western nation-states such as England and France. Mission work, the pope argued, 2 Fleming, 24–25, and James Edward Walsh, MM, Blueprint of the Missionary Vocation (Ossining, NY: Maryknoll, 1947): 41–42. 3 Fleming, 25–26. 4 See Jean Bruls, “From Missions to Young Churches,” in The Church in a Secularized Society, ed. Roger Aubert (New York: Paulist Press, 1978)..

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