CRGE E-Newsletter

The Chinese government and the Vatican drafted a compromise deal in 2018 to establish a process for selecting bishops for the Catholic Church in China. This agreement met strong criticism, but the Vatican recently reaffirmed its commitment to dialogue with China's national leadership and expressed its intent to extend the deal. It hopes the agreement will unite Catholics in China, who have been divided for 70 years between those who belong to official state churches and those who belong to unregistered churches loyal to Rome. The Vatican Secretary of State claimed in a recent address that it is a starting point for "greater fruit," highlighting that "for the first time in many decades all the Bishops in China are in communion with the Bishop of Rome." Critics contend that the deal severely undermines the moral witness of the Catholic Church.

The map above is from the Online Spiritual Atlas of China (OSAC) and plots official, state-sanctioned Catholic religious sites in China. OSAC was created by the Center on Religion and the Global East (CRGE) at Purdue University to allow users to visualize the spatial distribution of individual religious sites in China, as well as to see how provinces, prefectures, and counties compare with each other in terms of the number of religious sites. Currently, the data contains over 70,000 religious sites from all of China’s 31 provinces or provincial-level regions and municipalities.

To see this map and more, visit OSAC at globaleast.org. See also the 2018 print volume, Atlas of Religion in China: Social and Geographical Contexts by Fenggang Yang.