The Chinese Rites Controversy (1610-1939)

Matteo Ricci's double wager

When Matteo Ricci died in Beijing on 11 May 1610, the China mission rested on a strategy of considerable doctrinal boldness. Taking up the intuition of Alessandro Valignano (1539-1606), Visitor General of the East, Ricci laid down as a principle that Chinese civilisation is not a false religion to be destroyed, but a grandiose civilisation whose elite, trained in the Confucian Four Books, can be approached through natural reason, European sciences and a patient dialogue with its classical texts^[1].

This intuition took shape in three concrete decisions, made between 1594 and 1603, which structured the entire subsequent strategy:

1. Adopting the dress of the ruxue — the robe and cap of the Confucian scholar — and no longer the Buddhist monk's habit, deemed degrading in the eyes of the elite^[2].
2. Tolerating the participation of Chinese Christians in the rites honouring the ancestors (food offerings, prostrations before the tablets of the dead) and in the ceremonies in honour of Confucius (twice a year in Confucian schools and temples), on condition that these rites be understood as civil acts of filial piety and civic gratitude, and not as acts of religious worship^[3].
3. Translating the word "God" by the classical Chinese terms Tianzhu (天主, "Lord of Heaven"), Shangdi (上帝, "Sovereign on High") or Tian (天, "Heaven"), on the grounds that China's ancient wisdom had preserved a primitive knowledge of the one God, later forgotten by the time of the Song neo-Confucians^[4].

This threefold choice is concentrated in Ricci's great apologetic treatise published in Beijing in 1603, the Tianzhu shiyi (天主實義, "The True Meaning of the Lord of Heaven"). A dialogue between a Western scholar and a Chinese scholar, the work demonstrates by natural reason alone the existence of a God who is personal, creator and judge, of whom the ancient Chinese classics (Shijing, Shujing, Liji) are said to have kept the trace: Confucius himself, on this reading, bears witness — imperfectly but authentically — to an original theism which the Song neo-Confucian commentators (11th–13th centuries), influenced by Buddhism and Taoism, are said to have progressively effaced^[5].

"Our God is the Sovereign on High spoken of in the ancient classics. [...] If anyone doubts it, let him consult the ancient books of China; he will see that the Sovereign on High and the Lord of Heaven differ only in name." — Matteo Ricci, Tianzhu shiyi, ch. II, § 103, Beijing, 1603 (translation)^[6]

A Catholic reading of ancient paganism

Ricci's argument is no isolated invention. It is rooted in a long Catholic tradition of reading ancient civilisations. Saint Justin Martyr (c. 100-165) spoke of the logoi spermatikoi, seeds of the Word scattered among the pagans before Christ's coming^[7]. Eusebius of Caesarea (c. 265-339), in his Preparation for the Gospel, gathered the presentiments of monotheism in Plato and the pre-Socratics^[8]. Saint Augustine saw in the best pagan philosophers the "gold and silver vessels" of the Egyptians spoken of in Exodus (Ex 12:35), to be recovered for the service of the true religion^[9]. And Saint Thomas Aquinas established, against occasionalism, that natural reason suffices to know the existence of one God, creator and provident — a knowledge which virtuous pagans did effectively attain^[10].

Ricci applies this pattern to China: the civilisation of the Han and the early Tang is said to have known a rudimentary but authentic theism, comparable to that of the Greek philosophers; Song neo-Confucianism is then said to have obliterated this intuition in favour of an impersonal metaphysics (the dialectic of li and qi). The Jesuit mission thus consists in awakening China's ancient memory by restoring to it its primitive treasure, purified and elevated by Christian Revelation^[11].

Three conceptions clash within the Society

But this strategy was disputed within the Society of Jesus itself. On Ricci's death, his successor at the head of the mission, the Jesuit Niccolò Longobardo (1565-1654, in China since 1597)^[12], refused to follow it despite belonging to the Society. A Sicilian, trained in Roman scholastic theology, Longobardo knew the language but remained convinced that the Chinese classics cannot bear Ricci's theistic reading.

