This paper examines how religious translation and patronage functioned as forms of soft power by organizing attention toward symbolically sanctioned forms of female sanctity during the early modern transmission of Christianity from Europe to China. Focusing on the figure of Mary Magdalene, it explores how Jesuit translators reshaped female authority through hagiographic translation in late Ming China, transforming a potentially disruptive figure into a culturally intelligible and institutionally contained patron saint. Drawing on European hagiographic sources, including the Legenda Aurea, and their Jesuit Chinese adaptations—most notably Tianzhu shengjiao shengren xingshi (《天主聖教聖人行實》)—the paper argues that translation operated not merely as a vehicle of religious transmission but as an active site of attentional governance. Through selective narrative emphasis, moral reframing, and paratextual guidance, devotion was directed toward silence, moral exemplarity, and inner discipline, rendering female sanctity symbolically effective while structurally constrained. By conceptualizing patronage as a non-coercive mode of governance, this study demonstrates how attention was cultivated and sustained in ways that facilitated Christian expansion without challenging established hierarchies between missionaries and converts, clergy and laity, and men and women. The case of Mary Magdalene thus offers a genealogical perspective on contemporary debates about attention, power, and inequality, illuminating religion's long-standing capacity to manage authority through symbolic mediation across cultural and institutional contexts.