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Ecclesiology from Below: Urbanizing Catholicism in an Urbanizing China
Wong, Stephanie M.
Wong, Stephanie M.
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Abstract
Given that the majority of Chinese Catholics have historically lived in rural villages rather than urban centers, China’s recent urbanization presents heightened challenges and opportunities for the Catholic Church in China. In order to understand the church’s engagement with this new urbanism, I consider an “ecclesiology from below” and analyze the ways in which rural and urban Catholic communities adjust their way of doing church in order to remain responsive to their social and pastoral circumstances. I propose that the rural-urban boundary in China is important to study—not because urbanization has made Catholic villagers and city-dwellers separate, but rather because after 1978 this boundary has become more permeable and therefore increasingly a site of ecclesiological experimentation. As ideas about Catholicism and its role move back and forth across this boundary, the transmission generates various new forms of church that will undoubtedly shape Chinese Catholicism in the years to come.
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2016
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Christian Study Centre on Chinese Religion and Culture, Chung Chi College, Shatin, Hong Kong