China’s Last Jesuit

Charles J. McCarthy and the End of the Mission in Catholic Shanghai

This pivot chronicles the life of Charles McCarthy, a San Francisco native and Jesuit missionary to China, and tells the unique and compelling story of a young man who experienced confinement under the Japanese occupation, followed shortly by imprisonment by the Chinese Communists in the 1950’s. Through a study of McCarthy’s unique epistolary exchanges, it considers the intellectual life of a Catholic missionary, his ongoing fight for equal citizenship rights, illustrating how American Catholic missionaries in Maoist-era Shanghai navigated the social tensions of a nation-state in turbulent transition. This narrative explores Jesuit strategies of resistance and persistence in an era of oppression, and ideological and religious conflict as those sent to fill the missionary spots left by European men lost in the World Wars were caught up in China’s mid-century political upheavals.