The Missionary in the World: The Invention of the Soul of Saint Francis Xavier in an Anonymous Sermon: The East, