European Jesuits Research Articles

European Image of China in the Seventeenth Century – Fascinating Cultures Stained with Repulsive Misbelief

What did seventeenth century Europeans know and think about China? How were the Chinese depicted in books? Looking at a travel report by two Jesuits and the illustrations of Chinese, Nepalese and Tibetans this article examines how the foreigners have been shown in one of the bestselling and most widespread books on China at the time. China monumentis, qua sacris qua profanis, nec non variis naturae & artis spectaculis, aliarumque rerum memorabilium argumentis illustrata (1667) by Athanasius Kircher is one of the first scientific European books on China and can be regarded as the “foundation of oriental studies” (Godwin, 2009, p.20). It describes and analyzes amongst other Chinese writing, geography, culture and religion and is based on travel reports (orally, manuscripts, writings, drawings) from European Jesuit missionaries to China during the early years of the Qing Dynasty (1644-1911). Although written and edited by Kircher who himself had never been to China, China illustrata and its translations coined the image of China in the West in early modern times. Maastricht University Jesuit Library also contains a copy of the Dutch version of China illustrata, titled Toonneel van China, Door veel, zo Geestelijke als Werreltlijke Geheugteekenen, Verscheide Vertoningen van de Natuur en Kunst, en Blijken van veel andere Gedenkwaerdige dingen, Geopent en Verheerlijkt (1668). Regarding the text this version is not significantly different from the Latin one (Szczesniak, 1952, p.389) and will be used for analysis in this article.

Christian–Buddhist Polemics in Late Medieval/Early Modern Japan

AbstractUntil recently, there have been predominantly two ways of approaching Christian–Buddhist polemics during Japan's late medieval and early modern periods. One way is to look at the writings of European Jesuits. The other way is to look at the Buddhist response, largely seen in works produced by Zen monks. Until recently, we had yet to see an informed Japanese understanding of Christianity, nor an insider's critical treatment of Japanese Buddhism. In the person of Fukansai Habian, however, we see both of these things. Not only was he a convert to Christianity, but he was also a former Zen monk. We will examine his catechistic text, Myōtei Mondō (1605), and its recently discovered first fascicle on Buddhism as a nexus for considering Christianity's polemical challenge to Buddhism. We will see how the meeting of radically different worldviews regarding such fundamental issues as salvation, the afterlife, ethics, the ‘soul’, and the nature of Ultimate Reality/God came to a climax in the person of Habian and found its most thorough and informed exposition in Myōtei Mondō. Within this discussion, we will also address the Buddhist response to the charge that it is based on emptiness, nothingness, and void.

Tea Ceremony as a Space for Interreligious Dialogue

Abstract This paper explores the potential of Japanese tea ceremony to be an aesthetic space for inter-religious dialogue. Through a study of historical encounters that took place between European Jesuit missionaries and Japanese tea masters in the late 16th century, this paper elucidates the missionaries’ experiences of tea ceremonies and discusses the validity and limitation of a tea house as a space for cross-cultural and interreligious dialogue. The fruit of tea ceremony in terms of interreligious dialogue includes a shared sense of aesthetic communion that is attained through communal enjoyment of the beauty of nature and drinking a cup of tea in an isolated tea house, where guests are invited to cast away worries of everyday business, as well as their social and religious differences; whereas its limitation pertains to marked indifference toward verbal communication that is characteristic to the way of tea, and thus the historical missionaries’ experience was limited to aesthetic paradigm and did not lead to logical understanding of doctrinal differences between Buddhists and Christians.

Catholic Written and Oral Cultures in Seventeenth-Century Vietnam

Abstract This article explores how European Jesuit missionaries engaged with literary and oral cultures in seventeenth-century Tonkin and Cochinchina (Vietnam). It considers the many interactions between texts, oral cultures, and the sacred on the mission fields, and the challenges of communicating with the divine in a new language. Missionary projects to translate sacramental phrases—such as the baptismal formula—into local languages could be particularly controversial: missionaries had to ensure that the translation did not affect the validity of the sacrament. This article examines how missionaries attempted to preserve the spiritual potency of Catholic holy texts and sacred words in a new cultural context and uncovers the strategies they adopted to convey the sacrality of Catholic writings and speech.

