Abstract
On an evening in the summer of 1939, Fr. Wendelin Dunker, CM, set off on a rather audacious midnight journey. He and his fellow Vincentian missionaries, local Catholics, and neighboring non-Catholi c Chinese had fled from the village of Yihuang that day ahead of advancing Japanese military forces. Resting briefly before continuing the retreat, it occurred to Dunker that bread already consecrated for the Eucharist remained in the chapel within the mission residence in Yihuang. Enflamed, he took to horseback to retrieve the Host or at the very least safeguard its sanctity in the face of Japanese troops who, he feared, would ransack the church without giving the exalted Eucharist a second thought.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution.
Buying options
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Learn about institutional subscriptionsPreview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
John C. Turner, “Towards a Cognitive Redefinition of the Social Group,” in Social Identity and Intergroup Relations, ed. Henri Tajfel (London: Cambridge University Press, 1982), pp. 15–40.
Paul A. Cohen, China and Christianity: The Missionary Movement and the Growth of Chinese Antiforeignism 1860–1870 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1977), pp. 77–109.
Li Huaiyin, Village Governance in North China: 1875–1936 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005).
For more detail on the challenges facing the Republican government’s struggle for political leadership, see R. Keith Schoppa, “Contours of Revolutionary Change in a Chinese County, 1900–1950,” in Twentieth-Century China: New Approaches, ed. Jeffrey N. Wasserstrom (New York: Routledge, 2003), pp. 103–137.
John Fitzgerald, Awakening China: Politics, Culture, and Class in the Nationalist Revolution (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), p. 38. For more detail on public health in the Republican Period, also see
Ruth Rogaski, Hygienic Modernity: Meanings of Health and Disease in Treaty-Port China (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004).
Edward R. Udovic, CM, “‘Go Out to All the Nations!’ The Foreign Mission Apostolate: 1914–1987,”.
I utilize the broad definitions of laity and clergy here. I take the latter category to include the group described as the “religious,” which can be considered a third category in its own right as pointed out by Jacinta Chiamaka Nwata in Jacinta Ciamaka Nwata, “The Catholic Church, The Nigerian Civil War, and the Beginning of Organized Lay Apostolate Groups Among the Igbos of Southeastern Nigeria,” Catholic Historical Review vol. XCIX, no. 1 (2013), pp. 78–95.
I am of course indebted to the work of Edward Said here. Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage Books, 1978).
Chinese belief systems were a complex fusion of Confucian cultural norms within the family and a specific moral, regiopolitical role assigned to the government. See Walter H. Slote, “Psychocultural Dynamics within the Confucian Family,” in Confucianism and the Family, ed. Walter H. Slote and George A. De Vos (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1998), pp. 37–52.
Chinese suspicion of Catholicism was well established, and rumors surrounding Christian activity were common. See Paul A. Cohen, History in Three Keys: The Boxers as Event, Experience, and Myth (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), pp. 162–167.
Editor information
Copyright information
© 2014 Cindy Yik-yi Chu
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Harney, J. (2014). Vincentian Missionaries in Jiangxi Province: Extending an American Catholic Community to China, 1921–1951. In: Chu, C.Yy. (eds) Catholicism in China, 1900-Present. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137353658_5
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137353658_5
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, New York
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-47238-3
Online ISBN: 978-1-137-35365-8
eBook Packages: Palgrave Religion & Philosophy CollectionPhilosophy and Religion (R0)