By 1952 the Chinese Communist Party had suppressed all organized resistance to its regime and stood unopposed, or so it has been believed. Internal party documents—declassified just long enough for historian Paul Mariani to send copies out of China—disclose that one group deemed an enemy of the state held out after the others had fallen. A party report from Shanghai marked “top-secret” reveals a determined, often courageous resistance by the local Catholic Church. Drawing on centuries of experience in struggling with the Chinese authorities, the Church was proving a stubborn match for the party. Mariani tells the story of how Bishop (later Cardinal) Ignatius Kung Pinmei, the Jesuits, and the Catholic Youth resisted the regime’s punishing assault on the Shanghai Catholic community and refused to renounce the pope and the Church in Rome. Acting clandestinely, mirroring tactics used by the previously underground CCP, Shanghai’s Catholics persevered until 1955, when the party arrested Kung and 1,200 other leading Catholics. The imprisoned believers were later shocked to learn that the betrayal had come from within their own ranks. Though the CCP could not eradicate the Catholic Church in China, it succeeded in dividing it. Mariani’s secret history traces the origins of a deep split in the Chinese Catholic community, where relations between the “Patriotic” and underground churches remain strained even today.

God wants you, but He wants you "strong" in His supernatural power. From the very first days of our membership in the Mystical Body of Christ, we are, in essence, commissioned officers in the Church Militant. This Church Militant Field Manual will test you in your resolve to become strong in the Lord and His mighty power. You will also learn the special operations (special ops) techniques and procedures for search and rescue missions of fallen comrades (family and friends whose faith has grown weak). Discover what it means to be "God strong."

The role of the Portuguese and Spanish missionaries in the overseas expansion of the Iberian powers.

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St. Robert Bellarmine's theological writings on the Church of Christ constitute an invaluable treasure not only for Catholics, but for the commonweal and eternal salvation of humanity itself. This is no slight exaggeration. His is the very first independent theological and dogmatic treatise on the Church. Patristic and medieval Catholic authors treated on the mystery of the Church, to be sure; but they provided no free-standing treatment de ecclesia.Bellarmine's is the first and the best of its kind. From the Foreword St. Robert Bellarmine's On the Church Militant is the first ever English language translation of his treatise De Ecclesia Militante, dealing with questions such as, what is the Church? Who is in the Church? How do we define it? Not only does Bellarmine define it, he refutes false notions of the Church, such as the Protestant contention that the Church is invisible, as well as ancient heresies that bear upon the modern debate such as, are only the good in the Church? Are sinners also in the Church? As always, Bellarmine answers the question directly from Scripture, the Fathers and right reason to show us clearly that there is a visible Church composed of those united in the same profession of faith and unity of the Sacraments, irrespective of their interior disposition. This is the latest from the Bellarmine translation project, which aims to translate the whole of Bellarmine's De Controversiis into English. For more info, visit http://www.mediatrixpress.com.