I. Introduction
On December 7, 1965, the Second Vatican Council promulgated Ad Gentes Divinitus, a decree that would fundamentally reshape how the Catholic Church understood its mission to the world. The final vote was nearly unanimous: 2,394 Council Fathers approved the text, with only five dissenting.Footnote 1 Although Ad Gentes was not among the highest-ranking “constitutions” promulgated at Vatican II, many regard it as one of the Council’s most consequential documents. The decree urged the Church to plant itself within local cultures, adapting its liturgy, theology, and structures to the traditions of each people rather than imposing Western forms. Already in 1966, the Protestant theologian Karl Barth called it the Council’s finest text.Footnote 2 More recently, Stephen Bevans has argued that a “missionary consciousness” permeated the entire Council, claiming that mission “gave the council its basic direction.”Footnote 3 Furthermore, the significance of Ad Gentes has only grown as Catholicism has become a predominantly non-Western religion. In Asia particularly, the decree exercised an outsized influence, catalyzing the formation of new missionary societies in countries such as the Philippines, Korea, and India.Footnote 4
Yet this later consensus obscures the contentious process that had produced the text. In 1964, the Council had rejected a first draft of the document. Missionary bishops denounced the schema as lifeless and inadequate to the realities of a rapidly changing global Church. Speaking on behalf of African bishops, Donal R. Lamont invoked the prophet Ezekiel, condemning the text as “dry bones without flesh, without sinews” and demanding “something living; something worthy of this second Pentecost.”Footnote 5 Nearly 80 percent of the Council Fathers voted to scrap the document entirely and ordered a complete revision.
The task of rewriting the decree fell to a newly constituted sub-commission of the Council’s Commission on Missions, whose leadership proved decisive. Its president, Johannes Schütte, Superior General of the Society of the Divine Word (Societas Verbi Divini, SVD), had spent more than a decade as a missionary in China, serving as Apostolic Prefect of Xinxiang (新鄉) in northern Henan before his expulsion in the early 1950s. The vice president, Stanislaus Lo Kuang (羅光), then bishop of Tainan, was himself a product of the Chinese Church and had been involved in missionary deliberations since the Council’s outset. Their appointment marked a significant shift in authority, effectively sidelining the Congregation for the Propagation of the Faith (Propaganda Fide) in the final drafting process.Footnote 6
Ad Gentes was shaped to an unusual degree by figures formed through the experience of missionary collapse in China. While China was by no means the only context informing conciliar debates – Africa loomed large as well – it functioned as a powerful point of reference in discussions of institutional vulnerability, political rupture, and the limits of missionary expansion. No one embodied this formative experience more consequentially than Johannes Schütte. His years in China decisively shaped his thinking about missionary formation and ecclesial presence, and as the figure who shepherded Ad Gentes through the drafting process, he left a lasting imprint on the decree’s final form. This article focuses on Schütte’s trajectory from wartime China to the Vatican, tracing how the lessons he drew from missionary failure informed his vision for the Church’s future.Footnote 7
This article draws further inspiration from recent work reframing twentieth-century Christian history as a story in which ecclesiastical reform and decolonization unfolded together.Footnote 8 As Elizabeth Foster and Udi Greenberg have observed, “For countless Christians across the world, the unfolding of decolonization and the remaking of their faith were deeply linked: they were parallel assaults against Europeans’ exercise of power and claims to embody universal values in the domains of politics, religion, knowledge, and beyond.”Footnote 9 Across Africa, Asia, and Latin America, Christians sought to reconcile their faith with local cultures, challenge Western dominance on issues such as racial inequality and economic justice, and claim leadership within churches long controlled by Europeans. These movements shifted Christianity’s center of gravity away from its historic European heartlands. This reversal reshaped the global Church, symbolized most visibly by the growing presence of African, Asian, and Latin American clergy in Europe and the election of Pope Francis, the first pontiff from Latin America, in 2013.Footnote 10
Yet this sweeping story of decolonization, as it is usually told, leaves certain cases at the margins. As A. G. Hopkins has noted, China remains largely absent from this decolonization narrative – China was never formally colonized and is therefore more often placed within Cold War, rather than decolonization, studies.Footnote 11 And certainly, a conventional interpretation of a figure like Johannes Schütte would place him squarely within this Cold War frame. His writings after he returned to Europe in the 1950s reveal a man haunted by Communism, which he regarded as an existential threat to Catholic mission. Viewed this way, Schütte appears as a textbook Cold Warrior: defending the Church against Marxist hostility, documenting repression, and marshalling Christianity as an arm in the global struggle between Christianity and atheistic materialism.
This article situates Schütte’s career within the extended trajectory of decolonization, a process already underway in China by the late 1920s because of the Vatican’s push to indigenize the episcopacy. Reframing Schütte’s career in these terms places China within the broader history of religious transformation in the postwar world. It also challenges the geographic and conceptual boundaries of the decolonization narrative itself.Footnote 12 Schütte’s case suggests that decolonization involved more than formerly colonized peoples claiming independence; it was a global reckoning with structures of foreign authority – religious as well as political – that transcended formal imperial boundaries.
Expelled from China in the early 1950s and imprisoned as a “counterrevolutionary,” Schütte returned to Europe profoundly marked by the collapse of the mission field to which he had devoted his career. Communist denunciations of missions as instruments of imperialism were not, for him, abstract ideological hostility; they were experienced through interrogation, expulsion, and enforced withdrawal. Yet even as his Cold War commitments hardened, Schütte came to acknowledge that these critiques contained what he would later call “grains of truth.” Anti-Communism thus became, paradoxically, a framework through which he reassessed the failures of a missionary system built on foreign authority and European control.
This analysis contributes to three key debates in decolonization studies. First, it reflects recent scholarship that expands the temporal frame beyond formal independence movements, encompassing longer processes of institutional transformation that began before the Second World War and continued well into the 1960s and beyond. Second, it challenges the geographic limitations of decolonization scholarship by demonstrating how a never-formally colonized country could experience decolonizing processes that then reshaped metropolitan institutions. Finally, it illuminates the complex relationship between violent rupture and elite-driven reform in decolonizing transformations – showing how revolutionary expulsion in China catalyzed institutional changes in Rome.
