Each year, Catholics from all over Taiwan join the Madonna procession at the Wanjin Basilica of the Immaculate Conception in southern Pingtung County. As the procession passes by local homes, firecrackers explode and locals shout in Mandarin, “God bless you” and “Peace.”
Those joining the procession wave cheerfully at each other, gathering behind banners representing their home cities and counties in Taiwan—Taipei, Tainan and Kaohsiung among them. Conversations come to a halt when the firecrackers make talking impossible.
This veneration of Mary is one of the largest annual Catholic gatherings in Taiwan, held annually during the Feast of the Immaculate Conception on Dec. 8. The large crowd belies the real numbers of the faithful in Taiwan, who make up about 1 percent of the population.
While most of the world is attentive to a kind of identity crisis that has bedeviled the relationship between mainland China and what Beijing considers its “breakaway province” of Taiwan, within Taiwan itself a small Catholic community is struggling with its own identity challenges. Many Catholics here grimly assess the current state of the church in Taiwan as “perilous.”
Mary and Mazu in Taiwanese consciousness
Lin Xuanhan, a Catholic from Tainan, took part in the procession for the first time in 2025. He said it shows how Catholicism is steeped in Taiwan’s culture, as it incorporates the “Taiwanese style and Taiwanese emotional expressions of hospitality and welcome.”
Some see parallels with the goddess Mazu, Taiwan’s most prominent female deity. Believed to protect fishermen and bless families, she is honored in many folk processions and ceremonies. During Mazu processions, locals crawl under the palanquin, the chair holding the Mazu statue, in the hope of receiving blessings.
“In Taiwan, many people practice a blend of Buddhism, Taoism and local folk traditions. They don’t always identify strictly with one organized religion,” Mr. Lin said. Some Taiwanese think Mother Mary is like Mazu, so followers of folk traditions respond to Mary with the same reverence. In the past, some have crawled beneath the statue of Mary during the Wanjin procession in the hope of receiving a blessing from “Mazu.”
“But that is forbidden now by the church authorities,” Mr. Lin said.
‘Do Catholics worship Mary?’
In Taiwan, religious imagery and syncretism surrounding Mazu is one explanation for a common misconception among the nation’s larger community of Taiwanese Protestants that Catholics worship Mary.
“I think the confusion with Mary is related to Chinese traditional religion,” said Pascal Chang, a master’s student at National Cheng Kung University in Tainan. Last November, Mr. Chang led a two-hour faith-sharing lesson with members of both the Tainan Youth Center Catholic community and a nearby Presbyterian church. As part of a two-part interreligious dialogue, Mr. Chang prepared responses to common questions about Catholic beliefs.
“Mary in Mandarin is sheng mu. Sheng in English means sacred and mu means mother. Because Taiwanese traditional religion has Mazu, who is also considered a sacred mother, the title is seen as the same.”
Hung Wenhui, a lay missionary ministering to college students in the south of Taiwan, acknowledged the confusion among Taiwan’s other Christians about the Catholic religion.
“When you go into a church, you see Mary in the middle. The other Christians in Taiwan think Catholics worship Mary.” Ms. Hung said, adding that her friends have asked her “a thousand times” about the differences between Catholics and other Christians in how they see Mary.
A minority religion
There were about 13,000 Catholics in Taiwan when the country began receiving refugees fleeing civil war on the mainland in 1949. At the time, the Kuomintang-led government in Taipei cooperated with Catholic organizations like the Maryknoll Society to provide aid from the United States to the Taiwanese people, many of whom were deeply impoverished.
The Nationalist Party government supported the church’s growth in Taiwan with social, political and financial assistance. Twenty years later, after the arrival of more refugees from mainland China and a resurgence of foreign missionaries and aid groups who arrived to support the refugees, the number of Catholics in Taiwan had grown to 300,000.
Despite this early rapid growth and continuing support from the government, Catholics in Taiwan remain a tiny minority today. In Taiwan, Buddhists, the religiously unaffiliated and Daoists (also spelled Taoists) each represent about 25 percent of the population. Another 6 percent are Protestant Christian.
Bishop John Baptist Huang Min-Cheng, O.F.M., of Tainan, who heads the youth committee of the Taiwanese bishops’ conference, puts the current count of Taiwanese Catholics at about 230,000, making Catholics among the nation’s smaller religious communities.
Chen Huici, a fourth-generation Catholic, said the Taiwanese Catholic community is so small that many people in it know or are related to each other, even if they are sometimes not aware of it. She encountered a Taiwanese Catholic at a youth group event. Later at a gathering that included her father’s large extended family, she discovered that she and her new friend were cousins.
Daniel Joseph Bauer, S.V.D., has lived in Taiwan for over 40 years. Father Bauer said his order has difficulty attracting and holding young Catholics. “The minority status of Catholics in Taiwan makes it challenging for young people to be proud of their faith,” he said.
Catholics also perceive differences in their approach to life and society compared with mainstream Taiwanese. Ms. Hung explains that many Taiwanese focus on personal satisfaction and work or their professional lives without spending too much time pondering spirituality or the afterlife. “They focus on jobs, go abroad and buy things. Most of my friends are crazy about K-pop more than anything else.”
Ms. Hung disagrees with this focus on personal and material contentment because she believes that a life with God is not always about being happy. “Some people think that if you believe in God, you will live well and be happy. I do not agree. I think there will be a little bit of pain and struggle. Jesus asks us to love and be of service.”
Generational divides
Bishop Huang urges young Catholics to get more involved with their parishes to help sustain the church in Taiwan, but many continue to drop out.
