This Suffering Is My Joy: The Underground Church in Eighteenth-Century China by David E. Mungello (review)

This new monograph on the emergence of China’s “underground” Catholic community is a welcome addition to the extensive scholarly oeuvre of David E. Mungello, whose early works include such important studies as Leibniz and Confucianism: The Search for Accord (1977), Curious Land: Jesuit Accommodation and the Origins of Sinology (1985), and The Forgotten Christians of Hangzhou (1994). In this study, Mungello effectively reasons against the usual assumption that the underground Catholic community first emerged during the 1950s, after the establishment of the People’s Republic of China in 1949. Instead, he asserts that “the longer view of history shows that the underground church dates from the eighteenth century” (p. 7). Rather than locate the first movement underground during the Maoist era (1949–1977), Mungello suggests that China’s Catholics were forced to conceal themselves after the Yongzheng (r. 1722–1735) emperor banned the propagation of Christianity in his 1724 edict after the Vatican’s refusal to align with the Jesuit position regarding China’s Confucian and ancestral rites. Responding to previous books that consider China’s underground Christians, such as Ian Johnson’s The Souls of China: The Return of Religion after Mao (2017) and Paul Mariani’s Church Militant: Bishop Kung and Catholic Resistance in Communist Shanghai (2011), Mungello has provided a timely study that views the “underground” movement as part of a more protracted chronological landscape, one that analyzes the longue durée of underground Catholics that connects long-embedded religious strategies of survival from the imperial to modern eras.