II. China as Catalyst for Missionary Reform
China occupied an outsized place in the Catholic missionary imagination long before Schütte’s arrival, serving as a primary site for global policy shifts.Footnote 13 By 1919, Pope Benedict XV’s encyclical Maximum illud, which Ernest Young has shown was largely informed by the state of missions in China, initiated a “revolution” in missionary policy by demanding that foreign missionaries prepare local clergy for autonomous leadership.Footnote 14 This vision was reinforced in 1926 by Pius XI’s Rerum Ecclesiae and his subsequent consecration of the first six Chinese bishops of the modern era. These moves reflected Rome’s growing recognition that the Church had to decouple itself from European colonial regimes to survive rising anti-imperial nationalism.Footnote 15
However, these official mandates often coexisted with deeply racialized and paternalistic assumptions. As Udi Greenberg has shown, many missionaries continued to frame their work as a multi-generational process of “tutelage,” insisting that Asians first be disciplined into European social norms before achieving full Christian maturity.Footnote 16 Throughout the 1920s and 30s, missionary periodicals and exhibitions persisted in presenting Europe as the guiding center of civilization, effectively containing the equalizing implications of Vatican reform.Footnote 17
The Society of the Divine Word reflected these broader tensions. Founded in 1875 by the German priest Arnold Janssen, the SVD emerged from the ultramontane Catholic revival and the pressures of Bismarck’s Kulturkampf. The SVD expanded rapidly: by the mid-1880s it numbered in the hundreds, enabling it to send personnel abroad at a pace unusual for a new congregation. China became its largest mission field. The SVD became tightly entangled with Germany’s new colonial posture: the killing of two SVD missionaries in Shandong became the immediate pretext for Berlin’s seizure of Jiaozhou Bay.Footnote 18
The First World War and its aftermath accelerated a shift already underway. Under Wilhelm Gier, Superior General from 1920 to 1932, the SVD embraced the interwar papal calls for indigenization. It established new seminaries in mission territories, expanded the recruitment of local vocations, and spoke openly of preparing for the eventual transfer of authority to non-European clergy. During Gier’s tenure, the SVD more than doubled in size, growing from 1,783 to 3,782 members, and it became noticeably more international in composition.Footnote 19
Yet this internationalization remained largely structural and demographic. Within the missions themselves, the society proved far more reluctant to turn over control to indigenous clergy. Ordinations proceeded slowly, access to senior positions was tightly controlled, and financial and institutional power remained concentrated in European hands. By the early 1930s, SVD missionary leaders refused to ordain a Chinese bishop in their region, citing the alleged “spiritual immaturity” of Chinese Catholics.Footnote 20 Even after the consecration of its first Chinese bishop, Thomas Tian (Gengxin), SVD leadership continued to exert close control over many of his decisions.
It was into this missionary world in flux that Johannes Schütte entered when he began his novitiate in 1932. Born in 1913 in the deeply Catholic municipality of Essen, he joined the minor seminary in Steyl at the age of thirteen, quickly distinguishing himself as one of its most talented students.Footnote 21 Ordained in August 1939, days before Germany invaded Poland, Schütte began his missionary career under the shadow of global war.Footnote 22 His route to China traced the war’s new geopolitical alignments: traveling via the Trans-Siberian Railway in August 1940, he took advantage of the Nazi-Soviet Pact to cross Soviet Russia. He arrived in a Beijing occupied by Japan, which would formally join Germany and Italy in the Axis alliance the following month.Footnote 23
For Schütte, his first impressions of Beijing were “a genuine surprise.” What struck him most was the refinement of the city and its inhabitants. “I had never expected to find such a high culture, such refined, dignified and handsome people, such splendid buildings, such picturesque beauty,” he wrote in a travelogue to his family.Footnote 24 His deepest admiration was reserved for Confucian sites. In Qufu, the hometown of Confucius, he stood “in silent awe in the temple and at the tomb of Confucius, China’s noblest son.”Footnote 25
This appreciation stopped short of embracing Chinese religious life in its entirety. Schütte drew a clear line between Confucian ethics, which he admired, and popular religious practices, which he rejected. He admitted feeling “shaken” by the “crassest paganism” of Daoist, Buddhist, and Lamaist temples, with their “countless images of gods and grotesque devilish faces.”Footnote 26 These early observations reveal the tensions that structured Schütte’s missionary worldview. His respect for Chinese civilization coexisted with assumptions of European moral and religious superiority. His initial encounter with China remained bounded by hierarchies that distinguished between “religion,” “philosophy,” and “paganism.”
III. War, Nationalism, and the Unraveling of the Mission Order
In 1941, Schütte was assigned to southern Henan under the Apostolic Prefect Thomas Megan, an American SVD priest whose confrontational leadership and refusal to evacuate set a defiant tone as the wartime situation deteriorated.Footnote 27 The Japanese advance soon shattered any illusions of safety. One SVD priest reported that Japanese troops unleashed an “orgy of looting, rape, and killing” in Huaiqing, with the Catholic church becoming a refuge for 3,000 women.Footnote 28
This instability, which threatened to cut missions off from foreign personnel, prompted the Vatican to accelerate indigenization.Footnote 29 In July 1941, the Propaganda Fide appointed Vitus Chang as the first Chinese Apostolic Vicar of Xinyang. The appointment was a milestone for the Society, but European and American SVD missionaries in China met the news with open astonishment and, in some cases, resistance.Footnote 30 Superior General Josef Grendel was forced to issue defensive telegrams to the SVD’s China missions, urging his European subordinates to “justify this trust” and accept a Chinese superior.Footnote 31
Schütte arrived in this unsettled situation in August 1941 to manage a parish of over 1,300 congregants and five outstations while teaching in the mission school. His immediate arrival was unimpressive – emergency appendix surgery prompted one of his confreres, Max Exner, to remark dryly, “I saved his life…but whether I have done a good service to the Society, I do not know.”Footnote 32 Yet the Society needed personnel, especially after the attack on Pearl Harbor. Japanese forces arrested ten American priests in the region, allowing only Germans to remain.Footnote 33
The escalation of the war made missionary work deadly. Bernhard Polefka, one of Schütte’s classmates from St. Gabriel, was captured by local bandits and buried alive. In 1941, while traveling to a smaller village, Schütte was seized by armed robbers, stripped of his possessions, and marched at gunpoint to their chief in the next village. Interrogated as a suspected foreign enemy before the townspeople, he identified himself as Chinese. When the bandits expressed skepticism – “What? You, a Chinese?” – he explained that despite his German birth, he dressed, spoke, ate, and lived as a Chinese among Chinese people, working only for them. The bandits released him.Footnote 34
In March 1942, Fr. Schütte was assigned to assist Friedrich Linzenbach in Xinyang (信陽), a sprawling mission parish covering roughly thirty-five kilometers and serving more than 4,000 Catholics. On Saturdays, he traveled with a catechist to the outstations – at first by bicycle, later by motorbike – to hear confessions and deliver sermons. The parish sat near the Yellow River, which divided Japanese-occupied territory from Nationalist-held China, making it especially volatile. Chinese Nationalist and Japanese forces clashed regularly across the river. Schütte sought to expand the mission and in September 1942 founded a girls’ school in Xinyang. Since American priests were prohibited from leaving the city, he was left to oversee much of the surrounding province on his own.Footnote 35
Schütte’s initial reputation within the mission remained mixed. Bernard Kowalski, his regional superior, described him as “a rather weak man for his size.” Kowalski further noted that Schütte had “much ‘Weisheit’ (wisdom) to give away” and seemed convinced “he knows many things much better than other Fathers.” Kowalski closed his assessment with a note of guarded optimism: “still the future may improve him.”Footnote 36
Schütte retreated to Beijing in 1943 to recover from a heart condition, only to be forced back to Henan within the year. By then, Japanese hostility toward American missionaries had escalated, and while his American colleagues in Xinxiang were confined to internment camps, Schütte, as a German national, was not.Footnote 37 He founded a boys’ middle school in 1944. When it opened, over a hundred students enrolled immediately, but four days later American bombers destroyed the building. Classes resumed in the ruins. In 1945 the SVD opened a girls’ school with one hundred students, and by mid-1946 the boys’ school had over three hundred. Tuition, rents, investments, and donations sustained the schools. “We pay the best salaries hereabouts,” he wrote, “and are therefore able to secure good teachers.”Footnote 38
Schütte’s wartime experience proved formative in many respects. A newly ordained priest thrust into leadership by the sudden vacuum left when American missionaries were interned, he found himself responsible for institution-building almost immediately – founding schools, managing parishes, overseeing a sprawling network of outstations. Yet the war also revealed how fragile these infrastructures were: a school could be destroyed in an afternoon by American bombers, a mission parish destabilized by shifting front lines, years of painstaking work wiped away in an instant. He had seen firsthand how foreign missionaries could become liabilities in times of conflict, and how the church’s survival depended on local leadership and local ties.
