Hong Kong Sunday Examiner, Sunday 5 July 2009. MACAU (SE): “We can compare the approach taken to missionary work by the Jesuit missionary to China, Father Matteo Ricci, with that of St. Paul,” Father Gianni Criveller told a forum at the Macau Ricci Institute on the evening of May 11 to mark the 399th anniversary of the death of the remarkable Jesuit.
St. Paul had a strategy,” he said. “He learned from his experience and thought about what he was saying and how his listeners received and understood his words, especially among people who were not Jews. He looked at reality and reacted to it.”
He added, “Ricci did the same. He was different from many of the missionaries of his era. Street preaching was popular then. Missionaries would stand in the plaza holding a big cross and give out their message, without really worrying whether anyone understood it or not. The important thing was to proclaim.”
He said, ”However, Ricci did learn from his mistakes and was creative in developing new approaches to announcing the gospel among a people, whom he knew were vastly different from anything Christianity had ever encountered before.”
In his talk, entitled Matteo Ricci’s Ascent to Beijing (1583 to 1610), Father Criveller told the group that Ricci had been given a clear directive from his superiors to get to Beijing. However, this was a daunting task and he made lengthy stops between 1595 and 1601 along the way in Zhaoqing and Shaoguan in Guangdong, and later Nanchang, in Jiangxi, and Nanjing, in Jiangsu.
Many people view his life as a success,” the Italian priest from the Pontifical Institute for Foreign Missions said. However, he explained that Ricci did express great frustration at times, especially when his companions, whom he had put a lot of time into training, died untimely deaths. “He had an incredible ability to keep going, his dairies show that.”
He explained, “Ricci had a four character (Chinese) sentence which he used as a guideline for his mission work, which roughly translates as ‘complete Confucianism (use it as a platform to allow Christianity to give a religious dimension to the world) and oppose Buddhism’” (majority religion in China at the time).
He said that Ricci’s contribution to religion is often underestimated. “During his lifetime, he was not opposed,” Father Criveller noted. “He was only criticised after his death and although he is often placed in the context of the rites controversy, it happened about 30 years after he died.”
He added that he believes that historical figures should be allowed to speak for themselves. “Their own words should carry more weight than observations from either their own contemporaries or later historians. “They should be judged according to the standards of their time and place,” he added, “not those of a later age on a different continent.”
The Hong Kong-based priest said that Ricci has been criticised for using science as a trick in order to promote religion. “But he loved science,” Father Criveller said. “He belonged to the humanist era and believed in friendship, literature and conversation. He was a typical son of the Renaissance.” He added that although Ricci did not try to dialogue with religion, he did dress like a Buddhist scholar. “However, he did not pretend to be one,” he stressed. “He did not like it, but it was the only way to get acceptance and move around.”
Ricci has also been criticised for preaching Christianity without Christ and without the cross. “But in actual fact, the accusation is not true,” Father Criveller says. “But, he did it in a well considered and thought out manner.”
He explained that on his first attempt to get into Beijing in 1600, Ricci was intercepted by the minister of rights, Ma T’ang, who checked the gifts that he was carrying for the Ming emperor. Among them was a vividly painted crucifix. “Ma T’ang screamed,” Father Criveller said. “He interpreted it as black magic or something like the practice of sticking pins into a doll in the way of north American witchcraft. He accused Ricci of putting a magic spell on the emperor.”
When Ricci returned to Beijing in January the following year, he presented himself quite differently, and was given a warm welcome by the emperor. The scholar priest said that, from then on, Ricci did not talk openly about Christ, but about the Lord of Heaven. “But he did have a method. He distinguished between natural revelation and positive revelation. Its in his letters,” Father Criveller said. “Like St. Paul, he followed the logic that everyone can understand the revelation contained in natural reason. Then he spoke of positive revelation, which comes from the gift of faith, the bible and Church teaching. He wrote books on natural revelation, the light of reason and conscience.”
However, Father Criveller explained that Ricci also wrote a catechism, but misunderstanding arose because he used the word to mean an introduction to Christianity in dialogue with culture.
I also read in his dairies that he wrote another work on Christian doctrine, more like what we would call a catechism today. However, he never put his name on it, as he regarded it as a collection of Church teaching and not primarily his own work. It includes positive revelation, Church teaching and biblical references, as well as the cross and Christ. But he did not circulate it widely, only giving it to people whom he judged to be reading for the gift of faith. Like what we would call a catechumen today.”
Father Criveller said that Ricci would judge when someone was ready to read his catechism or be introduced to Church teaching and doctrine. “Zen Buddhism has a custom similar to that. The disciple progresses when the master thinks he is ready. However, that is not where Ricci learned to do things that way.”
He said that Ricci distinguished between the direct apostolate and the indirect. “He preached to those who wanted it. This was his method. Later Jesuits in Europe were keen on the cross, so some found his method shameful and criticised him for it.”
Father Criveller pointed out that Ricci was a man of exceptional ability. “Where ever he went he had to establish his own credibility,” he said. “He had to live on his wits and mostly had to support himself. He used his expertise in calculating the calendar and in astronomy to do this. He also believed that the physical and the metaphysical are both part of God’s creation, part of the same discourse.”
Father Criveller said it would be wrong to judge him as seeing a conflict between science and faith.
He added that Ricci also had an extraordinary memory. Although some scholars believe he tended to exaggerate his ability to learn Chinese, Father Criveller noted that he performed incredible feats of memory that are recorded by independent observers. “He also studied memory methodology and wrote a book on it.”
There will be major celebrations in Macerata, Italy, the town of Ricci’s birth, as well as in many other places throughout the world on May 11 next year to celebrate the 400th anniversary of his death.
(Source: China Infodoc Service, 06 July 2009)