The Jesuit was the first Westerner to enter the
gates of the Forbidden City. He impressed the emperor by predicting
solar eclipses.
He created an enormous map that
gave Ming dynasty Chinese a sense of the rest of the world for the
first time. He spoke and read Chinese well enough to translate Euclid.
And even though, after 13 years in China, he began to dress in the
garb of an imperial scholar-official, his goal was to convert the
Chinese to Catholicism, which he did with some success and considerable
flair.
Now all he needs is a miracle or two. Literally.
In May, the Vatican body that overseas canonization pushed ahead the
case for making Ricci, who died in 1610, a saint.
The Catholic Church
has collected hundreds of documents that provide evidence of his “heroic
virtues” and has dubbed him a Servant of God, which puts him on the
first rung of four steps toward full-fledged sainthood.
In order for him
to advance, Ricci’s supporters must now find evidence of popular
devotion to Ricci, that prayers to him have cured fatal illnesses, or
that his body hasn’t decayed in the 403 years since his death.
That next step might take some time, says the Reverend Gianni
Criveller, the Hong Kong-based Jesuit assembling the historic documents
for the process.
Several years ago, Criveller says, a woman said she had
been cured of an illness after praying to Ricci, but church officials
didn’t think it was a strong-enough claim. The woman was sick, prayed to
Ricci, and got well, but her case did not meet the qualification of a
healing that was “complete, sudden, and cannot be explained according to
medical knowledge,” Criveller says, “To make a long story short, the
miracle is not there.”
Meanwhile, the real miracle might be something even more
elusive: reconciliation between the Catholic Church and Beijing.
Observers of Church-China relations say that the Vatican’s push to
beatify Ricci now could be a political maneuver, a way to repair
relations that have splintered.
Ricci has long been a symbol of how to get along with China. In a
catechism called “The True Meaning of the Lord of Heaven,” Ricci melded
Chinese culture and Catholicism, arguing through a Socratic dialogue
that Confucianism had in its beliefs the idea of a monotheistic being, shangdi.
“A lot of myth-making rests on his shoulders,” says Liam Brockey, a
historian of early modern Europe who is one of the foremost experts on
the Jesuits’ attempts to convert China. Dominican and Franciscan
missionaries felt Ricci had gone too far in drawing parallels between
the two belief systems, and that controversy in part led to the
Vatican’s later decision to reject the use of Chinese rites in Catholic services.
That’s what makes Matteo Ricci the “perfect image of what is a good
relationship between China and the West,” says the Reverend Michel
Marcil of the U.S. Catholic China Bureau in Berkeley, California.
Catholic-Chinese relations have had a rollercoaster history, with
much of the ride stalled in the dips. Ricci’s tolerance of Chinese
tradition included allowing new converts to continue to venerate their
ancestors in religious practice. This tolerance continued for a century,
until the Pope sent an emissary to Beijing to forbid missionaries from
continuing the practice on pain of excommunication.
The Kangxi emperor
called the pope’s decree “petty” and insisted that all missionaries sign
a certificate allowing Christian converts to continue practicing
ancestor worship. Many of the Jesuits agreed; other Catholic
missionaries refused and were expelled from China.
Rome reversed its decision against Chinese practices finally in 1939.
After 1949, of course, the issue was moot. But another low point came
in 2000, when Pope John Paul II canonized 120 Chinese martyrs,
many of them killed during the Boxer Rebellion—and did it on October 1,
the anniversary of the founding of the communist state.
Relations climbed back to a higher point in more recent years, as the
Chinese Catholic Patriotic Association—the Communist Party-run
bureaucracy that oversees the sanctioned Church in China—and the Vatican
agreed to appoint at least some bishops simultaneously.
But in 2011,
the Chinese Patriotic Catholic Association, the P.R.C.’sofficial Catholic Church, reversed that trend and started inserting its own bishops into church positions.
In July 2012, Shanghai Bishop Thaddeus Ma Daqin suddenly
resigned from the Chinese Catholic Patriotic Association during his
consecration. He received a standing ovation from members of the
congregation after that announcement, but then was put under house
arrest, where he remains today.
That, and the death in December of Shanghai’s 97-year-old
Bishop Jin Luxian, makes a gesture towards rapprochement even less
likely.
Jin had wanted Ricci to be beatified along with one of Ricci’s
contemporaries, named “Paul” Xu Guangqi. Xu, a scholar and colleague of
Matteo Ricci, lived simultaneously as a Catholic and an imperial
official, and translated several Western texts with Ricci.
The thinking,
says Thierry Meynard, International Director of the Beijing Center for
Chinese Studies, a Jesuit research center, was that the Chinese would be
more accepting of a dual beatification: one Westerner (and a good one
at that) and one Chinese. But with the recent twists, the Vatican has
put that process on hold.
In May, the newly anointed Pope Francis, a Jesuit, called upon the faithful to
be more like Matteo Ricci and the Jesuits to build bridges and
“establish a dialogue with all persons, even those who don’t share the
Christian faith.”
It is a sure sign that something deliberate is happening. “I think
the Vatican wants to make sure that if there is going to be a
beatification, it’s going to help the Catholic Church in China,” says
Meynard.
Whether that process is positive or not depends on your point of
view, says Wang Meixiu, a scholar of world religions at Beijing’s
Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. Catholics think the move is
positive, but “those outside of the church—they might think
differently,” she says. While the Chinese people have great respect for
Ricci, “at this sensitive period of time in history, to have him
beatified is another thing.”
Brockey wonders who is behind the push for sainthood. “I don’t know
whose interest it serves to have his beatification,” he says. But anyone
who reviewed the historic record would see that “the man was not a
saint, no two ways about it,” as Brockey says.
R. Po-Chia Hsia, author of A Jesuit in the Forbidden City and
a Professor of History at Penn State, agrees. “If he’s canonized, I’ll
have to eat my words,” he says.
Historian Jonathan Spence’s The Memory Palace of Matteo Ricci describes
scenes of Ricci shouting down Buddhist monks at dinner parties.
And
Ricci went to plenty of dinner parties, writes Spence. He called the
Chinese “barbarians” in letters home to friends and observed that
slavery might be one of God’s ways to eventually convert people to
Christianity.
Despite these shortcomings, beatification might be a fitting end for a
man who defied expectations in life and in death. When Ricci died in
1610, Emperor Wanli ordered an imperial burial in Beijing, an honor no
foreigner before him had been granted.
Today, his tomb rests in a cemetery lined with cypresses and pines in
a quiet corner of Beijing. Ironically, the Jesuit’s eternal resting
place—along with other Jesuit missionaries—is on the grounds of the
Beijing Administrative College, the municipal training center for cadres
of the Communist Party.
On March 13, the day that Francis, the first Jesuit Pope, was
elected, a fresh bouquet of flowers mysteriously appeared on Ricci’s
gravesite, says Phil Midland, a businessman who happened to be visiting
that day.
It seemed a fitting link between two ground-breakers.