The Tale of a Scottish Catholic Missionary Priest in China

Francis Chisholm is a compassionate and humble priest whose vocation emerged from a crucible of suffering. His parents were murdered in anti-Catholic riots in Scotland, his guardians mistreat him, and his sweetheart commits suicide. He is sent to China where he establishes a flourishing Catholic mission amid desperate poverty, civil war, plague, and the hostility of his superiors. Recognized as A.J. Cronin's best novel, The Keys of the Kingdom is a gripping and thoughtful tale of a man called to do good in an imperfect world.

Thus reads the blurb from the back cover of A.J. Cronin's The Keys of the Kingdom (1941), one of the most enjoyable novels I've read in some time. While perhaps not a great piece of literature, it was an extremely well-written and very moving page-turner.


Written before the Second Vatican Council, the novel has a decidedly post-conciliar feel about it, but that does not condemn it. The protagonist can best be understood by his Christian name; both Father Chisholm and Saint Francis of Assisi were Holy Fools who met with some misunderstanding from the more worldly (by necessity) hierarchy of the Church, but won out in the end.

A most interesting episode occurs when his Pacifism is put to the test. Also illuminating is an episode illustrating the "little-remarked-upon story," as Joseph Bottum explains in his introduction, that "the real origins of modern Christian unity are found in the missions fields of China and Burma and Indonesia—where much of the ancient feud of European Protestantism and Catholicism was set aside in a kind of ecumenism of the trenches."

Father Chisholm acknowledges the truths found in Confucianism, Taoism, and Buddhism, but is never guilty of Syncretism. The author never falls into the trap of exoticism in his descriptions of China. Among the most remarkable chapters of the book occurred in a remote village Father Chisholm chanced upon, whose Kakure Kirishitan-like inhabitants had been converted three centuries earlier by a lost Portuguese missionary and maintained the Faith as best they could without access to the priesthood or the sacraments. I pictured it looking like these photos from a post of mine last year — Catholic Tibet: