Different Paths to the Same Destination: Catholic Ordination and Folk Religion in Rural North China

ABSTRACT This article examines how Catholicism and folk religion interact through the annual ordination ceremony of new priests in rural North China. Catholics interpret ordination as a sacrament of divine grace; folk believers, drawing on assumptions about marriage as the marker of male adulthood, understand it as a surrogate wedding. This interpretation circulates not only among non‐Catholics but within Catholic families, among parents of ordained men. The ceremony operates as a site of social convergence sustained by kinship obligations rather than shared belief. The adoption of the wedding interpretation within Catholic families as an emotionally coherent framework for a son's departure from domestic life reveals a process that this article terms interpretive permeability. Shared ritual occasions in religiously plural communities can become conduits through which culturally produced meanings cross religious boundaries rather than sites of parallel participation, sustained by the shared recognition of a rite of passage.