IV. Catholicism under Siege: The Fall of the Henan Mission
The immediate postwar years presented a complex picture of simultaneous advance and retreat for the Catholic mission in China. The elevation of Thomas Tien, SVD, as China’s first cardinal in 1946 marked a symbolic triumph for the indigenization agenda that the SVD had begun pursuing nearly two decades earlier.Footnote 39 That same year, North Henan’s designation as an independent apostolic prefecture, with Thomas Megan as its first prefect apostolic, suggested institutional consolidation and growth. Schütte’s appointment as vicar general under Megan recognized the administrative initiative that he had shown during the war years.
When Megan departed for what was intended as a six-month visit to the United States in January 1948, appointing Schütte as pro-prefect, neither man could have anticipated the permanent nature of this separation. Accusations surfaced that Megan had served as an American military intelligence officer during the war. Whether grounded in fact or political expedience, the allegations ensured that Megan was barred from re-entering China. The episode presaged the systematic campaign against foreign missionaries that would soon unfold. The frameworks that had enabled foreign Catholic missions – unequal treaties, extraterritorial privileges – were incompatible with revolutionary nationalism and its assertion of Chinese sovereignty.Footnote 40
Schütte’s appointment as SVD regional superior for North Henan placed him at the center of a rapidly shifting political situation. Throughout 1948, Communist forces progressively seized Henan’s major cities and encircled Xinxiang. Schütte continued the mission’s building efforts, seemingly undeterred by the deteriorating political situation – though he admitted to the newly appointed Superior General Alois Grosse-Kappenberg that he was “getting gray hair from all the worries and planning.”Footnote 41 In January 1949, Grosse-Kappenberg made an unannounced trip to Shanghai to discuss the future of the China missions. At the meeting, the SVD’s religious superiors unanimously agreed to continue their work even in the event of a Communist takeover.Footnote 42
The SVD’s decision to remain reflected a conviction forged through decades of survival. It had outlasted the fall of the Qing, the chaos of the warlord era, and the Japanese occupation, and believed it could weather this latest storm as well. Yet this institutional resilience rested on a fragile assumption: that the new regime would respect the same legal and diplomatic foundations that had always protected foreign missions. Unlike its predecessors, the Chinese Communist Party was committed to dismantling the unequal treaty system entirely. And the church did not help its own cause: the Vatican had elevated anticommunism to what Giuliana Chamedes has called a “credo” following Pius XI’s 1937 encyclical Divini Redemptoris. Footnote 43 Caught between their association with Western imperialism and their identity as global anticommunist crusaders, the missions found themselves more vulnerable than ever before.
By May, Xinxiang surrendered peacefully to Communist forces. Immediately, Communist authorities initiated public campaigns against Schütte and school head Peter Huber, using allegations of political subversion and moral misconduct as pretexts for formal disciplinary measures.Footnote 44 A more consequential scandal soon followed. In September 1949, a Chinese SVD priest was arrested and, at a public hearing, admitted to living with a Catholic woman “as man and wife.” In the absence of corroborating evidence, the provincial judge extended responsibility upward, declaring Schütte guilty of striking the woman on the grounds that accusation itself constituted proof. On this basis, the court proposed expelling Schütte as an “uncompromising reactionary” who exercised “unlimited despotism” over local Christians.Footnote 45
Missionaries saw the charges as pretextual. Peter Huber later argued that Schütte had drawn attention precisely because he remained so active – teaching catechism regularly and publicly challenging anti-religious arguments in local schools. But Communist authorities had their own reasons for concern. Foreign missionaries still exercised significant control over Chinese Catholics, an arrangement that conflicted with the new government’s understanding of sovereignty. And the scandal involving the Chinese SVD priest suggested that the missions’ internal discipline was failing even by their own standards.Footnote 46
When Mao Zedong proclaimed the People’s Republic on October 1, 1949, the new government moved quickly to redefine the place of religion in China. Party policy sought to sever religious institutions from foreign influence and to bring them under state supervision. In the summer of 1950, the CCP circulated a confidential directive instructing local cadres to avoid overt anti-religious campaigns that might alienate believers and instead to identify “patriots within the Church” whose nationalist commitments could be mobilized.Footnote 47
The regime’s professed commitment to religious freedom coexisted with aggressive efforts to brand foreign missionaries as reactionaries and agents of imperialism. The Catholic Church became the primary target, and anyone connected to Catholic institutions faced suspicion of counterrevolutionary activity. Schütte observed how the regime sought to alienate Christians from missionaries and render the mission “morally impossible through slanderous propaganda.” Newspapers suddenly accused Catholic missionaries of serving “entirely in the service of American espionage, with the Vatican at the head.” Under suspicion of espionage and facing serious charges, believers withdrew, creating “an atmosphere of storm and tension.”Footnote 48
Catholic leaders escalated the conflict, exhorting the faithful to resist. Father Matthew Chen Zhemin, Chinese-language secretary to papal representative Antonio Riberi and a staff member of the Catholic Central Bureau, issued a rebuttal titled The Church: Holy and Catholic. He reaffirmed the Church’s universal and indivisible nature: any attempt to redefine it along national or political lines would strip it of its identity, and Catholics who willingly broke with the Holy See separated themselves from Christ and the Church itself. A state-controlled “national Catholic church” would be nothing more than a schismatic institution. His statement underscored the deep ideological gulf between the Vatican’s vision of a global Church and the CCP’s nationalist, state-led religious order.Footnote 49
At the same time, Riberi championed the spread of the Legion of Mary (聖母軍) in China – an international lay Catholic organization founded in Ireland in 1921 and devoted to intense Marian piety. In Shanghai, it had gained a strong following among middle school girls; by 1950, the city alone counted an estimated 1,500 senior and junior members.Footnote 50 Schütte met with Riberi in March 1949 to discuss establishing a Legion of Mary presidium in Henan.Footnote 51 A year later – on March 25, 1950, the Feast of the Annunciation – he helped establish the first local chapter in the province. In the weeks before Easter, the Catholic community in Henan entered into an intense spiritual preparation, organizing multiple novenas. In his report, Schütte wrote: “The number of rosaries that were prayed during these weeks is certainly unique in the history of our mission. Need teaches one to pray!” Footnote 52 The event culminated in a mass consecration on Easter Saturday. Schütte described the atmosphere as one of profound devotion, convinced that the ceremony would strengthen the mission amid mounting political pressure.Footnote 53
