China’s Last Jesuit

"This book provides a remarkable account of one of China's last Jesuits officially there as a missionary. Clark's study of Charles McCarthy's fascinating life relies upon an extensive number of Jesuit archives, and unique access to the documents and photographs from the McCarthy family's private collection. China's Last Jesuit delivers a refreshing example of rigorous scholarship and accessible prose, and shall be of value to anyone interested in the Society of Jesus' enduring encounter with China." (Michael Maher, SJ, Associate Professor of History & Director Catholic Studies, Gonzaga University and Author of: Jesuit Formation and Its Influence on the Methods of Matteo Ricci, in A Voluntary Exile: Chinese Christianity and Cultural Confluence since 1552) "China's Last Jesuit by Amanda Clark's is a lovingly crafted biography of a great and unsung hero of the Church in Maoist China. In a work that draws almost entirely on the personal correspondence of its subject, Fr. Charles J. McCarthy, S.J. (1911-91), Clark provides us with an in-depth portrait of a missionary priest whose career spanned the critical decades of the mid-twentieth century, and served as a living record of its violent and perverse upheavals." (Eric Cunningham, Professor of History, Gonzaga University and Author of: Zen Past and Present (2011) and Hallucinating the End of History (2007)) "Dr. Amanda C. R. Clark should be praised for having written this insightful, often moving, account of the ministry of Father Charles McCarthy (1911-1991), the last American Jesuit to be released from Maoist prison and expelled from China in 1957. By tracing Father McCarthy's journey from boyhood on to becoming a missionary in Shanghai and later in Manila, Dr. Clark adds a personal voice to the trans-Pacific links of Chinese Catholicism. Her masterly narrative throws light on the major revolutionary events that had shaped the Chinese Church in an era of great upheaval." (Joseph Tse-Hei Lee, Professor of History, Pace University, New York, US and Author of: The Bible and the Gun: Christianity in South China, 1860-1900 (2014))

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.

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.