Speaking with Birds in Chinese. Franciscan Thought on the Middle Kingdom Proselytization

Abstract

The difficult task of preaching Christianity in China was undertaken by several Catholic missionary orders, the first of which was the order of the Franciscans. The article examines philosophical and theoretical foundations of Franciscan “inculturation”, which served as the basis of their missionary practice, arising from the ideas and activities of the founder of the order – Francis of Assisi, in particular from his belief in the need to declare the truth of the Gospel to all things from stones and birds to the pagans.According to the author’s hypothesis rational seeds of the Franciscan inculturation were carefully incorporated into the theory and practice of the famous Jesuit teologia accomodativa, which allowed the Renaissance Jesuit order to bring the ideas of medieval scholastics-Franciscans to a new level, thereby achieving great success in missionary work, and stay in China at the court of Ming and Qing emperors in spite of the persecutions.The first part of the article examines the fusion of the basic principles of both orders, both in historical retrospect, and the embodiment of this synthesis in the modern Catholic Church in the current Pope Francis. It is shown how the Franciscans, who postulated the importance of personal charisma and the need to bring Gospel’s message to the largest possible audience, played a fatal role in suppressing the activities of Catholic missions in the Middle Empire due to their de facto intolerance to the more radical methods of inculturation used by the Jesuits.Summing up 700 years ofFranciscan presence in China (with an inevitable break after the Yuan Dynasty and the prohibition of Christian preaching under Emperor Yongzheng), the author believes that the fundamental developments of the order's thinkers, glorified in medieval Europe, turned out to be ineffective when trying to spread Christian ideas in the Confucian Celestial Empire.