Catholic Church in Sichuan

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 doing evangelism.

The Yongzheng edict of 1724 proscribed Christianity in the Qing empire and declared foreign missionaries personae non gratae. Catholics in Sichuan learned how to make do without ordained priests. When the Qing became ever more possessed by the idea that Catholics belonged to a "heretical" organization (as contrasted with the "orthodoxy" of 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. As a consequence, significant numbers 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 lifting of missionary controls in 1858.

Nevertheless, by 1870, the Sichuanese Church 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.

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 Peter Luo Beizhan died in 2001.

While works on the Catholic missions in the capitals of the Chinese empires are abundant (Chang'an, Khanbaliq/Karakorum, Nanjing, Beijing), few Catholic phenomena have been analysed in the Sichuan Province.