In 1623-1624, Longobardo wrote a long memorandum — the Risposta breve sopra le controversie del Xámti, Tienxin, Línhoên (Brief Response on the controversies over Shangdi, Tianshen and Linghun) — to demonstrate that Confucian notions are irreducibly materialist or immanentist: Tian and Shangdi there denote a material Heaven and a corporeal god, never a transcendent, creator God; human souls are conceived there as modulations of qi, not as immortal spiritual substances^[13]. In Longobardo's view, Ricci's strategy is a dangerous equivocation: making the Chinese classics say what they do not say risks a syncretism that dissolves the Gospel into the host civilisation. Only Tianzhu, a neologism coined by the missionaries, would be acceptable.

The Visitor Francesco Pasio ordered the destruction of the copies of Longobardo's memorandum in 1627. But the text survived in clandestine copies, and was eventually published in Paris in 1701 by the Paris Foreign Missions as a weapon against the Jesuits^[14]. Meanwhile, the mendicant orders were entering China by the Philippine route.

The arrival of the mendicant orders (1632-1645)

From 1632 onwards, Spanish Dominicans and Franciscans from Manila settled in Fujian. Lacking linguistic training comparable to the Jesuits', they observed Confucian funeral ceremonies from the outside — candle smoke, prostrations, offerings of incense and food before the tablets — and concluded that it was pure and simple idolatry. The Dominican Juan Bautista de Morales (1597-1664), who arrived in China in 1633, wrote a systematic denunciation of Jesuit practices which he personally carried to Rome in 1643^[15].

At Morales's request, the Congregation De Propaganda Fide examined the dossier and published, under the authority of Innocent X, the decree Cum ad aures on 12 September 1645: it condemned in seventeen propositions the practices described by Morales^[16]. But the Jesuit procurator Martino Martini S.J., dispatched to Rome in 1654 by the Society, presented in turn the rites as actually practised — that is, stripped of their former religious meaning and reduced to a social protocol of filial and civic respect. On the basis of this corrected dossier, Alexander VII published the decree of 23 March 1656 which suspended the 1645 condemnation and authorised the rites as they were effectively lived^[17].

The two successive disciplinary decisions of 1645 and 1656 — one condemning, the other authorising the same practices through a different description of the facts, without any change of doctrine — would feed for half a century the canonical ambiguity of the question. Each camp cited its own decree, and the concrete reality of the rites became the central issue: were they objectively religious, or objectively civil?

A French quarrel as much as a Roman one

One often underestimated dimension of the controversy is that it unfolded in Europe against the background of ecclesiological conflicts peculiar to the 17th century. The quarrel over the Chinese Rites overlapped, in France notably, with the Jansenist quarrel, Gallican resistance to Rome, and the struggle for influence between the Society of Jesus and the Paris Foreign Missions (MEP) founded in 1658-1663^[18].

The Paris Foreign Missions entered the scene with a priority opposite to the Jesuits': breaking the Portuguese Padroado, which reserved jurisdiction over the Asian missions to Portugal under the treaty of Tordesillas (1494) and the bull Romanus Pontifex (1455). For the MEP, the evangelisation of China henceforth fell directly under Propaganda Fide, without passing through Lisbon or the Beijing Jesuits. This canonical and political rivalry became embedded in the theological dispute over the rites: attacking the Jesuit strategy also meant weakening the Portuguese monopoly and extending French influence in Asia^[19].

Added to this dimension were the anti-Jesuit publications of the Jansenists: Antoine Arnauld (1612-1694) devoted his 1690 Morale pratique des jésuites (volume VII) to a critical examination of Jesuit "idolatry" in China; Pasquier Quesnel continued this fight; they found a powerful relay among the Dominicans, and a formidable polemicist in Charles Maigrot, vicar apostolic of the Paris Foreign Missions. The controversy left missionary circles to become a matter of French public opinion, instrumentalised in the wider battle against the Society^[20].

Actors and issues

This plurality of actors, whose motives were partly theological and partly political, explains the lasting entrenchment of the quarrel.

