“Pagan Babies”: Orphan Imagery in the Passionist China Collection and the Emergence of American Sympathy for the Chinese in the Early Twentieth Century

Abstract

Images of Chinese children generated by Christian missionaries played an important role in shaping American perceptions of China in the first half of the twentieth century. This article draws upon the recently-digitized Passionist China Collection of missionary photographs in order to discuss the importance of orphan imagery to mission fundraising, missionary approaches to children, and the establishment of sentimental bonds between missionaries, the Chinese, and American mission supporters. By examining “pagan baby” campaigns in the 1920s and 1930s which urged American Catholics to contribute to the care of a faraway Chinese orphan, this article attempts to frame the historical meaning of Chinese orphan imagery, the circumstances of missionary cultural production, and the various cultural, social, and economic functions served by these images. Through the circulation of their images in missionary magazines and beyond, Chinese orphans emerged as familiar figures that came to exemplify ideas of American benevolence and cross-cultural sympathy.

Keywords:

• “pagan babies”
• orphan imagery
• missionary photographers
• visualizations of children in missionary propaganda
• American perceptions of China
• Passionist China Collection
• cross-cultural sympathy

Acknowledgements

This article is based on research that began at the Ricci Institute at the University of San Francisco where it benefited from the support of Fr. Robert Carbonneau, Fr. Antoni Uclerler, Xiaoxin Wu, and Mark Mir. I am especially grateful to Fr. Carbonneau for granting permission to reproduce the images. I also thank Didier Aubert, Carol Williams, Nancy Park, and the anonymous reviewers for the Chinese Historical Review for helpful comments.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes on contributor

Margaret Kuo is professor of history at California State University, Long Beach. She is the author of Intolerable Cruelty: Marriage, Law, and Society in Early Twentieth-Century China. Her current research examines missionary photography in early twentieth-century China.

Correspondence to: Margaret Kuo. Email: [email protected]

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

1 Edward J. Malatesta, S.J., “Foreword” to Sr. Mary Carita Pendergast, Havoc in Hunan: The Sisters of Charity in Western Hunan, 1924–1951 (Morristown, NJ: College of St. Elizabeth Press, 1991), vii.

2 Fr. Robert E. Carbonneau, “The Passionist China Collection Photo Archive,” Trans-Asia Photography Review, vol. 4, no. 2 (Spring 2014): http://hdl.handle.net/2027/spo.7977573.0004.209 provides an overview of the Passionist China Collection photographs. The digitization of China missionary archives at the Ricci Institute comes in the wake of several other massive digitization projects. For example, the International Mission Photography Archive, http://digitallibrary.usc.edu/cdm/landingpage/collection/p15799coll123, has catalogued the collections of several European and American, Catholic and Protestant, missionary groups from across the globe.

3 American Passionists trace their order to the Confraternity of the Sacred Passion founded in Italy in 1720 by Paul Danei (1694–1775), known as St. Paul of the Cross. Passionist priests profess four vows rather than just the usual three vows taken by other Catholic priests (poverty, chastity, and obedience). The fourth vow is to spread the word of Christ Crucified, reflecting the special importance Passionists place on the meaning of suffering in the Passion of Jesus Christ. The first American Passionist congregation formed in Pittsburgh in 1852. American Passionists found success in leading parish missions and retreats before venturing into foreign missions. Approximately 80 Passionist priests served in the China missions, assisted by nuns from the Sisters of Charity of St. Elizabeth, NJ, and Sisters of St. Joseph in Baden, PA. The Passionists were one of the fifteen groups of American Catholic missionaries active in China from 1919 to 1949, including the Maryknoll/Society for Foreign Missions, Vincentians, and Franciscans. Breslin 1980 offers an overview of American Catholic missionaries in China. For memoirs and studies that focus specifically on the Passionist missions in China, see Robert E. Carbonneau, “The Passionists in China, 1921–1929: An Essay in Mission Experience,” Catholic Historical Review, vol. 66, no. 3 (July 1980): 392–416; Caspar Caulfield, Only a Beginning: The Passionists in China, 1921–1931 (Union City, NJ: Passionist Press, 1990); Theophane Maguire, Hunan Harvest (Milwaukee: The Bruce Publishing Co. 1946); and Pendergast, Havoc in Hunan.

4 “Ransoming a pagan baby” was also referred to as “adopting,” or “redeeming” a pagan baby. The term “pagan babies” perhaps comes across as derogatory in our current cultural climate. It will be used with and without quotation marks in this article, always with the intention to understand the term in the particular historical context in which it emerged. For a visual culture approach to modern China, see Visualizing Modern China: Image, History and Memory, 1750-present, eds., James Cook, Joshua Goldstein, Matthew Johnson, and Sigrid Schmalzer (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2014). For works that have explored the global dimensions of missionary history, see Kendrick Oliver, Uta A. Balbier, Hans Krabbendum, and Axel R. Shafer, “Special Issue: Exploring the Global History of American Evangelicalism, Introduction,” Journal of American Studies, vol. 51, no. 4(2017): 1019–1042; and Angelyn Dries, “‘National and Universal’: Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Catholic Missions and World Christianity in The Catholic Historical Review,” Catholic Historical Review, vol. 101, no. 2(2015): 242–73.