The regime responded immediately. The next day, police marched into the church during Mass, smoking cigarettes and prying open the tabernacle. They recorded every name and residence before allowing the faithful to leave. “This was a shock and a warning of the first order,” Schütte concluded.Footnote 54
With the outbreak of the Korean War in June 1950 and China’s entry into the conflict that October, the CCP intensified its campaign to establish control over religious institutions. The campaign soon reached Schütte’s doorstep. On January 23, 1951, local Communist authorities staged a direct action against Schütte’s church, summoning all clergy, hospital staff, school representatives, and students to a mandatory 10 a.m. assembly. Declaring Schütte an agent of the “American SVD,” they ordered all its assets and funds frozen and demanded full registration within five days. The meeting concluded with a blistering denunciation of Schütte, and he was branded an American spy and agent of imperialism.Footnote 55
Following the meeting, police detained Schütte for questioning; he was held for more than fifteen hours over several days.Footnote 56 The registration of missionary property was completed, and four Party functionaries moved into the mission residence to monitor visitors and oversee operations. The hospital was placed under two physicians – both former Catholics – who quickly demonstrated loyalty to the regime.Footnote 57
These measures formed part of a broader campaign that unfolded through 1951. In May, People’s Daily reported that Beijing authorities had reviewed and sentenced 505 alleged “counterrevolutionaries.” The sentences, the paper claimed, had caused “the enemy’s arrogance to sharply decline and the people’s morale to greatly rise,” forming “a surge of mass movement to suppress counterrevolutionaries.” People from all walks of life had “one after another, accused and reported counterrevolutionary elements, urgently demanding that the People’s Government promptly clear up counterrevolutionary cases.” Punishments ranged from immediate execution to suspended death sentences and imprisonment, with a small number of releases. Among those swept up was Li Fang, accused of working as a Kuomintang security official who had shared intelligence with the “American operative” Thomas Megan – “also the Catholic bishop of the Xinxiang diocese.” After his arrest, Li was said to be “willing to repent” and became a “leader in re-education through labor.”Footnote 58
In June, the drive to root out counterrevolutionaries continued to widen. Archbishop Antonio Riberi was placed under house arrest, interrogated for sessions lasting over fourteen hours, and expelled in September. Two days later, four directors of the Catholic Central Bureau were arrested. That same month, police raided the Legion of Mary’s offices to gather evidence.Footnote 59
The campaign reached Henan in the fall. Authorities introduced compulsory “re-education” courses for Catholics and on October 25 formally dissolved the Legion of Mary, arresting six of its leaders. Schütte, together with regional superior Baumeister and rector Blank, was placed under house arrest in separate locations.Footnote 60 Schütte was placed under continuous guard and detained for more than six months.
In his journals, Schütte recorded the psychological toll of prolonged isolation, even as he retrospectively framed these months as unexpectedly clarifying. He interpreted his imprisonment through a familiar spiritual idiom, reading suffering as participation in a broader religious struggle and confirmation of his vocation.Footnote 61 Most significant in his account was his ability to celebrate Mass in secret, with the assistance of a recent convert who smuggled him the necessary materials. “Man can forego everything,” he concluded, “but God, he cannot forego.”Footnote 62 At the same time, his writings took on a register of self-scrutiny, cataloguing personal failings – selfishness, pride, fear of sacrifice – and invoking the language of Christ’s passion as a discipline of purification.Footnote 63
Beginning in April, Schütte and two fellow SVD priests were repeatedly summoned before the local police chief for extended interrogations: nineteen times by his count.Footnote 64 A public trial on May 7, 1952, before a crowd of approximately 10,000 marked the culmination. The verdict had been determined in advance: “expulsion from China forever.” Schütte’s deportation, followed by the removal of the remaining German priests by February 1954, completed the dismantling of the SVD’s presence in the region.Footnote 65
V. The Grains of Truth: Engaging Communist Critiques of Mission
After his expulsion from China, Schütte returned to Europe, where China remained very much on his mind, as it did for many former China missionaries. As Andrzej Miotk has shown, expelled missionaries stayed in close contact, organized meetings, and launched initiatives designed to keep the China mission intellectually and institutionally alive in Europe. In July 1953, for instance, eighty former China missionaries gathered at the SVD’s headquarters in Sankt Augustin near Bonn. A follow-up meeting in February 1954 created a working committee charged with drafting proposals for the SVD Superior General in Rome. Central to these proposals was a call for further training of missionaries, aimed both at deepening reflection on past methods and preparing for a possible return to China. Suggested areas of study ranged widely – including sociology, anthropology, and languages to agriculture, medicine, and media – equipping missionaries not only for schools and colleges but also for forms of social, economic, and scientific cooperation.Footnote 66
Many exiled missionaries now concluded that advanced study in missiology was essential. In China, they believed, a cohesive missionary method had been lacking; without systematic reflection, promising initiatives in teacher training, catechesis, and education had too often ended in failure. Only well-trained missionaries would be able to respond adequately in the future. For Schütte, the emerging discipline of Catholic missiology offered precisely such a framework. It was in this spirit that he enrolled in the doctoral program in Münster, then the pioneering center for missiological studies.Footnote 67
Schütte’s dissertation, later published as The Catholic Mission of China Reflected in the Chinese Communist Press: A Search for a Missionary Meaning (1957), allowed him to confront his Chinese experience directly. To write his work, he drew on Communist newspapers and pamphlets collected through the Catholic Center in Hong Kong and sent to him on microfilm by SVD confreres.Footnote 68 In the introduction, Schütte acknowledged how deeply his imprisonment had marked him. The long months of confinement had given him time to reflect, and the book offered what he called “a new approach to the Communist accusations and charges against the Catholic mission in China – and thus against myself.” He did not dismiss the Communist charges as mere propaganda. Instead, he conceded that not all were fabrications and that some contained “a grain of truth.”Footnote 69
What were those grains of truth? Schütte directed his critique at the Catholic Church’s own missionary record in China. He argued that missionaries had long transplanted an “entirely Western form” of Christianity that struggled to take root. Catholicism too often appeared under the national banners of Spain, Portugal, or France, reinforcing perceptions of Western arrogance and complicity in imperialism.Footnote 70 These failures were not merely symbolic. Even mission institutions, he noted, frequently fell short of papal standards in their treatment of Chinese personnel, undermining the Church’s moral authority from within. The future of missions, Schütte argued, depended on shedding Christianity’s colonial baggage.