The 1693 diocesan mandate

The decisive turning point was a local event of diocesan scope. On 26 March 1693, at Changlo (Fujian province), the French bishop Charles Maigrot (1652-1730), vicar apostolic of the Paris Foreign Missions for Fujian, published a seven-point diocesan mandate absolutely forbidding:

1. the use of Shangdi and Tian to translate "God" (only Tianzhu being authorised);
2. the inscription Jing Tian ("Adore Heaven"), hung in certain Chinese churches by Kangxi's permission;
3. any participation by Chinese Christians in the rites in honour of Confucius (twice a year in Confucian schools and temples);
4. any participation in the rites honouring the ancestors involving offerings, incense or prostrations before the tablets;
5. Christians being allowed to follow non-Christian funerals according to Confucian customs;
6. Ricci's teaching that the Chinese classics had known the one God;
7. the reading of any Jesuit work defending these positions^[21].

The mandate legally applied only within the apostolic vicariate of Fujian. But Maigrot immediately sent it to Rome — through the MEP — as a bill of indictment against Jesuit practice in China as a whole. This bill of indictment reached Rome at a time when the papacy was governed by a pope concerned with missionary discipline: Innocent XII (1691-1700), then Clement XI (1700-1721)^[22].

Cum Deus optimus (20 November 1704)

After more than ten years of examination, the Holy Office published on 20 November 1704 the decree Cum Deus optimus, countersigned by Clement XI. The decree upheld Maigrot's mandate, condemned in eight propositions the practice of the Chinese rites as described by the Jesuits' opponents, and reversed Alexander VII's 1656 decree^[23]. It forbade:

• the use of Shangdi and Tian to designate God;
• placing in churches the Jing Tian inscription granted by Kangxi;
• Christians' participation in the solemn rites to Confucius and the ancestors twice a year;
• placing ancestral tablets bearing the ritual formula shenwei (seat of the spirit), even among Christians.

The decree sided with Maigrot and the Dominicans, overriding a century of Jesuit practice and Alexander VII's decree. What remained was to promulgate it in China without triggering a diplomatic crisis with Emperor Kangxi (reign 1661-1722), whose friendship for the Jesuits was well known and who had obtained, in 1692, the edict of toleration opening the Empire to the Gospel.

A Patriarch of Antioch sent to Beijing

To notify the 1704 decree, Clement XI sent an extraordinary legate: Charles-Thomas Maillard de Tournon (1668-1710), a Savoyard gentleman of Piedmontese family, a young Roman prelate of 34, Patriarch of Antioch since 5 December 1701, legate a latere for China and the East Indies^[24]. Tournon was doctrinally convinced and courageous, but knew nothing of Chinese civilisation and had never left Italy: he embarked from the port of Civitavecchia on 9 February 1703, reached Pondicherry in November 1703, and arrived at Macao on 8 April 1705, then at Beijing on 4 December 1705^[25].

Kangxi's audience and Maigrot's examination

Kangxi received Tournon in audience at Beijing on 31 December 1705. The meeting was at first cordial: the emperor, a reader of Ricci's writings and a great admirer of the Jesuit astronomers, assumed the legate had come to thank him for the honours granted to the Society. But Tournon, after the audience, transmitted to the imperial governor an official interrogation on the rites and summoned Charles Maigrot himself to Beijing, presenting him to the emperor as the expert able to prove that the Chinese rites were idolatrous.

Maigrot's examination by Kangxi, in the summer of 1706, became one of the most dramatic episodes of the controversy. The emperor questioned the French bishop on the classical passages invoked by Ricci to support the theistic reading of Confucianism. Maigrot, who had lived seventeen years in Fujian but spoke Mandarin only imperfectly and could not read the classical characters, was unable to read the passages of Confucius and Mencius placed before him. Kangxi was wounded that a European should dare to judge Chinese civilisation without knowing it, and expelled Maigrot to Macao on 17 December 1706, judging him incompetent in Chinese^[26].