Ms. Chen said that older Catholics in Taiwan have not succeeded in passing on the faith to younger generations. “Young people are more skeptical and want reasons to be part of the religion, and older people cannot give them a reason. The elder generation makes their religious practices habits, but most of them do not know why to believe.”
“I think the biggest problem in the Taiwan Catholic Church is the decrease of the population of youth,” Mr. Chang said. He said that because the church has few vocations, older parishioners will strongly encourage young people to get baptized and pressure young men to become priests.
“Imagine you go to church and want to have a good conversation with God and what you hear [instead] is elder people and sometimes some priests and bishops saying this to you,” Mr. Chang said. The experience, he said, does not make Taiwanese Catholic youth feel comfortable exploring their faith freely.
Ms. Hung said that family and culture play a strong role in whether young Catholics keep their faith. In Taiwanese families, fathers are traditionally “silent and authoritative. They do not know how to…connect with young people,” she said.
Mr. Chang believes this plays out in the roles and relationships with youth that Taiwanese priests, as spiritual fathers, maintain.
In a society that has rapidly changed since the late 1980s, when martial law ended and the country began democratization, a deep intergenerational divide has opened among Catholics in Taiwan. Fewer and fewer baptized young Catholics return to parish life when they reach adulthood, and on many campuses, Catholic student groups have ceased activities.
“The church no longer speaks in a way that inspires the young,” said Michael Chang, a Ph.D. student and teacher who has researched the Catholic Church for over 20 years. “A large number of young Catholics have left because they see too many contradictions. The church is deeply committed to works of charity, yet at the same time seems politically indifferent within Taiwan and often unwelcoming toward [L.G.B.T. people].”
Taiwan is the first country in Asia to legalize same-sex marriage. Many young people have reacted to the church’s resistance to the law by accusing priests of intolerance.
Yvon Pan, a Filipino-Taiwanese raised in Taiwan, recalls homilies and prayers of the faithful during Masses related to the same-sex marriage debate in 2019. “In prayers of the faithful each week, they would write and pray for the passing of [a bill] to protect the sanctity of marriage ‘as God intended it,’” Ms. Pan said. She decided to leave the church because of its theology on marriage.
Mr. Chang does not believe the same-sex marriage debate played a role in decreasing youth interest. “For Catholics in Taiwan, this is not very significant because I remember I did not see a lot of Catholics talk about this.” Mr. Chang said. “The Catholics who did talk about this did not split in the way Protestant churches here did. I heard from my Protestant friends that many people left [their church communities] over this issue.”
“This is difficult because the old Catholic people are not accepting of gay people, so sometimes they cannot speak to each other,” Bishop Huang said. “I do not know how to face this problem.”
A way forward
In Taiwan, the most prominent political parties are the Kuomintang, which accepts that Taiwan and mainland China are part of one nation, and the Democratic Progressive Party, which supports an independent Taiwan. According to Pascal Chang, people within the Taiwanese Catholic Church tend to be Kuomintang supporters and Taiwan’s Protestants mostly support the D.P.P., but the divisive political environment of the country makes it difficult to openly discuss politics.
Mr. Chang said that the Catholics who are Kuomintang supporters nevertheless are concerned about what might happen if the mainland were to regain control over Taiwan. “The Catholics who are K.M.T., including myself, know that the Catholic Church in China is dealing with pressure from the government. Our reaction is to pray for the Catholic Church in China. It does not go further than that because there is nothing we can do,” he said.
Catholic clergy are similarly divided. “Bishops ordained in the last century identified more with [mainland] China,” Father Bauer said. “Bishops who were ordained in the last 10 to 15 years identify with Taiwan [independence] more.”
How political and cultural identity among Taiwanese Catholics evolves in the future will depend on the grounding in faith young Catholics may receive today. Many missionaries and religious brothers and sisters believe young Taiwanese Catholics need greater accompaniment and community. They say that at all levels of the church, there is not enough focus on effective youth formation.
Xiao Cui, a lay missionary who has worked with young Catholics for 22 years, said that leadership in the church should focus less on raising money and building new churches. “Nobody cares too much about the church buildings. The people in the church are the living church.”
Bishop Huang agreed that building a new church requires a lot of energy but disagreed that the Taiwan church needed to de-emphasize such efforts. “In a diocese,” he said, “there are many activities and groups. It is only one part of our job.”
He said young people are welcome to come to church, but youth involvement in parish life “is very weak.” “We are very open. They are most welcome. The problem is they do not like to come. They are busy,” he said.
Ms. Hung believes that sending young people to World Youth Day or planning large activities like Taiwan’s Eucharistic Congress, set for 2027, will not do the job of re-evangelization. “Without community, young people will lose their faith. If you want young people to stay in the church, you need a lot of patience and time,” Ms. Hung said.
“What is most important is creating small groups while in junior and senior high school,” Ms. Hung said. “Bishops should hire more youth ministers and help young people stay in the church,” she added. “I still meet a lot of young people who have a desire to work in the church and have a mission for serving, but the jobs for youth ministers have a lot of responsibilities and the pay is too small.”
Jean Dusanter, C.S.J., who served as the chaplain and director of the Tainan Youth Center for over seven years, said sponsoring such a youth and pastoral center is very important. “I hear in the parishes [without pastoral centers] in Tainan, no one takes care of people who are new and talks to them and invites them to events,” he said. “If you have this kind of center, it is a big strength.”
It is often said that the future of the church is its youth. That could be too great a burden to put on a declining number of young faithful in Taiwan—a rapidly changing society struggling with complex political and generational divides. The Taiwanese Catholic Church makes up just 1 percent of the island nation’s population. How its leaders approach youth in Taiwan will determine how that percentage might change.
Politics
Faith
Culture
Vatican
Scripture
Podcasts