5 Jane Haggis and Margaret Allen examine the way in which missionary publications helped form affective communities between Indian subjects and British missionary supporters in the journal article “Imperial Emotions: Affective Communities of Mission in British Protestant Women's Missionary Publications c1880-1920,” Journal of Social History, vol. 41, no. 3 (Spring 2008): 691–716.

6 On the context of American expansionism in Asia under the ideology of “benevolent assimilation,” see David Brody, Visualizing American Empire: Orientalism and Imperialism in the Philippines (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010).

7 Harold R. Isaacs, Scratches on Our Minds: American Images of China and India (New York: John Day Co., 1958), 71. Isaacs classifies American perceptions of China from 1905–1937 as into the “Age of Benevolence,” (p. 127). Isaacs describes pre-1949 American benevolence toward China: “The Chinese … were a people Americans had always helped, a nation that somehow evoked a special and unique benevolence and even a sense of obligation, a people of sterling qualities who deservedly held our high regard” (p. 65). Isaacs goes on to observe:

China occupies a special place in a great many American minds. It is remote, strange, dim, little known. But it is also in many ways and for many people oddly familiar, full of sharp images and associations, and uniquely capable of arousing intense emotion. (p. 66)

T. Christopher Jespersen, American Images of China: 1931–1949 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1996), argues that “American perceptions of China … ran the gamut from Christian paternalism, to economic aspirations, and finally to racist preconceptions, in short, a mélange of often contradictory attitudes, expectations, and hopes” (p. 2). On the one hand, from 1890 to about 1931, American missionaries, businessmen, and politicians looked to remake China in America's image, offering spiritual and material salvation. On the other hand, American perceptions of China were clouded by a virulent racism, evidenced by the Chinese exclusion acts.

8 Compared to domestic missions, overseas missions required greater expenditures to cover substantial travel costs, communication expenses, and unforeseen losses due to local banditry, vandalism, and anti-Christian sentiment among other operating costs. In the nineteenth century, the French Holy Childhood Association, a branch of the Society for Foreign Missions (Jesuits), first promoted the notion of “ransoming a pagan baby” to drum up support for the foreign missions movement. Henrietta Harrison, “‘A Penny for the Little Chinese’: The French Holy Childhood Association in China, 1843–1951,” American Historical Review, vol. 113, no. 1 (February): 72–92; Michelle T. King, Between Birth and Death: Female Infanticide in Nineteenth-Century China (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2014); and Sophie Heywood, “Missionary Children: The French Holy Childhood Association in European Context, 1843-c. 1914,” European History Quarterly, vol. 45, no. 3(June 2015): 446–66 discuss the French Holy Childhood Association campaigns in the 1860s to raise support for the foreign missions among French school children. The American branch followed similar practices.

9 Fr. Kevin Murray, “Some Kienyang [Qianyang] Babies,” Sign, vol. 4, no. 1 (August 1924): 37. The Passionist priests were just one of the many hundreds of Christian denominations that established orphanages across China. Humanitarian outreach to orphans was a major focus of missionary work in China especially in the twentieth century as social welfare programs began to eclipse outright evangelization efforts. Passionist-run orphanages experienced problems that were typical of Catholic missionary orphanages. Though practices varied by locale, out of desperation and poverty, unwanted or sick children, most often girls, were abandoned at the mission gates. At the mission, the children were received, treated, and baptized. Priests hired local women as wet nurses to care for infant children. Chinese “sworn virgins” also cared for the children until they were displaced by the arrival of foreign nuns to staff orphanages. Chinese foster families also raised younger children until they were old enough to enter the orphanage. Although there were hostile rumors about the mistreatment of children at the orphanages, these rumors were rare and did not often result in conflict with the local population. See Alan Richard Sweeten, Christianity in Rural China: Conflict and Accommodation in Jiangzi Province, 1860–1900 (Ann Arbor: Center for Chinese Studies University of Michigan, 2001), 186–88; Henrietta Harrison, The Missionary's Curse and Other Tales from a Chinese Catholic Village (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013), 68–69, 101.

10 Heather D. Curtis, “Depicting Distant Suffering: Evangelicals and the Politics of Pictorial Humanitarianism in the Age of American Empire,” Material Religion: The Journal of Objects, Art and Belief, vol. 8, no. 2 (June 2012): 154–83; and Marianne Gullestad, Picturing Pity: Pitfalls and Pleasures in Cross-Cultural Communications in a Northern Cameroon Mission (New York: Berghahn Books, 2007) discuss ideas of cross-cultural sympathy in the context of India and Africa, respectively.

