Rediscovering the great Jesuit missionary to China: Matteo Ricci
An
illustration depicts Jesuit Father Matteo Ricci in traditional Chinese
clothing. The 16th-century missionary to China is well known by the
country's Catholics. (CNS photo/Nancy Wiechec) On Friday, Nov. 15, the Pontifical Gregorian University in Rome hosted an international conference on Matteo Ricci, the famous 16th-century Jesuit missionary to China and one of the university’s most famous alumni.
The conference, titled “Matteo Ricci: A Heritage of Friendship, Dialogue and Peace,” not only looked back to the 16th century, revisiting the life and mission of Ricci in China; it also reviewed developments in Rome and China over the past 40 years that witnessed what one might call a rediscovery—or certainly a re-evaluation—by the church of the Jesuit missionary’s contribution to evangelization and Christianity in China.
The conference was organized by the Society of Jesus, the Archives of the Society of Jesus and Georgetown University. Federico Lombardi, S.J., postulator of Ricci’s canonization cause, acted as moderator. It brought together about 150 people, including university professors, Chinese priests and students and leading figures from the Vatican involved in the dialogue with China, including Cardinal Pietro Parolin, the secretary of state. Other significant figures included Arturo Sosa, S.J., the superior general of the Jesuits.
The aim of the conference, Father Lombardi said, was “to celebrate the memory and the mission of Matteo Ricci” with an emphasis on “the exploratory dialogue” conducted by this great pioneering missionary in the Chinese capital. Today, he said, Ricci is “a figure of reference and inspiration” for the church and its dialogue with China.
Father Sosa emphasized the central significance of Matteo Ricci for Jesuit missionary activity and said he should not be seen as “an isolated giant” but as one deeply rooted in the church’s evangelizing effort.
Ricci was born in Macerata, Italy, on Oct. 5, 1552, two months before St. Francis Xavier, the first great Jesuit missionary to the East, died from a fever on Shangchuan Island while waiting for a boat to take him to mainland China. Ricci later realized Xavier’s dream of reaching China.
Ricci entered the Jesuit novitiate in Rome on 1571 at the age of 19, and from then until 1577 studied at the Collegio Romano (today’s Gregorian University), founded by St. Ignatius Loyola in 1551. He studied not only theology and philosophy but also astronomy, mathematics and geography—subjects that would later serve him well at the Chinese imperial court.
Ricci first arrived on the east coast of China, in present-day Macau, in 1582. He moved to Nanchang in 1595 and lived there as a Confucian man of letters. At his residence, he had a map of the world that became a source of great interest to the Chinese literati. Ricci spent 28 years in China until his death in 1610 in Peking, where he was buried.
For centuries after his death, the memory of Ricci was eclipsed, partly because of the fallout from the Chinese rites controversy—a debate over to what extent Confucian philosophy and rituals, particularly the veneration of ancestors, were compatible with Christianity.
Pope Pius XII “definitively closed” the Chinese rites controversy on Dec. 8, 1939, when he issued a decree authorizing Chinese Catholics to observe their ancestral rites, Cardinal Parolin said, and recent popes “have re-evaluated the figure of Matteo Ricci.”
Papal praise
Cardinal Parolin recalled that Popes John Paul II, Benedict XVI and Francis each highlighted Ricci’s work toward the inculturation of the Catholic faith and considered him a point of reference for the Holy See’s dialogue with China. This dialogue, he added, reached a new level following the signing of the provisional agreement on the nomination of bishops on Sept. 22, 2018.
Cardinal Parolin noted that Pope John Paul II extolled Matteo Ricci’s life and legacy on several occasions. “The Jesuit, Father Matteo Ricci, understood and appreciated Chinese culture fully from the beginning, and his example should serve as an inspiration to many,” John Paul II said in an address in Manila in 1981. “Others, at times, did not show the same understanding.”
Pope John Paul II spoke again about Ricci in 1982, addressing a conference on the fourth centenary of Ricci’s arrival in China. The pope recalled then that Ricci, who learned the Chinese language and customs, became “a bridge between two cultures” through a “personal lifestyle” that was not just intellectual but also virtuous. His inculturation of the Gospel message showed the Chinese people that it is possible to be a good Christian and a good Chinese citizen.
Cardinal Parolin said Pope Benedict XVI also praised Ricci in a 2010 greeting to pilgrims commemorating the 400th anniversary of the missionary’s death. The pope recalled that Ricci “reached the end of his earthly life in Peking on 11 May 1610. The extraordinary privilege he was granted, unthinkable for a foreigner, of being buried in Chinese soil is proof of the high esteem in which he was held, both in the Chinese capital and at the Imperial Court itself.”
A model of encounter
At the time of Ricci’s death, there were 16 Jesuit missionaries in China, and some 3,000 Catholics, including a handful of literati. “[It was] a very modest reality, a totally insignificant percentage, in an immense country of some 150-200 million inhabitants, even then the most populous in the world,” the Rev. Gianni Crivillere, an Italian PIME missionary and Ricci scholar who spent many years in China, commented afterward in an article on Asia News.
