ABSTRACT
The village has been swallowed up by Taiyuan city, but you can still tell the difference when you enter it. Coming off the broad city highways, its narrow lanes are packed with food stalls and thronged with some of the thousands of migrant workers who rent rooms from the villagers. Only the Christian texts over a few doorways hint that this might be a Catholic community, until a gateway at the end of a lane leads into the church. Inside a quiet courtyard is a huge gothic church built in grey brick, and a block of classrooms where young nuns from a local teaching order are providing summer school lessons in Chinese and mathematics for a large group of children. The church is dark and cool, with rows of benches and wooden kneelers arranged before a modern wooden altar. A middle-aged priest, broom in hand, is preparing for the evening service with the help of two parish women. This could be any Shanxi Catholic parish on a summer afternoon, and at first glance it would be easy to miss both its long history and its global ties. For the first report of Catholics in this village comes from a missionary who visited in 1726 and recorded that there were nine Catholic households (Margiotti 1958: 609). The descendants of these households have been Catholic ever since, and inscriptions on the front of the church list the names of the villagers who were massacred when the church was burned down during the Boxer Uprising of 1900. Under the altar, wrapped in cloth and enclosed in a wooden box are the bones of these martyrs, which were rescued after their graves were destroyed in Land Reform and returned to the church in the 1980s, when they were said to have smelled miraculously of roses. Now they lie under the altar and the children coming in for evening mass after their classes pray before the bones of their ancestors. But this is not the only relic in the church: in a small side chapel is an altar to St. Thérèse of Lisieux with a tiny relic of the saint given by a recent French visitor. St. Thérèse, submissive, humble, and childlike, was a favorite with the Italian missionaries in Shanxi in the early twentieth century and constantly promoted as a model for the Chinese, but today her relic is also a reminder of the church’s links with the outside world. In the same way the priest, who reads both Italian and Latin but is sweeping out the church, marks both the province’s Franciscan missionary heritage and a more contemporary and individual commitment to the ideals of St. Francis with their emphasis on humility and manual labor.
