The Jesuits by S. W. J. O'Malley

Author:S. W. J. O'Malley
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
Published: 2014-03-20T16:00:00+00:00

CONTROVERSY

During their second century, the Jesuits became the focal point of three major controversies of international scope, in each of which their opponents eventually triumphed. The first was the controversy over the degree of accommodation to Chinese culture that the Jesuits employed in their mission in Beijing, the famous “Chinese Rites” controversy. Even some Jesuits objected to the radical adaptation Ricci pioneered. But it was the Franciscans and Dominicans who first brought the issue into the international arena. They focused specifically on the Jesuits’ willingness to allow converts to continue to practice traditional Chinese ceremonies honoring Confucius and their ancestors.

The controversy originated in the early 1640s when the first Spanish Dominicans and Franciscans entered China and were perplexed to witness Chinese converts to Christianity engaging in such rites. They questioned the Jesuit interpretation of the rites as civic, not religious. The friars then undertook their own investigation and came to conclusions at odds with the Jesuits’.

This divergence in interpretation assumed public and ominous importance in 1643. That year Juan Morales, a Dominican who opposed the Jesuit practice, submitted “Seventeen Questions” to the papacy. He described the rites in a way that could only evoke condemnation, which the Holy See in fact issued in 1645. In response to the condemnation, the Jesuits in China sent their own representative to Rome, Martino Martini, and in 1656, Pope Alexander VII through the Holy Office decided that the ceremonies as described by Martini were “a purely civil and political cult” and therefore admissible. But this second decree meant each side now had a papal document supporting its position, which left the situation ambiguous.

Twenty years later, in 1676, the controversy revived and entered an even more public phase when another Dominican, Domingo Fernández Navarrete, who had known the Jesuits in China, published in Madrid his Tratados … de la monarchia de China, which was severely critical of the Jesuits’ approach. The book, soon translated into several languages, became a major resource not only for those who had misgivings about the Jesuits’ approach in China but for everybody with a grievance of any sort against the Society.

In the meantime the arrival in China of French clerics who were not Jesuits further tipped the balance against them. When in 1684 Charles Maigrot, Doctor of the Sorbonne and Vican Apostolic of Fujian, appeared on the scene, he immediately took a stand against the Jesuits. He provoked enormous ill will and resistance from the Chinese converts and of course from the Jesuits. The controversy moved into its final phase in 1697 when the Holy See agreed to consider the objections Maigrot raised against the Jesuits. The inquiry went on for seven years. The Jesuits reinforced their position by transmitting to Rome a declaration of Emperor Kangxi that the ceremonies were civic, not religious. They believed, wrongly, that the declaration was irrefutable proof of the correctness of their interpretation.

On November 20, 1704, Pope Clement XI issued a decree forbidding Catholics to participate in the rites. The decree did not directly

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