Ideology and Christianity in Japan (review)

Reviewed by: Ideology and Christianity in Japan William J. Farge, S.J. (bio) Ideology and Christianity in Japan. By Kiri Paramore. Routledge, London, 2009. ix, 230 pages. $150.00. Ideology and Christianity in Japan by Kiri Paramore is an important and thought-provoking contribution to the field of Tokugawa intellectual history. It will be of interest to specialists and advanced students who are engaged in the study of Tokugawa ideology and cross-cultural exchanges between Eastern and Western philosophy and religion. The book explores works of Christian literature from the early seventeenth century, among them Myōtei mondō by Habian (Fabian Fukansai, 1565–1621), which the author calls "the best example of indigenous Japanese Christian thought extant from this period," and Dochirina Kirishitan, an introduction to Catholic doctrine, published by the Jesuits at the turn of the seventeenth century. Comparing these two texts, the author shows that, while both are works of Christian literature, there are important theological differences, the most important being the emphasis on ethical knowledge as truth in Myōtei mondō and the prominence of the place of faith in Dochirina Kirishitan. Paramore explains that by emphasizing faith in ecclesiastical authority and doctrinal orthodoxy rather than depending on rational explanations to support the faith, the Jesuits in Japan exerted a particular influence on Habian and on Japanese Christians that was different from the thinking of Matteo Ricci (1552–1610) (p. 29). According to the author, Dochirina Kirishitan equated faith in God to faith in the Church hierarchy alone and neglected arguments that would support a positive view of human thought, knowledge, and discernment (p. 31). Throughout the book, the author encourages his reader to grapple with important questions in the study of Christian literature, such as whether these works should be considered "Japanese Christian texts" at all, due to the preponderance of European philosophy and theology in the content. Paramore also raises the question of the ideology of the European Jesuits in Japan. He states that they were "conservative" (p. 41) and that "Habian had been told simply to believe by [this] small group of European Jesuits on the periphery of the Catholic world" (pp. 29–30). Paramore implies that the theological perspective of the European Jesuits in Japan was a minority view [End Page 210] in the Catholic world. While the terms "conservative" and "progressive" or "traditional" and "liberal" are used today to describe differences among those who profess to be Catholic, the Church in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was not divided in the same way. Catholics viewed Church teachings and doctrines more simply as either orthodox or heterodox, giving little room for individual interpretation of the faith. One was either Catholic or not Catholic, rather than conservative or liberal. The Jesuits in Japan held the Catholic position. Trained as they were in the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius, they would have been faithful to Ignatius's "Rules for Thinking with the Church": "We must put aside all judgment of our own, and keep the mind ever ready and prompt to obey in all things the true Spouse of Christ our Lord, our holy Mother, the hierarchical Church."1 This was an age long before one could dissent from the teaching of the Church and still call oneself "Catholic." Hence, Paramore's understanding of the Jesuits in Japan as being a group "on the periphery" may be somewhat anachronistic. Paramore also writes, "what both Ricci and Habian did possess and the European leadership of the Jesuits in Japan lacked, was a real understanding of non-Christian thought…. (in particular Confucian thought)" (p. 32). While this may be true, an important difference between Matteo Ricci and the Jesuits in Japan was the manner in which they dealt with the problems of using the non-Christian religious vocabulary of Chinese and Japanese in their translations of Christian theological works. While Ricci used indigenous Chinese terms, the Jesuits in Japan used transliterated words from Latin and Portuguese. This difference in methodology did not reflect so much a lack of knowledge of the meaning of the indigenous Japanese religious terminology or of non-Christian thought on the part of Jesuits in Japan but more the fact that the study...

