VATICAN (SE): Pope Francis declared 17th-century Jesuit missionary to China, Father Matteo Ricci (1552- 1610), venerable, making an important gift to the Church in China on December 17, the pope’s 86th birthday, Vatican News reported. The Church recognises Father Ricci’s “heroic virtues,” a key stage on the path towards beatification.
During an audience on December 17 with Marcello Cardinal Semeraro, the prefect of the Dicastery for the Causes of Saints, Pope Francis authorised the promulgation of Decrees concerning 10 servants of God who will soon be beatified, and fourteen holy men and women recognised as Servants of God, who will now be known as “Venerable.”
The pope recognised the heroic virtues of Father Ricci, acknowledging him as one of the Church’s great missionaries and the Apostle of China. The pope has repeatedly recalled the figure of Matteo Ricci, saying he “was great not only for what he wrote but because he was a man of encounters, a man of the culture of encounter; a man who went beyond being a foreigner and became a citizen of the world.”
Father Matteo Ricci, he said, was “among the first to establish a bridge of friendship between China and the West, implementing a still valid model of inculturation of the Christian message in the Chinese world.”
While he is especially venerated in Asia, Ricci’s fame and reputation for miracles have spread worldwide. Father Ricci spread the faith more through his holiness of life and charity toward all than through his words.
Father Ricci, who was born in 1552 in Macerata, in central Italy, spent 28 years evangelising, absorbing Chinese culture and bringing Western science to the faraway Asian continent, CNS reported.
He won the trust and admiration of the Ming Dynasty Emperor Wanli, ensuring that he and his Jesuit brothers would have the freedom to evangelise.
Ricci was a man of science—a cartographer, an astronomer and a mathematician—and he immersed himself in Chinese culture, enough to be able to translate many works, including a Catholic catechism, into Chinese and the teachings of Confucius into Portuguese.
He died in Beijing in 1610 at the age of 58, and the emperor made an unheard-of concession at the time of allowing Father Ricci, a foreigner, to be buried in Beijing.
The diocesan phase of Father Ricci’s sainthood cause opened in 1984 but was almost immediately closed when questions were raised about his commitment to pure Christianity. It opened again with Vatican approval in 2010.
Both Pope Benedict XVI and Pope Francis have praised Father Ricci for being able to proclaim the gospel with clarity and prudence in dialogue with another culture.
