VATICAN - Cardinal Semeraro: here is what Venerable Matteo Ricci says to our present time

Monday, 8 May 2023 holiness inculturation jesuits mission

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by Gianni Valente

Rome (Agenzia Fides) - A priest "zealous for the glory of God and the salvation of souls". A wise, chaste, obedient religious, detached from material goods and humble", supported by trust in divine help" that led him to face "with serenity the difficulties and illness that led to his death". This is how the official website of the Dicastery for the Causes of Saints describes the great Jesuit missionary Matteo Ricci, who came to China in 1582 "to free wretched souls from eternal perdition", and died in May 1610 in the imperial court, completely “turned into Chinese”.
The diocese of Macerata, the birthplace of Matteo Ricci, did not introduce the cause for the Jesuit's beatification until 1984, when more than 350 years had passed since his death. A delay that was perhaps also due to the fact that the name of Matteo Ricci had been involved in the very long dispute over "Chinese rites", in which his interpretation of the Confucian rites for ancestors as civil and non-religious ceremonies was at the center of disputes.
On December 17, 2022, his 86th birthday, Pope Francis authorized the Dicastery to promulgate the decree on the heroic virtues of Matteo Ricci. Now, for the Church, Matteo Ricci is "venerable". His fame for holiness - reads the website of the Dicastery - "was always present in life and in death." Today "this fame has spread spontaneously and appears together with a certain fame of signs."
Matteo Ricci was buried in Beijing, on land donated by the Emperor to the Jesuits, he being the first non-diplomatic European foreigner to be buried in China. Today that plot, with his and about twenty other graves, is located in the large inner courtyard dominated by the various buildings of the ideological school of the Chinese Communist Party.
"That of Matteo Ricci is a memory that time has not erased", acknowledges Cardinal Marcello Semeraro, Prefect of the Dicastery for the Causes of Saints.
In the attached video, made for Agenzia Fides by Teresa Tseng Kuang yi, Cardinal Semeraro highlights some features of Matteo Ricci's missionary history that make his figure highly topical and full of suggestions for missionary dynamics in the age of globalization.
Going to China - underlines the Prefect of the Dicastery for the Causes of Saints - Matteo Ricci made "not only a long geographical journey, but also an interior journey, to approach a world very different from the one in which he was born". "He didn't set out to conquer," the cardinal continued, "but primarily to get to know the Chinese world." He was aware "that without this assimilation, "he could never have been able to really know people".
Matteo Ricci travelled to Ming China "to enter and there, if possible, make a gift." On this trip, the first thing he looked for were "similarities". While other cultures are characterized by dialectical dynamics, in Chinese culture - recalls Cardinal Semeraro - the focus is on the search for harmony. And Matteo Ricci used culture "to enter a world of wisdom with wisdom". Even his experience shows that "the encounter between civilizations is a factor of peace between peoples". Unfortunately - adds the Cardinal, with a note full of possible comparisons in the chronicles of the present world - "the criterion that has been used many times is that of absorption, and this is a mistake that sometimes continues to be made even today. I think about it from the aspect of the world of politics, of society. To think that a model that works well in Europe, in America, must necessarily work well in Africa or the East, is a mistake”.
The video made by Teresa Tseng ends with images of the recent solemn prayer vigil for the beatification of Venerable Matteo Ricci, held in the cathedral of Beijing, in the presence of Bishop Li Shan and the Jesuit Stephen Chow, Bishop of Hong Kong, (see Fides, 17/4/2023), on the first day of his visit to the Archdiocese of Beijing. (Agenzia Fides, 8/5/2023)