Seeking to explain Communism’s appeal more fully, Schütte acknowledged that the CCP had addressed China’s urgent economic and social needs – needs missionaries had too often neglected in their focus on “saving souls.”Footnote 71 Many priests, he complained, knew Catholic social teaching only vaguely, leaving a vacuum in which Communism could present itself as the sole path to justice. True mission, he insisted, had to engage “the whole person – everything in man, and everything around him.” The Church’s failure in China, in his view, lay as much in its neglect of social realities and nationalist aspirations as in its spiritual shortcomings.
One partial exception, in Schütte’s account, was the Legion of Mary, which he described as Catholicism’s most “unexpected success” in China. Its appeal lay in its combination of active apostolate and Marian devotion, which resonated with deep cultural associations of motherhood and care. So effective was the movement, he argued, that Communist authorities singled it out as “enemy number one,” devoting considerable resources to infiltrating and dismantling it.Footnote 72
Between 1954 and 1955, Schütte extended these reflections in “The Christian Mask of Chinese Communism,” published in two parts in the leading Catholic journal for missiology, Zeitschrift für Missionswissenschaft und Religionswissenschaft. Footnote 73 Drawing on examples from Communist party pedagogy, mass rituals, and reports of re-education practices, he argued that Chinese Communism functioned as a rival “pseudo-religion” that consciously appropriated Christian forms.Footnote 74 The movement replicated core elements of Christian life – confession, conversion, martyrdom, eschatological hope – while recoding them in secular terms. Capitalism took the place of original sin. Revolution became redemption. The classless society functioned as an immanentized paradise. What struck Schütte most was how Communism mobilized virtues like faith, hope, love, discipline, self-denial, and communal belonging in ways that closely resembled Catholic moral pedagogy and ascetic practice. Yet for Schütte this resemblance was precisely the danger. He argued that Communist “faith” rested on absolute submission to ideology; its “hope” was directed toward an immanent, utopian future; its “love” was redirected toward abstract collectivities such as the Party, the People, or the Revolution.Footnote 75
It was against this backdrop that Schütte reviewed Klemens Brockmöller’s Christentum am Morgen des Atomzeitalters in 1956. The book was something of a sensation: within two years of its publication, it had gone through six printings and sold more than 18,000 copies, prompting Brockmöller himself to note that “the degree of interest and approval the book has found in so short a time has been surprisingly great.”Footnote 76 Brockmöller argued that the crisis of mid-twentieth-century Christianity could not be reduced to the external threat of Communism. Rather, it reflected the exhaustion of bourgeois, individualistic Western culture itself. Socialism and Communism, he suggested, were distorted responses to Christianity’s failure to sustain genuine forms of community under conditions of industrialization, technological power, and mass politics. Rejecting both a defensive identification of Christianity with Western civilization and a purely antagonistic Cold War posture, Brockmöller proposed a theological reading of the present as a moment of divinely permitted rupture, in which God “in his providence shatters the inherited religious-cultural forms” in order to compel a transition toward a new communal culture (Gemeinschaftskultur).Footnote 77
Schütte shared Brockmöller’s concern about the conflation of Christianity and Western culture and welcomed calls for renewal, but he sharply rejected any suggestion that Communism might be accommodated or approached through dialogue. For Schütte, Communism was a total moral system defined by irreconcilable opposition to Christianity. What troubled him most was the risk that exhausted European Christians might mistake Brockmöller’s critique for concession. In his review, Schütte revealed himself as a Cold Warrior who could acknowledge missionary failure and imperial entanglement while insisting that the conflict with Communism remained absolute and non-negotiable.Footnote 78
Schütte’s publications garnered attention, and his star continued to rise. Josef Otto, editor of the Jesuit journal Die Katholischen Missionen, invited him to contribute a series of articles on China, and in 1955 he was appointed Mission Secretary of the SVD, a role that gave him a panoramic view of the Society’s global challenges. Three years later, in 1958, he was elected Superior General.Footnote 79
As he rode through the institutional ranks, Schütte continued to devote significant attention to the China missions. As early as 1954, Schütte was sponsoring Chinese priests for advanced study in Europe, including Joseph Ti Kang (狄剛), a newly ordained priest from the Apostolic Prefecture of Xinxiang in Henan. Writing from Münster to the Congregation for the Propagation of the Faith in April 1954, Schütte praised Ti’s character and requested permission for him to pursue further studies at the Catholic Institute of the University of Münster, emphasizing that he would personally cover the costs and oversee his formation. Ti Kang would later become Archbishop of Taipei.Footnote 80
Correspondence with priests who remained in China was more painful. Letters smuggled to Hong Kong and forwarded by SVD intermediaries spoke of imprisonment, isolation, and uncertainty. One priest confessed feeling adrift after Schütte’s expulsion, even as he vowed to persevere.Footnote 81 By 1955, concerns about surveillance forced Schütte to break off direct contact. When the Propaganda Fide later circulated a questionnaire about the former China missions, Schütte replied tersely that he had received no further news. After that, silence.Footnote 82
Schütte maintained constant correspondence with former China missionaries scattered across the Americas, Asia, and Europe, always signing his letters “Sü,” the Chinese pronunciation of his name.Footnote 83 Among his correspondents was Friedrich Linzenbach, his former supervisor in Henan, who after expulsion relocated to the Philippines and retrained as an architect, eventually becoming the Society of the Divine Word’s chief architectural planner across Asia and Africa. In letters to Schütte, Linzenbach described rebuilding church infrastructure amid frequent earthquakes and requested support for his architectural studies – catalogues from Baden-Baden and Berlin, and subscriptions to European art journals. Despite this new direction, Linzenbach still hoped for a return to China. In 1955, he wrote: “Our greatest army is still the Lord God. And this army, above all, will march back into China – and we with it.”Footnote 84
Linzenbach’s work developed alongside the liturgical reform movement, which emphasized active lay participation, vernacular accessibility, and a return to early Christian simplicity – principles that were transforming Catholic worship and church architecture in the postwar period. In the Philippines, he encountered missionaries engaged in related debates, including Johannes Hofinger, an Austrian Jesuit who had left China in 1949 and later joined the Jesuit community in Manila.Footnote 85 By 1953, as prospects for return diminished, Hofinger established the Institute for Mission Apologetics. Reflecting on this period, he described the “enforced exile” from China as prompting missionaries to “re-examine the whole problem of religious instruction in pagan lands.”Footnote 86 The Institute encouraged approaches to mission that drew on cultural anthropology, applied psychology, and other social scientific disciplines, with an emphasis on indigenization and inculturation. As Paul B. Steffen has observed, Hofinger and the Institute played an important role in shaping discussions of pastoral formation that later intersected with the reforms of Vatican II. His work included lecturing in Europe, Asia, Africa, and the Americas, as well as organizing a series of International Catechetical–Liturgical Study Weeks in Nijmegen (1959), Eichstätt (1960), Bangkok (1962), Katigondo (1964), Manila (1967), and Medellín (1968).Footnote 87