More serious still: Kangxi henceforth demanded of the missionaries a piao (imperial certificate) attesting that they followed "the way of Ricci" — that is, the accommodation strategy. All missionaries who refused it were expelled to Macao. Most missionaries signed the piao; several dozen recalcitrants took the road to Macao. The mission was divided into two factions, one obeying Rome, the other obeying Beijing^[27].

The Nanjing decree (25 January 1707) and Tournon's arrest

Tournon, having failed to convince the emperor, withdrew to Nanjing where he published on 25 January 1707 his Nanjing decree: it confirmed the prohibition of the rites, required of every missionary in China an oath of obedience under pain of excommunication reserved to the pope, and threatened with ecclesiastical censures any Chinese Christian who continued to practise the rites^[28].

Kangxi, furious, had him arrested in turn. Tournon was taken to Macao in June 1707 and held prisoner there by the Portuguese authorities — who saw in him an agent of the dismantling of the Padroado. He died there on 8 June 1710, aged 41, after three years of captivity, created cardinal in extremis by Clement XI on 1 August 1707 without ever receiving the biretta. His body was brought back to Rome in 1722^[29].

The historian of the popes Ludwig von Pastor, while reserving his judgement on Tournon's missionary prudence, hails in him a confessor of the faith whose courage in inhuman circumstances remains admirable^[30].

While Tournon lay dying in Macao, the debate continued in Europe. The Jesuits, through their procurator Caspar Castner, pleaded in Rome that a gradual reception of the 1704 decree was necessary if the mission was not to be lost. Clement XI decided.

On 19 March 1715, on the feast of Saint Joseph, the pope promulgated the apostolic constitution Ex illa die which:

1. solemnly confirmed the condemnation of the Chinese rites pronounced by Cum Deus optimus;
2. imposed on every missionary in China an oath of obedience (formula ad amussim) to be taken in perpetuity;
3. threatened with excommunication reserved to the pope any missionary who contravened it;
4. declared "null and void" all contrary decrees, mandates or privileges, including those emanating from local Chinese ecclesiastical authorities^[31].

For the first time, the condemnation of the rites took the form of a solemn apostolic constitution addressed to the whole Church — a disciplinary act, not an infallible definition. But its effects, in China, were catastrophic. When the text of Ex illa die, translated into Chinese, was read to Kangxi during the Mezzabarba legation (December 1720), the emperor answered in 1721 with a decree rejecting the pontifical prohibition and henceforth forbidding Westerners to preach in China^[32].

A last attempt at conciliation

Aware of the disaster, Clement XI sent in 1720 a second legate a latere: Carlo Ambrogio Mezzabarba (1685-1741), a Lombard, Patriarch of Alexandria, far more diplomatic than Tournon. Mezzabarba left Lisbon on 25 March 1720 and arrived in Macao on 26 September 1720, then in Beijing on 25 December 1720^[33].

Mezzabarba brought a confidential instruction from the pope authorising him to grant eight permissions softening the application of Ex illa die:

1. permitting in Christian homes the ancestral tablets purged of the disputed characters;
2. permitting all civil ceremonies connected with Chinese funerals, provided they are not mixed with superstition;
3. permitting Christians to render civil honours to Confucius as a teacher of civil morality;
4. permitting prostrations before the ancestral tablets, provided all idolatrous intention is excluded;
5. permitting Christians to offer food and incense before bodies not yet buried;
6. permitting genuflections in the civil ceremonies inaugurating schools;
7. permitting Christians to attend non-Christian ceremonies as mere witnesses;
8. permitting the use of the character Tian (Heaven) in certain neutral contexts^[34].

Received in audience by Kangxi in December 1720 and January 1721, Mezzabarba set out the eight permissions. The emperor, sixty-six years old and to die less than two years later, remained deeply wounded by the Roman attitude and gave no credit to the concessions. He refused to yield. Mezzabarba left again in November 1721 without having obtained the least imperial guarantee, carrying Tournon's body with him^[35].