Father Criviller, who was president of the historical commission for the canonization cause of Ricci, added: “The mission in China is eloquent evidence that the significance of a Christian experience cannot be measured in terms of accounting results but by its evangelical quality. And after more than 400 years, the Christian experience of a handful of foreign missionaries and a few Chinese Catholics is still a light that continues to illuminate the present, a precious mine from which we continue to draw for new meaning and direction.”
At the conference, Cardinal Parolin concluded his talk by speaking about Pope Francis, who holds up Ricci as an example of the type of inculturation that is essential for evangelization. In a way, the cardinal said, Ricci embodies the “culture of encounter” that Francis speaks about; the pope has presented him not so much as a figure of the past but rather “a prophetic figure” who nourishes the hope of encounter today.
The church in China
The final speaker at the morning’s session was Cardinal Stephen Chow, the Jesuit bishop of Hong Kong, who offered a summary history of the Catholic Church in China, mainly from 1949 to the present day. He recalled that when the Jesuits arrived in the 16th century, China had a worldview that saw itself at the center and Confucian culture as the core, rendering other cultural-religious entities as foreign. He said the Jesuits “engaged in the intellectual apostolate with socio-cultural elites, those who could examine and recommend to the authority to consider the new elements coming into China.”
As a result, Cardinal Chow said, “Christianity was not categorized as heresy to be suppressed but rather a novel teaching that is compatible with the Chinese culture.” He said that “this favorable treatment lasted until the time [of the Chinese rites controversy] when some Catholic elements in China denied the cultural bases of ancestral worship leading to the banning of Catholicism.”
During the 1950s and 1960s, he said, the communist government that came to power in 1949 introduced rapid social transformation and sought “to purge the country from Western control.” “The missionaries who had leadership roles in the church were identified with the other foreigners and were expelled from China,” Cardinal Chow said. “Only local Chinese clergies were allowed to remain and run the church by themselves.”
He said social campaigns “to transform China into a socialist reality” then began, and “the Chinese Catholic Church was subjected under this national transformation program into a nationalistic institution under the civil authority, like all civil groups, in the country.” This radical transformation “ended in the total decimation of all traditional cultures and institutions, including all religions during the Cultural Revolution.”
During the 1980s, the cardinal recalled, as China opened its doors and adopted a pragmatic policy to induce foreign capital investment and know-how, “the church was re-constituted as part of the overall reform initiative,” and “religion was gradually transformed from the notion as the opium of the people to a neutral entity allowed to operate on its own.”
In the 1990s, “the authorities adopted a non-supportive yet non-interference policy, unless religion was found to have crossed the line of social and national security,” Cardinal Chow said. In this situation, the Catholic Church enjoyed a “lenient policy and began its rapid rise.” Moreover, “a common consensus that religion could be beneficial to the development of the Chinese society was formed,” and the Catholic Church on the mainland “took advantage of such pragmatic policy to increase its social contact beyond the walls of the church into education, charity and disaster relief projects, witnessing Catholic faith in many social spheres in China.”
Cardinal Chow said the Chinese authorities feel that China, the second largest economy in the world, “is now at the point where it can construct its unique characteristics vis-à-vis the international community, and all social institutions are now going through this ‘Chineseness’ or ‘Sinicization’ process.” In view of this, he said, the government set up “a highly centralized authority under President Xi” to create “a Sino-centric nationalistic society.”
He said, “It is against this background that the Chinese Catholic Church faces a new reality—an indigenized community under the civil authority with increasing incorporation of Chinese ‘elements,’ to eventually becoming part of the integrated Chinese society.”
“Just as what those Jesuits in the Ming/Qing courts did for the church to gain acceptance in China,” Cardinal Chow said, “many local scholars were, in the past few decades, trying to shape the mindset of the authority for a more open attitude toward the church.” He concluded, “What is important for now is that the content of Sinicization of the Catholic Church has yet to be engraved in stone, which means we can very much be part of the author.”
Recognizing Ricci
While Cardinal Chow referred mainly to the Jesuits rather than to Ricci, it was clear from the conference that Matteo Ricci has gained almost universal recognition for what he achieved in terms of the encounter between cultures and inculturation of the faith. But it was not only the popes and the church that recognized Ricci’s merits; the authorities of the People’s Republic of China did so, too, listing him among the important figures of Chinese history in the “Millennium Museum” in Beijing, where only two foreigners are remembered: Marco Polo and Matteo Ricci.
But—as a 2022 article on the official website of the Society of Jesus pointed out—this universal recognition of his merits has not been accompanied until now by much attention to, or appreciation of “the greatness of his spiritual figure and virtues.”
That could change, however, as the conference at the Gregorian took place almost two years after Pope Francis, on Dec. 17, 2022, recognized that Matteo Ricci had lived the Christian life and virtues “to a heroic degree,” putting him on the path to sainthood.
Beatification is the next step on the journey to being declared a saint, but that requires a miracle through Ricci’s intercession. “We need a miracle!,” Father Lombardi told me at the conference. In other words, the cause needs to inspire devotion to the Venerable Matteo Ricci and for the faithful to pray for a miracle through the intercession of the man who has proved to be a bridge between China and the West and a prophetic figure for evangelization in Asia and around the world.
Gerard O’Connell is America’s Vatican correspondent and author of The Election of Pope Francis: An Inside Story of the Conclave That Changed History. He has been covering the Vatican since 1985.
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