Resurgam: China’s Six Bishops of 1926 and the Samist Photograph Collection

This study details the extraordinary Samist photograph collection of the six Chinese bishops who were consecrated in St. Peter’s, the Vatican’s monumental Baroque basilica in 1926. It also considers how this documentary photography continued to record their lives as bishops after they returned to their native China to construct and reconstruct a new edifice of Chinese Catholicism. Among the insights resulting from this archival research is evidence of a growing hierarchical inversion as these bishops and their successors began to supplant the long and persistent ecclesial dominance of a Western episcopacy.