The Catholic Church in China Today: The Limitations of Autonomy and Enculturation

Since the 1950s, the ruling authorities in the People's Republic of China have insisted that Christian churches there cut their ties with foreign religious institutions and become "autonomous," or self-governing. Jesuit missionaries in the 1600s, judging that the way to the conversion of China was through conversion of the scholarly elite, argued that the main thrust of Confucian teachings was compatible with Catholic doctrine (as, by analogy, were the teachings of Aristotle) and that many Chinese ceremonial practices were at least not contrary to Catholic worship.8 After a long debate, in the early 1700s, Rome shut down this attempt to adapt the "Chinese rites," provoking an imperial prohibition of further missionary activity in China.