Through Hofinger, Schütte became an active participant in the liturgical reform movement. In 1956, Hofinger organized an International Congress on Pastoral Liturgy and invited Schütte to take part. Three years later, in September 1959, he hosted an International Study Week on Mission and Liturgy in Nijmegen, and again Schütte was extended the invitation. The Nijmegen conference brought together missionaries and missiologists who had been reflecting on similar themes across Asia and Africa. For church leaders, the events in China cast a long shadow. The expulsion of foreign missionaries from the People’s Republic had demonstrated how quickly revolutionary nationalism could dismantle decades of missionary infrastructure. As Elizabeth Foster has shown, Vatican officials feared that Guinea under Sékou Touré – who declared independence in 1958 and soon turned on the Catholic missions – might provide a model for other newly independent African states. What Communist China had done to foreign missionaries, nationalist Africa might now do as well.Footnote 88 The urgency of liturgical reform and indigenization was thus inseparable from these anxieties: if the Church could not disentangle itself from its European trappings, it risked losing Africa as it had lost China.
Hofinger and Schütte shared important similarities: both came from the German-speaking world, both had served as missionaries in China, and both were expelled by the Communists after 1949. Hofinger, like Schütte, centered China as an important point of reference for his reflections on liturgical reform. In a 1958 call for “The Urgent Need for Liturgical Renewal,” he reflected on what had been lost: before the Communist victory, Chinese Christians had enjoyed prayer texts of considerable literary quality, often surpassing the formulaic devotional manuals of the nineteenth-century West. Communal prayer was understood as central to Christian life, and across China one could find visible, regular, active participation in the liturgy. By many measures, Hofinger concluded, “the missions in China were well in advance of many others.”Footnote 89
Hofinger, like Schütte, lamented that Catholic missionaries had been caught off guard by the Communist assault on the Church in China. The devastation, he admitted, had “taken us by surprise”: missionaries “were in no way prepared for this kind of persecution,” and in China they were “the first to be swept away.” This lack of experience, he suggested, was understandable only in hindsight, prompting a pointed counterfactual question: what might missionaries have done differently had they anticipated “this persecution and its particular characteristics” in advance?Footnote 90
Central to that lesson was the vulnerability of missionary institutions, particularly schools. Recent experience, Hofinger insisted, demonstrated “without any doubt” that when Communism came to power it brought with it the systematic destruction of mission schools.Footnote 91 Nor was this danger confined to explicitly Communist regimes. Any totalitarian control over education posed a similar threat, as did the political transitions accompanying decolonization, when newly independent states often curtailed missionary institutions once their provisional usefulness had passed. The relative survival of such institutions in certain regions, Hofinger cautioned, reflected not their security but only a temporary dependence on foreign assistance.Footnote 92
Precisely because of this fragility, Hofinger argued that liturgical reform could not be postponed. Once Communism had “reached out its iron hand” over mission territories, it was already too late to undertake the necessary changes. The transformations required to ensure the religious and catechetical effectiveness of public worship had to be established “in a time of comparative peace,” before missionaries were expelled or restricted. China, he made clear, illustrated the consequences of delay: once persecution began, the opportunity for meaningful liturgical adaptation had already passed.Footnote 93
Hofinger called on active missionaries to reform their work. The missionary apostolate, he believed, had entered “a new stage” marked by the collapse of colonial rule and the political awakening of non-European peoples. This transitional moment demanded “greatly increased vitality.”Footnote 94 The future of the Church’s mission depended on whether it could summon the energy required “to make the voice of Christ heard among these peoples who are now awakening” and to form them accordingly.Footnote 95
Reform, for Hofinger, meant simplifying the liturgy, making it “intelligible and truly popular.”Footnote 96 It also meant making worship more visibly communal. “In missionary countries, this visible community action is of the utmost importance,” Hofinger wrote. The more apparent the congregation’s active participation in the prayer and action of the priest, the more they would come to understand that worship signified “their active collaboration in the apostolate of the hierarchy.”Footnote 97 But this activity had to be rightly ordered: “The active participation of the congregation must, obviously, be not any kind of ‘activity,’ but the activity of prayer, activity vivified by the Spirit.”Footnote 98
Schütte shared many of Hofinger’s premises and agreed that liturgical reform was urgent. But where Hofinger called for a new activism, Schütte warned of activism’s moral and spiritual costs. In a paper delivered at the 1959 International Study Week on Mission and Liturgy in Nijmegen, titled “The Primacy of Religious and Spiritual Endeavors in the Missions,” Schütte expressed skepticism toward large-scale projects and visible expansion. China remained the central empirical reference point for this critique. In China, Communist authorities had confiscated nearly all missionary institutions – churches, schools, hospitals, and charitable works – demonstrating how easily centuries of labor could be erased. Drawing on the spiritual lessons of his imprisonment, during which he had been stripped of every material possession, Schütte concluded that “only that which we have built in the supernatural temples of the Holy Ghost remains.”Footnote 99
Where Hofinger emphasized the need for renewed vitality in a period of transition, Schütte warned against the dangers of what he termed “hyperactivity.” Modern culture, he observed, encouraged an exaggerated confidence in action and organization, as people became increasingly oriented toward the visible and tangible, their senses constantly stimulated by modern media. This tendency, Schütte cautioned, was no longer confined to Europe or North America but was increasingly evident in mission territories as well. The danger was not inactivity but excess: the risk that missionaries might “win the world but lose themselves.”Footnote 100 Such hyperactivity fostered what Schütte described as a “practical naturalism,” marked by an inflated faith in methods, resources, and organizational power, and a corresponding neglect of “supernatural means and the life of grace.”Footnote 101
Taken together, Hofinger and Schütte reveal both the coherence and the internal tension of postwar Catholic reform. They shared a common biographical trajectory, a common missionary horizon, and a common shock in the collapse of the China missions, and both treated China as a privileged site for rethinking the future of Catholic mission. Yet they drew slightly different lessons from the same experience. Hofinger approached China as a warning that demanded renewed vitality, earlier preparation, and active work in simplifying liturgy to make it intelligible to local populations. Hofinger, in other words, still centered the active role of the missionary in bringing about these reforms.