Northwest Indian Evangelization by European Jesuits, 1841-1909

Northwest Indian Evangelization by European Jesuits, 1841–1909 Gerald McKevitt* S.J. "All of my life," wrote the Jesuit Nicole Point, "I have felt my heart throb at the very sound of the word, 'America.'" The young Frenchman who penned those words while en route to the United States in 1835 voiced a sentiment shared by many nineteenth-century Europeans who longed for missionary careers. Felix Barbelin, who emigrated from France to America in 1831, was so eager to proselytize, his sister recorded, that "he used to practice leaping over chairs, that he might be able to spring clear the ditches in America, whither he was always desirous of going." The future founder of the University of Notre Dame, Father Edward Sorin, entertained the same fantasy, writing in 1842, "I see nothing in the world comparable to the life of a missionary among the savages." Steeped since childhood in exotic accounts of Indian life found in the works of Chateaubriand and other romantic writers, Europeans were further inspired to become missionaries by their religious training. Visits by recruiters and a steady stream of literature about converting Native Americans produced a fascination with the frontier that reaped a bountiful harvest of missionaries for the United States.1 The rush of Europeans to frontier America was part of a global migration that saw Christian missionaries scatter to the four corners of the earth in the nineteenth century in unprecedented numbers. "Comparable in size and morale with the expeditionary forces of any great power," in the words of one historian, an army of missionaries achieved remarkable [End Page 688] Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 1. [End Page 689] results as Christianity "flung its outposts farther afield and won more converts than in any earlier period of like duration."2 For the Catholic Church, this burst of energy constituted a striking reversal to what had preceded. At the close of the eighteenth century, Catholic missions had been in a state of near collapse, a consequence of the French Revolution, the temporary suppression of the Jesuit order, and Napoleon's thrashing of the papacy. By the end of the Napoleonic era, the total number of European Catholic priests in all the missions of the world numbered only 270. Yet by the mid-nineteenth century, the Church, led by a succession of strong popes, emerged a revivified and highly centralized institution. As Stephen Neill records in his classic History of Christian Missions, "No one at the beginning of the century could possibly have imagined that this apparently moribund Church would produce from within itself those astonishing new manifestations of energy." Not only did missionary work revive; it became international to an unprecedented degree. In the United States, much of that transformation was effected by clergy from France, Belgium, Holland, Ireland, and Italy.3 Among male religious orders engaged in ministry to Native Americans, none provided more European volunteers than the Society of Jesus. The most popular destination for Jesuits was the Rocky Mountain Mission in the Pacific Northwest. Founded in 1841 by the Belgian Jesuit Pierre-Jean De Smet, its dominion embraced the modern states of Oregon, Washington, Montana, and Idaho. Personnel were drawn from many nations, but the majority came from Italy, driven from their homeland by the upheavals that accompanied the process of national unification known as the Risorgimento ("Rebirth"). During that movement, which climaxed in 1870 with the fall of papal Rome, anticlericalism drove members of many religious orders from their homeland. When the kingdom of Piedmont in the north began expelling clergy, many Jesuits from the order's Turin Province took up missionary work in the United States, beginning in 1854 when the gesuiti piemontesi assumed administration of the Rocky Mountain Mission. Although the Rocky Mountain Mission was overseen by the Jesuits' exiled Turin Province, its ethnic membership was strikingly diverse. So appealing was the prospect of converting Indians that men from a wider spectrum of countries volunteered for duty there than in any other Jesuit [End Page 690] enterprise in the West. By 1895, the Mission's personnel numbered 160 Jesuit priests, brothers, and scholastics. Nearly fifty percent of these were either Italians or Americans, but another forty...

Wider den Rassismus. Entwurf einer nicht erschienenen Enzyklika (1938) (review)

On December 15, 1972, the Kansas City weekly, National Catholic Reporter, published fragments of a draft, prepared in 1938 at the request of Pope Pius XI [End Page 710] by the American Jesuit John LaFarge and others, of an encyclical condemning racism. LaFarge had come to the Pope's attention through the Jesuit's book Interracial Justice (1937). Pius XI commissioned LaFarge in a private audience on June 22, 1938, to draft an encyclical on this topic. No intellectual, LaFarge felt unequal to the task. At his request the Jesuit General Wladimir Ledóchowski assigned two European Jesuits to assist LaFarge: the German Gustav Gundlach and the Frenchman Gustave Desbuquois. Both had helped draft the encyclical Quadragesimo anno (1930). The three labored in Paris throughout the summer of 1938, completing their work in September. Pius XI died on February 10, 1939, without publishing the encyclical. His successor Pius XII did not revive the project.

Traditions and Cultural Transformations: European Copper-Based Kettles and Jesuit Rings from 17th Century Amerindian Sites

The basic question posed by the establishment of the initial interaction between Amerindian populations and Europeans in America is that of understanding the importance of the transformation of the traditional cultural fabric of the former by the spread of cultural traits originating from the latter. Copper alloy kettles, as well as, so-called “Jesuit” rings discovered in archaeological sites of Northeastern North America (southern Ontario, central Quebec) dating from the 17th century permit us to suggest that the contribution of new material goods is inscribed more in a process of integration to existing tradition, rather than to a process of radical modification of the latter.