11 Founded in 1921, the Sign continued to be published until 1982. At its peak in the late 1920s, its circulation exceeded 100,000 subscribers (Carbonneau, “The Passionist China Collection” cites the exact figure of 105,015 for 1931). Caulfield, Only a Beginning, p. 42, discusses subscriptions to the Sign as a means to support the China missionaries. On the importance of missionary periodicals in general to gather support for the missions, see Felicity Jensz and Hanna Acke, “The Form and Function of Nineteenth-Century Missionary Periodicals: Introduction,” Church History, vol. 82, no. 2 (June 2013): 368–73.

12 Heywood, “Missionary Children,” 453–56.

13 “With the Passionists in China,” Sign 4:11 (June 1925), 478.

14 Harrison, “Penny for the Little Chinese,” 80.

15 “With the Passionists in China,” Sign 4:6 (January 1925): 258; and 4:12 (July 1925): 521.

16 “With the Passionists in China,” Sign 4:6 (January 1925): 258.

17 “With the Passionists in China,” Sign 4:6 (January 1925): 260.

18 “With the Passionists in China,” Sign 3:10 (May 1924): 430.

19 On rising Chinese nationalism and anti-Christian movements of the 1920s, see Jessie G. Lutz, Chinese Politics and Christian Missions: The Anti-Christian Movements of 1920–1928 (Notre Dame, IN: Cross Cultural Publications, 1988).

20 Thomas A. Breslin, China, American Catholicism, and the Missionary (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1980). There were a few Catholic missionary groups who chose not to direct their efforts to abandoned children. See Dries, The Missionary Movement, 137.

21 “With the Passionists in China, A Letter from Father Raphael,” Sign, 1922, 216.

22 Sign 6:9 (April 1927).

23 Fr. Dominic Langenbacher, “Chinese Babies,” Sign 3:10 (November 1924): 430.

24 Sign 6:4 (Nov. 1926), 243.

25 “Letter from Fr. McDermott in Yuanzhou,” Sign 1922, 129.

26 Fr. Arthur Benson, “The Mission at Chenki,” Sign 5:12 (July 1926), 523.

27 “With the Passionists in China,” Sign 5:5 (December 1925): 216. Paul A. Cohen, China and Christianity: The Missionary Movement and the Growth of Chinese Antiforeignism, 1860–1870 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1963) mentions similar types of rumors dating back to the nineteenth century.

28 For a comparison between Catholic and Protestant conversion stories in China, see Albert Wu, “Catholic and Protestant Individuals in Nineteenth-Century German Missionary Periodicals,” Church History, vol. 82, no. 2 (June 2013): 394–98.

29 Dries, The Missionary Movement, 134–38, discusses the formulation of strategies designed to win over the children, including the building of orphanages and schools to reach out to children.

30 Fr. William Westhoven, “Bright Spots Amid the Gloom,” “With the Passionists in China,” Sign 5:11 (June 1926): 481–82.

31 Sign 6:11 (June 1927).

32 Fr. William Westhoven, “With the Passionists in China,” Sign 5:11 (June 1926): 482.

33 Fr. William Westhoven, “With the Passionists in China,” Sign 5:11 (June 1926): 482.

34 Passionist China Collection 800.06_004.008. “The Squad. Sr. Carita, Fr. Beckes, C.P, Woxi.” Passionist China Collection 800.06_004.010. “Woxi football team at ease.”

35 Passionist China Collection 800.06_004.009. “Girl's Football Team.”

36 As Sr. Carita explains, the Sisters preferred to give the children short haircuts because lice was a common problem at the orphanage. Pendergast, Havoc in Hunan.

37 The Woxi mission was emblematic of Passionist ambitions in West Hunan to plant churches and save souls. Passionist Fr. Cuthbert O’Gara (who rose to become the Bishop of Yuanling in the 1930s) planned and built the entire church and surrounding compound on the site of a former rice paddy. The compound consisted of a church (called Christ the King Church), a rectory (priests’ residences), sisters’ quarters, orphanage, schools (girls and boys), old-age home, bell tower, and several playing fields, including tennis and basketball courts. The layout of the mission accords with the missionaries’ vision of a modern American institution (in contrast to the European missions inherited from the Augustinians that did not make space for play and recreation). The lucky orphans of Woxi [Wuxi] get to enjoy a large play yard. Its parishioners were better off than most in that region because of the presence of gold in that village. Pendergaast, Havoc in Hunan.

38 See Catherine A. Lutz and Jane L. Collier, Reading National Geographic (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993) on added intimacy enabled by the small group portrait format.

39 Passionist China Collection 800.06_012.066 (left to right): “Suey into every mischief but she has a beautiful disposition, Rose Mary holds the dog, Beatrice and Anna were legally adopted by t[w]o Christian families this week December 20, 1936. Woxi.”

40 Gullestad, Picturing Pity, and Curtis, “Depicting Distant Suffering.”