Turning Curses into Blessings: How the Catholic Lay Movement Survive in Contemporary China

Abstract

Catholic Church in China has revived remarkably in last 30 years under the tensely church-state relationship. This paper will attempt to answer the question of how the Catholic Church develops under the severe religious regulation in China with the case study of the Catholic lay movement in China. Specifically, this paper argues that the strategy that the lay organizations take advantage of the special church-state relationship and find an “umbrella” for themselves has been revealed through comparing three different cases. And the growth they can achieve depends on the characteristic reshaped by both their own tradition and their attitude toward the religious regulation in China. Another contribution of this paper is that while most scholars divide Chinese Catholic Church into two separate entities, open and underground communities, in their studies, this paper reveals that a common mechanism can work in both of the communities.