Schütte, by contrast, treated the Chinese experience as a caution against confusing vitality with constant activity, expansion, or organizational confidence. Where Hofinger emphasized readiness and reform in anticipation of political rupture, Schütte stressed vigilance against a missionary ethos shaped too closely by modern regimes of productivity and visibility. Their divergence reflects different judgments about how the Church should act – and how much it should do – in a postcolonial, Cold War world where the durability of institutions could no longer be assumed.
VI. Schütte and the Making of Ad Gentes
In a 1960 memorandum on the “Problems and Tasks of the World Mission Today,” Schütte offered a sober assessment of Catholicism’s global predicament. Despite significant missionary gains since the nineteenth century, he argued, demographic growth in Asia, the spread of secularism in Europe, and competition from other religions left Catholics a numerical minority with dangerously overstretched resources. He warned of an impending Erstickungsgefahr – a “danger of suffocation” – in which the imbalance between clergy and faithful threatened to paralyze mission work. Nationalism and Communism figured as the principal structural challenges: the former an ambivalent reaction against colonialism, the latter a rival “pseudo-religion” claiming total allegiance. Schütte’s response centered on indigenization and accommodation – the formation of local hierarchies, greater lay participation, and the decoupling of Christianity from European civilization. What appeared as crisis, he concluded, also created an opening to reimagine a genuinely global church.Footnote 102
It was precisely Schütte’s reputation as a reformist, progressive thinker that made him the choice to help marshal Ad Gentes to fruition. In 1964, after the initial schema on missions had been rejected on the Council floor, Schütte was appointed president of a special sub-commission tasked with rewriting the text. He convened the sub-commission at the SVD’s headquarters in Nemi January 1965, providing both the setting and the hospitality that allowed a fractious group of bishops and periti to work with focus and collegiality. Serving alongside him as vice-president of the sub-commission was Stanislaus Lo Kuang (羅光), Bishop of Tainan, who had also been deeply engaged in mission debates since the beginning of the Council. Together, they shaped both the direction of the revisions and the selection of theological experts. It was through Schütte’s invitation that Joseph Ratzinger – later Pope Benedict XVI – joined the team, and, as James B. Anderson has shown, Lo’s advocacy ensured that many of Yves Congar’s proposals were retained in the final text.Footnote 103 In other words, Ad Gentes bore the imprint of two figures whose formative missionary experience had been in China.
Johannes Schütte also shaped the intellectual orientation of Ad Gentes. The document opened with a reference to the “new situation for mankind,” an oblique but unmistakable nod to the age of decolonization.Footnote 104 Running through its text was the pressing question of how missionaries should relate to newly independent nation states, many of which regarded Catholicism with suspicion. Ad Gentes underscored that the Christian faithful, though drawn “out of all nations,” were “not marked off from the rest of men by their government, nor by their language, nor by their political institutions.” Rather, they were to “live for God and Christ in a respectable way of their own national life.” Christians were urged to embody civic loyalty as “good citizens” who should be “true and effective patriots,” while missionaries were cautioned to avoid the twin perils of “racial prejudice and hypernationalism.”Footnote 105
Schütte’s hand in Ad Gentes is perhaps most visible in the way that the decree grounds mission in education. The document made an urgent call for missionaries to demonstrate respect and understanding for non-European ways of being: “let them share in cultural and social life by the various undertakings and enterprises of human living; let them be familiar with their national and religious traditions.”Footnote 106 Ad Gentes also insisted that “For anyone who is going to encounter another people should have a great esteem for their patrimony and their language and their customs.”Footnote 107 In its insistence on the importance of engaging national cultures, Ad Gentes reflected Schütte’s critique of imperialistic models of Catholic missions in China. The document stressed that missionary work could no longer be framed as the export of European Christianity, but had to be rooted in and respectful of the cultures it encountered. Its call for “genuine adaptation to local conditions” echoed the very vision Schütte had championed – one in which cultural attunement was not a reluctant concession but an essential precondition for credibility and vitality.Footnote 108
This respect for local ways of life was paired with a broader vision of mission: emissaries were urged to collaborate with governments, private groups, and even non-Christian communities to address famine, ignorance, disease, and to promote human dignity and peace. Echoing Schütte’s claim that missionaries in China had faltered by ignoring the conditions of ordinary people, the decree called on Christians to “labor and collaborate with others in rightly regulating the affairs of social and economic life.”Footnote 109 It exhorted a new generation of missionaries to be trained with attention to local needs, social realities, and dialogue with non-Christians.
Schütte also worked to explain the stakes of conciliar reform to the wider public. In a 1965 interview with the Süddeutsche Zeitung, the reporter described the SVD as having earned its “current reputation as one of the progressive missionary societies” due to the lessons Schütte had learned in China. “We are not bound to the soul of the West,” Schütte admitted. “The Church should have become Chinese,” he insisted, capturing both his critique of the old missionary model and his conviction in the postconciliar emphasis on inculturation. By putting this diagnosis into print in one of West Germany’s leading newspapers, Schütte ensured that debates over mission and cultural adaptation were aired before a broader audience. For Schütte, the disaster of the 1950s was not simply the result of communist hostility but of a structural flaw: the Church had remained too foreign in leadership and outlook, too slow to entrust its future to indigenous clergy. Through Ad Gentes, he hoped to ensure that future missionaries – and the Church as a whole – would not repeat the same mistake.Footnote 110
VII. Conclusion
In 1967, just two years after the close of Vatican II, Johannes Schütte edited a volume of essays, Mission after the Council. There, he argued that Ad Gentes had redefined mission as the planting of churches “fully rooted in their own people and culture.” Mission now had to be a new “incarnation of Christ and his Church in another people, in its culture and mentality.” The Church had to “give itself up and forget itself,” setting aside its “Western clothing and face” so that it might truly become at home in another culture. Missionaries needed to “grasp the true soul of that community, of that social group, and let Christ and his Church become at home within it. This requires the proclamation of Christ in the milieu of that specific culture and mindset, with its sociological, cultural, and religious realities.” Footnote 111 In other words, Ad Gentes laid out the vision for a postcolonial Church.