The American Jesuit Contribution to Social Action and Social Order AfterRerum Novarum

Much has been written of the aims and programs of Catholic Social Action. This article does not intend to duplicate that material, but rather to concentrate on the contribution of the American Assistancy of the Society of Jesus to the social apostolate and to show how that contribution promoted the aims of the Catholic Economic Association.1 The Society of Jesus has earned a reputation for being on the cutting edge of most papal campaigns to reform society. Their participation in the social action movement which followed Pope Leo XIIFs call for improvement of the condition of workers in his encyclical Rerum Novarum is well documented, especially in the activities of Action Populaire in France, Fomento Social in Spain, and Ecole Social Populaire in Quebec (Gareau, 1946, p. 1; Graham, 1946, p. 5). The more philosophical works of European Jesuits such as Oswald von Nell-Breuning, Gustav Gundlach, and Heinrich Pesch have been reviewed in depth and will not be revisited here.2

Place–Name Literature, United States 1967–1969

Broche, Gaston E. Villes americaines de noms fran9ais. Societe de geographie et d'etudes coloniales de Marseille. Bulletin 63:73-89. 1944-47. Duffy, Thomas F. A controlled research project: American place names. New York, Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1968. 78 p. maps. (Aspects of English). Bibliography: p. 14-17. Very limited and out of date. Describes a project for controlling the sources used by students in writing research papers, using a study of American place-names as an example. Contains a group of four general readings on place-naming practices and a group of four specific readings dealing with place-names in Massachusetts and Virginia. Florin, Lambert. Ghost town El Dorado. Seattle, Superior Pub. Co., 1968. 192 p. maps. (The Western ghost town series). Ninth in the author's Western ghost town series. Includes towns in 11 western states of the United States and in British Columbia. Frazer, Robert Walter. Forts of the West; military forts and presidios, and posts commonly called forts, west of the Mississippi River to 1898. Norman, Univ. of Oklahoma Press, 1965. 246 p. Bibliography: p. 190-226. Arranged alphabetically within the boundaries of present states. Includes origin of the post name and changes in name and location. Jakle, John A. Salt-derived place names in the Ohio Valley. Names 16:1-5, March 1968. Includes a map of such place-names, as found on the Ohio Valley's Topographic quadrangles. McClung, Quantrille D. Bent, Boggs and Carson place names. Oolorado Genealogist 28:35-36, June 1967. A listing of place-names derived from these three surnames, throughout the United States. Murray, J. Franklin. Jesuit place names in the United States. Names 16:6-12, March 1968. Names of places for which European Jesuit missionaries are in some way responsible. New York, Washington, Philadelphia. New York Times Jan. 26, 1969, p. xx29. Short article on small English towns bearing same name as the major U.S. cities.

Jesuit Place Names in the United States

PLACE NAMES OF RELIGIOUS ORIGIN in the United States are common enough to cause no wonderment. Missionaries or religiousminded pioneers of many faiths were strongly inclined to attach religious or biblical names to their missions and settlements. Among the earliest explorers were the Spanish and the French, who were nearly always accompanied by padres intent on Christianizing the natives. Whatever their national origin, these missionaries belonged to religious orders or congregations which are not always sufficiently differentiated in historical accounts. It is the purpose of this study to single out the names of places for which European Jesuit missionaries are in some way responsible. Although less successful as name givers than Franciscan and Dominican missionaries in areas once held by Spain, Jesuits nonetheless have a respectable number of names to their credit, particularly in the Great Lakes region and in the Mississippivalley. The Society of Jesus was founded in Paris in 1540 by the Basque ex-soldier, Ignatius of Loyola. Motivated by Counter-Refornlation zeal, it grew rapidly as an institute devoted chiefly to missionary and educational pursuits. Francis Xavier, a Spaniard closely associated with Ignatius, went out to the Orient. Other members of the Society bearing the nickname of Jesuits set out for the New World. Unlike many other missionaries, they tended to operate somewhat independently of civil authorities. Before the end of the seventeenth century Jesuits from western Europe explored large areas of the North American continent and founded hundreds of missions, to which they gave commemorative religious names.l Many of these missions disappeared as the Indians were pushed to the west, but a significant number survived and gave their names to