Kangxi's death and the Yongzheng edict (1722-1724)

Kangxi died on 20 December 1722. His successor, his fourth son Yongzheng (1678-1735, reign 1722-1735), was intellectually more austere and sterner than his father, and had no personal attachment to the Jesuits. Under the influence of high anti-Christian mandarins, he promulgated in 1724 an edict proscribing Christianity applied throughout the Empire: all missionaries were expelled to Macao, except for twenty-one Jesuits retained in Beijing as astronomers, painters and clockmakers to the court^[36].

The Roman theological controversy, by hardening, precipitated the diplomatic collapse of the mission. Large-scale conversions became impossible. The rural Christian communities survived underground; the urban communities of Beijing and Nanjing withdrew. This was the most brutal historical turning point of the China mission — and it was, in large part, directly caused by the Rites Controversy.

For two decades, Rome remained agitated by the question of the Mezzabarba eight permissions, whose outright annulment the mendicant orders demanded. When Prospero Lambertini became pope under the name of Benedict XIV in August 1740, he decided to put an end to it.

On 11 July 1742, Benedict XIV published the bull Ex quo singulari: it confirmed Ex illa die in full, purely and simply annulled Mezzabarba's eight permissions, imposed an even stricter oath than that of 1715, and forbade any further discussion of the question, under pain of excommunication reserved to the pope:

"We will and ordain by the tenor of the present that no one shall dare to maintain, defend, profess or teach publicly or privately, in writing or by word of mouth, under any pretext whatsoever, the Chinese rites and ceremonies in question, nor practise them, nor permit them to others." — Benedict XIV, bull Ex quo singulari, 11 July 1742 (translation)^[37]

This was the official end of Jesuit accommodation. For two centuries, no voice could publicly call the question into doubt again. The controversy, theologically frozen, became a painful textbook case in every Catholic missiology manual. The remaining Chinese Christian communities practised underground; some secret Christians continued the rites of their clan anyway, knowing they risked excommunication; others broke with their families — and often lost inheritance and social status. The proscription weighed heavily on pastoral life.

Collapse of the mission and clandestine survival

From 1742 onwards, the Chinese Christian communities lost the mandarin elite that supported them. The survivors withdrew into the rural communities of the coastal provinces (Fujian, Zhejiang, Jiangsu, Shanxi) and continued their life of faith sustained by Chinese lay catechists, priests trained at the College of the Holy Family of Naples founded in 1732 by Fr. Matteo Ripa, and by the remarkable institution of the Chinese virgins (Tongzhennü, 童貞女) — confraternities of consecrated women without solemn vows who ensured the transmission of the faith from family to family for two centuries^[38].

The suppression of the Society of Jesus by Clement XIV (brief Dominus ac Redemptor, 21 July 1773) completed the dismantling. Chinese Christians remained, until the mid-19th century, under a latent persecution which periodically hardened (1746-1748, 1784-1785, 1805, 1815, 1839, 1898-1900). According to the estimates taken up by Standaert, from some 250,000 Christians in 1720 their number fell to about 150,000 around 1810; it rose slowly again in the 19th century, but the 1742 rupture lastingly mortgaged the possibility of a genuine inculturation of Christianity into Confucianism^[39].

The 20th-century Asian upheavals

For two centuries, the 1742 proscription of the rites had seemed as irreversible as the Holy See's other dogmatic decrees. But new Asian circumstances reopened the question in the early 20th century.

In Japan under the Shōwa militarism of the 1930s, the civil cult of the emperor and the Shintō shrine ceremonies were imposed on all, including the Christian pupils of Catholic schools. The Holy See, by an instruction of the Sacred Congregation for the Propagation of the Faith dated 26 May 1936, authorised Japanese Christians to take part in the Yasukuni ceremonies and those of the other jinja, as civil rites of homage to the fatherland and to dead soldiers, and not as religious worship^[40].

