PAUL P. MARIANI, Church Militant: Bishop Kung and Catholic Resistance in Communist Shanghai. Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 2011. xiii, 282 pp. US$39.95, £29.95, J36.00 (hbk). ISBN 978-0-674-0613-8 For six years after the Communist takeover of the city, Catholics in Shanghai actively resisted government control. This book, based on extensive research in both Chinese and Western archives, tells the tragic story of that resistance and considers its implications for the church in China today. The book is structured as a detailed narrative history of the events that took place in the Shanghai Church between 1949 and 1956. The first chapter deals with the immediate aftermath of the Communist takeover of the city and sets up the two main themes of the book. The first theme is that from the start the aim of the Communist Party was to destroy the Catholic Church. This aim was not publicly declared, since the Party was actively promoting the idea of a United Front, but Mariani argues that it was inherent in both Marxist atheism and in the Party’s history of opposition to imperialism. The new government took control of Church institutions and began to promote its open goal of a ‘‘patriotic’’ Church without institutional links overseas. Ordinary Catholics responded to these threats with increasing devotion and this brings us to the second major theme of the book: the key role of organized Catholic youth in resistance to the state. In the face of state repression, leading clergy focused on students and young people whom they organized into Marian sodalities (promoted primarily by the Jesuits) and the Legion of Mary 聖母軍 (promoted by the Vatican’s internuncio Antonio Riberi, whose first name Mariani anglicizes as Anthony). Within these organizations they also recruited ‘‘special militants,’’ young people known only to the priest who was their spiritual director; they promised ‘‘to accept prison or death, to postpone marriage for the time being, to have a spiritual plan of life, and to accept all missions that would aid the church’’ (p. 64). The rest of the book describes the unfolding of these themes as the government’s campaign against the church progressed. In 1951 members of the Legion of Mary across China came under huge pressure to register with the government and to renounce the organization. In Shanghai, unlike other parts of China, the majority refused to comply. Eventually the organization was disbanded, but many of its key members entered ongoing ‘‘catechism groups’’ instead. This was also the period that saw the beginnings of the institutions of the Underground Church, with a few young people joining secret religious orders. Repression continued, with the next climax coming in 1955, when large crowds of ordinary Catholics gathered in churches and protested the arrests of foreign and Chinese priests, while at the same time Rao Shushi 饒淑石, the first party secretary of East China, came under attack in the Gao Gang 高崗 affair. Rao was accused, among other things, of weakness in failing to deal with the Shanghai Catholic Church. The result was a massive crackdown: the bishop of Shanghai, Ignatius Kung (Gong Pinmei 龔品梅) was arrested along with twenty-three members of his clergy and three hundred Chinese Catholics. Soon, leading Catholics began to crack under great pressure in prison, with the most notable being the Jesuit mission superior Fernand Lacratelle, who made lengthy confessions that accused Bishop Kung of being an imperialist, named his supporters, and revealed the structures of the militant Catholic youth organizations. Tape recordings of these confessions were also crucial in breaking BOOK REVIEWS 69 the morale of others who had resisted. The final two chapters of the book follow more rapidly through the events of the succeeding years with the establishment of what Mariani terms a ‘‘puppet’’ church, the show-trial of Bishop Kung in 1960, and the complex and difficult situation that continues to exist between the underground and government-registered churches in Shanghai today. The research for this book is excellent. Mariani makes careful use of the abundant Catholic materials as well as Chinese newspapers and the Shanghai Municipal Archives. The effect is to build up a convincing picture of events in Shanghai, but the reader should...