The presence of the Catholic Church in the southwestern Chinese province of Sichuan and city of Chongqing dates back to 1640, when two missionaries, Lodovico Buglio and Gabriel de Magalhães, through Jesuit missions in China, entered the province and spent much of the 1640s evangelizing in Chengdu and its surrounding areas. The Paris Foreign Missions Society assumed full responsibility for the Sichuan Mission in the 18th century.
The Basset–Su Chinese New Testament produced in Chengdu by the French missionary Jean Basset and the Sichuanese convert Johan Su during the first decade of the 18th century, became the prototype for Protestant Bible translations done by Robert Morrison, the first Protestant missionary to China in the early 19th century, which paved the way for the entire Protestant missionary enterprise in the country.
In 1724, Yongzheng Emperor's "Amplified instructions on the Sacred Edict" proscribed Christianity in the Manchu-led Qing empire and declared European missionaries . Catholics in Sichuan found a way to muddle through without ordained priests. When the imperial authorities became increasingly paranoid and were convinced that Catholics were members of a "heretical" organization—as contrasted with state-supported Confucianism—which might threaten the empire's order and rule, district magistrates found it convenient to manipulate non-Catholic communities against the Catholics, leading to discrimination as well as social and political pressure against Catholic families. In consequence of this persecution, a considerable number of Catholics withdrew into the remote mountains and hinterlands of western Sichuan, becoming "hidden Christians" whom were mistaken for Buddhists by European missionaries after the legalization of Christian missions in 1858.
Nevertheless, by 1870, the Catholic Church in Sichuan had 80,000 baptized members, which was the largest number of Catholics in the entire country. By 1911, the number increased to 118,724 members. Throughout its ecclesiastical history, Sichuan was one of the hotbeds of anti-missionary riots in China.
Following the fall of mainland China to communism in late 1949, and the subsequent establishment of the state-sanctioned Catholic Patriotic Church (CPC), the Church in Sichuan, as well as in other provinces, has been subjected to the control of the CPC since 1957, which generated controversy between the Holy See and the People's Republic of China, and created a schism between CPC Catholics and those who remain loyal to Rome. The latter are commonly referred to as loyal church or "underground church" Catholics.
According to 2011 data, Catholics in the dioceses of Chengdu, Shunqing, Jiading, Suifu, Ningyuan numbered 110,000, 80,000, 60,000, 30,000 and 30,000 people, respectively, making a total of 310,000 faithful. This data did not include Catholics in Chongqing (dioceses of Chongqing and Wanxian) and Tibet (Diocese of Kangding), due to the separation of Chongqing from Sichuan in 1997 and the diocesan jurisdiction changes took place in the 1980s and the 1990s.
Despite the Diocese of Chengdu being the oldest bishopric in Sichuan, the primate of the province is the Archbishop of Chongqing, with his seat at St. Joseph's Cathedral. The post has been vacant since the last Archbishop died in 2001.
While works on the Catholic missions in the imperial Chinese capitals are abundant (e.g., Chang'an, Khanbaliq/Karakorum, Nanjing, Beijing), Catholicism in Sichuan has seldom been the focus of study.
History Early period
In 1640, Lodovico Buglio, a Sicilian Jesuit, arrived in Chengdu (Chengtu), the provincial capital, at the invitation of , a Sichuanese native from Mianzhu and Grand Secretary of the Ming dynasty. Thirty people were baptized the following year, who were the first Sichuanese Catholics. There was a certain Peter (Petrus) among them, according to An Account of the Entry of the Catholic Religion into Sichuan (1918), he was a descendant of the , and quite active in the congregation. After the Portuguese Jesuit Gabriel de Magalhães joined the mission in August 1642, work began at once in Chengdu, Baoning and Chongqing.
In 1644, following Zhang Xianzhong's invasion of Sichuan and the subsequent establishment of the "Great West" regime, the mission was cut short and the two priests were held captive in Zhang Xianzhong's court until early 1647. In 1651, Magalhães submitted to Rome a report of their ordeal in Portuguese titled . The report was kept in the Archivum Romanum Societatis Iesu and was never published.
After the devastation of Sichuan (1645–1646) wrought by Zhang Xianzhong's massacre, a search for surviving converts was carried out during the 1660s by , then the intendant of , and his mother Candida Xu, both Catholics. They found a considerable number of converts in Baoning. Candida then invited the French Jesuit priest Claude Motel (a.k.a. Claude Métel or Claudius Motel, 1618–1671) to serve the congregation. Several churches were built in Chengdu, Baoning and Chongqing under Motel's supervision, and he baptized 600 people in one year.
18th century First half of the 18th century
The Apostolic Vicariate of Szechwan was established on 15 October 1696, with its headquarters in Chengdu. The French missionary Artus de Lionne of the Paris Foreign Missions Society (, abbreviated MEP) was appointed as the first apostolic vicar. De Lionne managed to recruit four priests for his vicariate. In 1700, he entrusted the city of Chengdu and the western part of Sichuan to the MEP priests Jean Basset and Jean-François Martin de La Baluère. Two Lazarists were also placed at his disposal, Luigi Antonio Appiani, an Italian, and , a German. De Lionne entrusted them with Chongqing and the eastern part of Sichuan. Two different missionary congregations thus found themselves assuming responsibilities in the same province. Though very few in number and facing considerable hardship, the priests of these two societies competed for territory.
