To say that the 1960s were a time of upheaval for Americans is, by now, a cliché. Yet for American Catholics in particular, the disruption was twofold. In addition to all of the profound social and political changes that one associates with “the Sixties,” Catholics found themselves faced with a Church that was undergoing a transformation. The Second Vatican Council, which one church historian has described as the “most significant religious event” in five centuries, begat striking alterations in the ancient Church. It was, according to another, “the defining event of the Catholic Sixties.” In the same year that the Council concluded – 1965 – President Lyndon Johnson decided to commit 200,000 troops to fight the war in Vietnam.

Recounting the experiences of Wu Ruyin and his son, Wu Weiying, who between them held the title of Marquis of Gongshun in succession from 1599 to 1643, this chapter and the preceding one address two overarching issues. First, they explore how institutions and administrators persevere amidst crisis. It may be tempting to caricature late Ming bureaucrats as obdurately clinging to the past, but men like Wu Ruyin and Wu Weiying adapted to new demands by incorporating new technologies and new ways within established frameworks. Few felt the need to abandon the “institutions of the imperial forefathers.” Second, these chapters examine the place of merit nobles in late Ming society. Wu Ruyin and Wu Weiying were not men of the people, but by function of their social circles, they actively engaged in the capital’s broader cultural activities, and by virtue of their jobs as senior military administrators, they commanded surprisingly detailed information about common soldiers and officers, war captives and refugees, and even rumors circulating through Beijing. This chapter first examines Wu Ruyin’s role as the emperor’s representative in ceremony, which included officiating at rituals, offering prayers, and hosting banquets, and second, considers his experiences as a military administrator in a time of acute challenges.

Antiwar protest and debate about morality both increase with the US invasion of Cambodia. The killings at Kent State University unleash protests at numerous Catholic colleges and universities. An increasing number of clergy, religious, and even bishops speak out against the war. Pressure builds on the hierarchy to issue a definitive statement of the morality of the war. At year’s end, the bishops issue their “Resolution on Southeast Asia,” which finally does so.

Using Wu Jin’s tenure as Marquis of Gongshun from 1449 to 1461, this chapter explores issues of ability and difference in a time of upheaval at the Ming court. It traces the Wu family as it shifted from immigrant family at the empire’s western edge to members of the capital elite. The chapter also explores the divergent experiences of other Mongolians and merit noble families within the Ming polity.

As the situation in South Vietnam deteriorates, American Catholics wrestle with the morality of American intervention in Vietnam in light of Vatican II. A triangular relationship develops among those who support US intervention, those who oppose it, and those who are critical of the methods employed by the US and its South Vietnamese ally.

The fifth and final chapter analyses how people of African (and indigenous) descent practiced Catholicism in the 1770s to 1790s. It puts villages in the interior Caribbean and haciendas in Antioquia in conversation with the mines of the Pacific, revealing both how there were longstanding rural autonomies and possibilities and how they could be swiftly destroyed by the arrival of conquering missionaries or visiting judges. The chapter illustrates how Catholicism was at once a mode of colonial governance and transcultural, local, and interstitial. The first section examines the reducciones of arrochelados by the conquering friar Joseph Palacios de La Vega and is followed by a discussion of trials for illicit relations in Antioquia as part of a violent Enlightenment drive to reorder colonial (and especially black) life. It concludes with an analysis of baptismal and confirmation records from the mines of Nóvita, which reveal the extent to which people of African descent and the worlds of the mines of the Pacific transformed Catholicism.