“Children of Fatima”: Chinese Catholic Anticommunism and the Political Imagination of China in Cold War Jamaica, 1945–57

In 1955, five Passionist missionaries arrived in Jamaica to support the Catholic mission. One of them, Fr. Cormac Shanahan, was born in Massachusetts in 1899, ordained in 1925, and served the Passionist mission in Hunan. In 1941, he lived in Chongqing, the wartime capital of China, where he served as a journalist and the editor of the China Correspondent. In May 1944, along with a few other western journalists, he visited Yan’an and aimed to ascertain the status of Catholic mission property and Catholic communicants. During his visit in Yan’an, he saw the positive and negative aspects of the Communist experience. After the People's Republic of China was founded, many missionaries left China and served somewhere else. Fr. Shanahan was assigned to work in Jamaica. Due to his experience in China, he was invited to deliver two addresses about China to the Jamaican public. During the Cold War ideological conflicts, his sharing about Red China and the Far East situation was playing an important role in constructing a set of discourse.

Since many Chinese Jamaicans were Catholic, this paper explores how Catholicism influenced their support for and recognition of the Chinese Republican government during the Chinese Civil War and the Cold War. Through an analysis of Catholic newspapers in Jamaica, I examine how Catholic networks and teachings provided an alternative discourse through which Chinese Jamaicans could imagine China. They were taught that they were "children of Fatima" and that they could help China by praying. As an institutional religion with systematic teachings and extensive networks, I argue that Catholicism offered a moral framework that legitimized and moralized Cold War fears, transforming them into daily practice.