In Manchukuo under Japanese protectorate, the same recognition was granted on 27 March 1935 for the ceremonies in honour of Confucius in public schools^[41]. The Chinese question was thus already reopened de facto. On 3 November 1939, Bishop Paul Yu Pin, vicar apostolic of Nanjing, and several Chinese bishops addressed to Rome a formal request for a revision of Ex quo singulari^[42].

The instruction Plane compertum est (8 December 1939)

Elected on 2 March 1939, Pius XII responded with remarkable speed. On 8 December 1939, nine months after his election, the Sacred Congregation for the Propagation of the Faith published, with the express approval of the pope, the instruction Plane compertum est:

"It is today fully recognised that the rites practised in China in honour of Confucius and of the ancestors, which formerly bore a religious character, have in present usage only a purely civil meaning: they manifest filial piety towards the ancestors, love of country and courteous respect towards fellow citizens. Chinese Christians may therefore take part in the ceremonies in honour of Confucius in schools and official buildings, display his image or tablet, bow before it, as well as before the portraits or tablets of deceased ancestors. The oath imposed by the constitutions Ex illa die of Clement XI and Ex quo singulari of Benedict XIV is henceforth abolished." — Pius XII / Sacred Congregation De Propaganda Fide, instruction Plane compertum est, 8 December 1939, Acta Apostolicae Sedis 32 (1940), pp. 24-26 (translation)^[43]

In half a page of text, Pius XII did three things of considerable scope:

1. he abolished the oath imposed by Clement XI and Benedict XIV on all missionaries in China since 1715;
2. he authorised Chinese Christians to take part in the Confucian ceremonies of schools and official buildings and to honour the ancestral tablets;
3. he based this decision on a finding of fact: the meaning of the rites has changed; they are no longer today a religious cult but a civic act.

A reversal or a doctrinal continuity?

It is here that a careful Catholic reading is needed, neither progressive nor traditionalist. Plane compertum est has often been presented, by hostile historians, as a humiliating disavowal of the decrees of 1704, 1715 and 1742. This reading is inaccurate on three levels:

On the canonical level

The decrees of Clement XI and Benedict XIV were not dogmatic definitions ex cathedra concerning revealed truths. They were disciplinary and prudential decisions on the missionary advisability of admitting certain rites, depending on their real meaning in Chinese practice.

The reversal is not a doctrinal retraction; it is a prudential re-decision based on a factual finding: the meaning of the rites has evolved. The same Church which judged the rites equivocal in 1715 judges them purely civil in 1939. This is the hermeneutic of continuity applied to missionary discipline.

On the theological level

The principle on which Ricci based his accommodation — distinguishing religious worship from civil acts, seeking in pre-Christian civilisations the semina Verbi — was never condemned in itself by the Magisterium. What was condemned, rightly in the context of 1715, was a particular application of this principle which its opponents judged ambiguous. The Constitution on the Liturgy of Vatican II (Sacrosanctum Concilium, 4 December 1963, nos. 37-40) and the conciliar decree Ad gentes (7 December 1965, no. 22) take up the Riccian principle of inculturation, erected into a missionary norm for the whole Church^[44].

On the historical level

It must be said honestly that the 18th-century actors committed human faults, for which the Church's doctrine bears no responsibility. Tournon's haste, Maigrot's linguistic ignorance, the Jansenist and Gallican political hostility against the Society, the rivalry between the Portuguese Padroado and the French MEP considerably distorted the perception of the facts in which the decrees of 1704, 1715 and 1742 were rendered. The Magisterium never claimed to be omniscient in ethnographic matters; it decided on the basis of the information transmitted to it, and that information was partly false^[45].

Pius XII in 1939 therefore did not contradict his predecessors; he re-established the truth of the facts which the anti-Jesuit reports had distorted, and reoriented discipline accordingly.

What is inculturation?

The Rites Controversy teaches, negatively, what true inculturation is: neither a syncretism that dissolves Christian content into pagan categories, nor a rigorism demanding that every host culture renounce itself to become Western, but a purification and elevation of the elements compatible with the faith, carefully distinguishing what belongs to religious worship (reserved to the one God revealed in Jesus Christ) from what belongs to civic, filial and cultural piety (legitimate and even meritorious in every civilisation).