The Lyonese priest Jean Basset wrote a long memoir in 1702 in Chengdu, under the title of , lamenting the sad state of the Church in Sichuan after so many past efforts. For Basset, there was only one remedy: translating the Bible and authorizing a liturgy in Chinese. "It was", he pointed out, "the practice of the apostles and it is the only way to familiarize the Chinese people with the Christian message". Basset set to work on the translation with the assistance of a local convert, Johan Su. Together they produced a New Testament translation in six large volumes which is now known as the Basset–Su Chinese New Testament.
In 1723, the arrival of the Lo family in Jiangjin made the town an important Catholic center in eastern Sichuan. The family was of Cantonese ancestry, whose members converted to Catholicism in 1695, and migrated to Sichuan shortly after their conversion. The Los built a church and a clergy house with donations from the local faithful. During a period of ten years from 1736 to 1746, Giovanni Battista Kou ( Joannes-Baptista Kou; 1701–1763) had resided in the clergy house while doing missionary work. Kou was a Beijingese priest trained at the Collegio dei Cinesi in Naples. The faithful from surrounding cities used to gather at the Jiangjin church to sing the Mass and receive the sacraments administered by Father Kou. Musical instruments such as sheng and xiao were used during major Catholic feasts.
During this period, an emerging phenomenon of consecrated virgins came into existence in Sichuan. One of the earliest such virgins was Agnes Yang, a woman from Mingshan County in western Sichuan. Her baptism was confirmed by an MEP priest, Joachim-Enjobert de Martiliat, the fourth Apostolic Vicar of Szechwan and author of the first detailed Rules for Consecrated Virgins (1744). De Martiliat visited Agnes again in 1733 when she was over fifty years old and found that she had remained faithful and chaste. These unmarried Catholic women served as baptizers and female catechists for the evangelization among women. The role they played was important in the growth of the Church in Sichuan, because of the segregation of the sexes in China. The most committed promoter of this practice was Jean-Martin Moye, provicar in Eastern Szechwan (future Archdiocese of Chongqing) and Kweichow (future Archdiocese of Guiyang) since 1773, who founded the Congregation of the Sisters of Providence in Lorraine before entering the mission field of Sichuan.
Latter half of the 18th century
In 1753, the MEP took over responsibility for Catholic mission in Sichuan. In 1756, , a young priest ordained in Tours just three years ago, arrived in Sichuan, taking charge as provicar of the five or six thousand Catholics dispersed in the province. After three years of pastoral visits, he was arrested and tortured, spent a few months in prison in Chongqing. In 1767 he was appointed Titular Bishop of Agathopolis and Apostolic Vicar of Szechwan. His episcopal consecration on 10 September 1769 took place in Xi'an, the capital of Shaanxi province, where he had to flee during a persecution. Having sold his house in Chengdu in 1764, Pottier retired with seven students to a cottage in Fenghuangshan (), 7 kilometers west of Chengdu. His poor school reminded him of the stable in Bethlehem, he called it the "Nativity Seminary". In 1770, his school was denounced to the authorities, and the cottage was destroyed. A few years later, Bishop Pottier resumed the work of training future priests by founding in 1780 a seminary at Long-ki in the Sichuan-Yunnan border region. From 1780 to 1814, forty priests left this seminary and moved to Lo-lang-keou in southern Sichuan shortly after its opening.
In 1783, Pottier chose Jean-Didier de Saint-Martin as coadjutor and ordained him bishop at Chengdu on 13 June 1784. Saint-Martin was imprisoned and then expelled from China the following year, but he managed to return to his post in 1792, the year of Pottier's death. He ensured his own succession by taking Gabriel-Taurin Dufresse as coadjutor, whom he ordained Bishop of Tabraca in 1800. This new bishop already had twenty years of experience in Sichuan, where he arrived in 1776. His ministry was interrupted by the persecution of 1784. Dufresse was imprisoned, brought to Beijing and then exiled to Portuguese Macau and the Spanish Philippines, he secretly returned to Chengdu in 1789 and was put in charge of the Eastern Szechwan and Kweichow missions. On the death of Saint-Martin in 1801, he took charge of the entire province. Despite the insecurity and multiple setbacks, the Church in Sichuan was then relatively prosperous. In 1756 there were 4,000 Catholics and two local priests in the province. In 1802, the number increased tenfold with 40,000 Catholics and 16 local priests. The pastoral experience accumulated during the 18th century made it possible to establish a general directory of the conditions of Christian life and the ministry of the sacraments.
Persecution The Christians in the 18th century suffered from persecution on both the local and national levels. Since the beginning of the Chinese Rites controversy—a dispute among Catholic missionaries over the religiosity of Confucianism—in the 17th century, in the position of foreign missionaries in China became very difficult. In 1724, the Yongzheng Emperor prohibited the propagation of Christianity through his "Amplified instructions on the Sacred Edict", which was issued by his predecessor to instruct the average subjects in the empire in the basic principles of Confucian orthodoxy.