Schütte’s embrace of this vision, this article has argued, was rooted in his willingness to acknowledge the “grains of truth” in Communist critiques. At the core of Schütte’s critique was an earlier missionary practice that identified Christianity with Western civilizational authority. Mission, as it had developed in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, often assumed the cultural, political, and intellectual superiority of Europe. Conversion was implicitly tied to participation in a Western moral and social order, even when missionaries rhetorically distinguished Christianity from colonial rule. For Schütte, the collapse of European empires and the expulsion of missionaries from China exposed the fragility of this arrangement. Christianity could no longer rely on inherited structures of authority or cultural prestige to sustain its global claims.
When Schütte called for “indigenization,” he insisted that Christianity had to become intelligible as a moral and communal project independent of Western political dominance. For too long, the Church’s claims to universal authority had been underwritten by European power; now, it was stripped of that backing. Church leaders had to confront societies shaped by rival systems – nationalism, socialism, communism – that offered their own answers to questions of community, justice, and historical purpose.
Schütte understood this challenge intimately. His own career traced how loss could become the crucible of reform. What the Communist regime imposed coercively in China, Catholic leaders came to embrace voluntarily across Africa, Asia, and Latin America: indigenous leadership, cultural adaptation, and a new understanding of universality. In this sense, China belongs at the center of the history of decolonization – not despite being the site of the Church’s most complete defeat, but because of it. Though never formally colonized, its revolutionary rejection of foreign missionaries performed the same work as independence movements elsewhere.
The decree Ad Gentes embodied these lessons. By insisting that churches become fully rooted in the people and culture of their own country, it reflected insights born of expulsion and exile, transforming Catholic universality from a project of European expansion into something closer to a catholic pluralism. This adaptation reveals decolonization as a protracted process of institutional and theological change – one that extended before and after the transfer of political power, unfolding even in places never colonized in the strict sense.
At the same time, Schütte’s proposals remained marked by tension. While he argued forcefully for disentangling Christianity from Western civilization, he was less clear about how that decoupling could come about institutionally. His caution against “hyperactivity” could also be read, in effect, as a restraint that stopped short of radical ecclesiological transformation. There was also a harder edge to Schütte’s caution. While he was willing to learn from Communist critiques, he remained adamantly opposed to any dialogue with Communism itself. For Schütte, Communism was a rival to be studied and outcompeted, never an interlocutor. This stance set him apart from other Catholic intellectuals of the period who explored Christian-Marxist dialogue, whether in Europe or Latin America.Footnote 112 Schütte’s Cold War posture foreclosed possibilities that others were just beginning to open. Did his insistence on competition rather than conversation stem from the trauma of imprisonment, or from a deeper conviction that Communism’s totalizing claims made genuine dialogue impossible? Either way, his anti-Communism constrained the scope of his reformism. He could imagine a Church extricated from Western power, but not one that might find common ground with the Left.
If his diagnosis was right, then cultural adaptation was not enough. The Church also needed to decentralize: to empower regional churches, to accelerate the formation of indigenous leadership, and to rethink the balance between Roman authority and local autonomy. Schütte’s thinking thus carried an unresolved tension: a sweeping critique of mission’s imperial entanglements paired with a cautious approach to institutional reform. The same tension runs through Ad Gentes itself. The decree reimagined the theology of mission but left open how far the Church would actually reorganize itself in response. That question remains open. Contemporary disputes over synodality, inculturation, and the scope of local episcopal authority all suggest that the institutional consequences of mission’s post-imperial turn are still being worked out.
Schütte’s story embodied a wider transformation. Communist expulsion dismantled the foreign mission – and in doing so, forced the Church to rediscover universality as rootedness in diversity. His career shows how Catholicism survived the collapse of empire by adapting to new realities, reimagining its global presence from the ground up. Today, the Church that Ad Gentes envisioned is increasingly visible. Catholic life in the Philippines, South Korea, India, and across sub-Saharan Africa bears the imprint of the decree’s insistence on indigenous leadership and cultural rootedness – principles forged, in no small part, from the wreckage of the China missions. That this genealogy remains largely unrecognized points to a broader gap in the historiography. Decolonization studies have tended to treat China and the Catholic Church as separate stories, the one belonging to the Cold War, the other to European imperial retreat. Schütte’s career suggests they were part of the same transformation. Recovering that connection redraws the map of how global Christianity remade itself in the twentieth century. Out of crisis came reform; out of loss, renewal.
Acknowledgments
This research was generously supported by Academia Sinica under grant AS-TP-113-H01 and by the Institute of History and Philology. The seeds of this article were planted in 2017, when Kathleen Cummings and John McGreevy invited me to join the planning committee for the Cushwa Center’s global history initiative. I am grateful to the full committee – Colin Barr, Pete Cajka, Giuliana Chamedes, James Chappel, Elizabeth Foster, Udi Greenberg, Piotr Kosicki, Charles Mercier, Florian Michel, Jaime Pensado, and Sarah Shortall – for a series of conversations that helped me see this project’s larger stakes. A panel on decolonization with Elizabeth Foster, Udi Greenberg, and Sarah Shortall further sharpened several of the arguments presented here. Research for this article would not have been possible without the generosity of the SVD Generalate in Rome, which granted me access to its archives. Father Paweł Wójcik, SVD, was an indispensable guide through the collections, and Father Andrzej Miotk, SVD, offered invaluable insights into the materials and their broader context. Father Piotr Adamek, SVD, graciously invited me to examine archival materials in the SVD archives in Taiwan. I am also grateful to Professors Wei-ying Ku, Hsin-fang Wu, and Chen-yang Kao for their comments on an earlier draft, and to Chen-yang for inviting me to present at a conference at the Institute of Ethnology, Academia Sinica. I would also like to thank the anonymous reviewers whose comments strengthened the final version. Conversations with Michelle Kuo helped push this article forward in more ways than I can count. Gemma Ke-Jing Lai provided excellent research assistance in locating materials.
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