This distinction is no invention of Vatican II. It is already in Saint Thomas Aquinas, who distinguishes in the Summa Theologiae (II-II, q. 81-103) the virtues neighbouring religion: pietas towards parents, observantia towards superiors, gratitudo towards benefactors. These are real human virtues, not idolatrous acts. Honouring one's ancestors, in the sense understood by Confucian culture today, belongs to Thomist pietas, not to religious worship^[46].

On the level of words themselves, the outcome is equally explicit: Tianzhu remains the usual Catholic name for God in Chinese — hence Tianzhujiao (天主教), the "religion of the Lord of Heaven" — and the 1939 abolition of the oath lifted at the same time the disciplinary apparatus which had weighed, since 1704-1742, on the rites as on the terms Shangdi and Tian. Each of the three difficulties opened at the beginning of this article — the semina Verbi in the classics, the translation of God's name, the civil or religious status of the rites — thus finds its answer in the 1939 decision and its conciliar confirmation.

Idolatry: a demanding concept

The Rites Controversy forces a precise definition of idolatry. Idolatry is not defined by the outward form of the act (prostration, incense, food offering), but by its inward object: rendering to a creature the worship of latria which is due only to the one God. A prostration can be an act of idolatry if done in divine honour; it can be a perfectly Christian act of piety if done in civic or filial honour.

The error of Ricci's 17th-century adversaries was to judge the outward act without being able to measure the inward intention of Chinese Christians. Maigrot's error in particular was to reason like a European theologian about foreign rites whose language he did not master. Pius XII restored the correct use of discernment: worship is judged by its willed object, not by its apparent gestures.

The hierarchy of jurisdictions

The controversy also reveals a structural problem: Rome, 9,000 kilometres from Beijing, can hardly judge in the last instance a Chinese ethnographic fact without delegation to a competent local authority. The Beijing Jesuits, who were the only Europeans to speak classical Chinese fluently and to frequent the mandarins daily, were better placed than Rome to judge the real meaning of the rites. The biased or incomplete reports sent to Rome by Maigrot, the MEP and the Jansenists short-circuited this local discernment.

The lesson holds for all times: ecclesial subsidiarity and respect for local charisms are not an option, but a condition of the practical truth of Roman decisions in disciplinary matters. This is what Vatican II recognised with episcopal collegiality (Lumen gentium nos. 22-23) and the place given to episcopal conferences in local pastoral care.

A serene Catholic perspective

The episode of the Chinese rites invites neither denigrating the authority of the Magisterium, nor demanding that it be infallible in its practical administration. Dogma was never at stake. These were prudential disciplinary decisions — legitimately binding in their time, given the state of information available to the Holy See — which were revised by the same Magisterium when the facts became clearer. This does not weaken the Church's authority: it shows its true nature, that of a teaching authority in charge of the truth, which knows, on questions that do not touch defined faith, how to adjust its discernment to the recognised truth.

Far from being a "scandal", the episode of the Chinese rites is rather a pedagogical model: it recalls that the dogmatic norm must not be confused with prudential discipline, that inculturation is a permanent requirement of evangelisation, and that two saints can oppose each other on a prudential question without either being at fault, because the facts are not immediately clear.

• Read the general article on The Jesuit Missions in China (1582-1773) which gives the broad context of the accommodation strategy and presents the major figures (Ricci, Schall, Verbiest, Castiglione).
• Read the Venerable Matteo Ricci (1552-1610) — founder of the accommodation strategy; cause for beatification opened in 1984, reopened on 24 January 2010, heroic virtues recognised on 17 December 2022.
• Read Ad gentes — the missionary activity of the Church (Vatican II, 7 December 1965) — the missionary decree which takes up the Riccian principle of inculturation.
• Read Saint Francis Xavier (1506-1552) — the first Jesuit apostle to aim for China.
• Read The Jesuit Missions in Japan and The Paraguay Reductions — the two sister experiments of Jesuit accommodation.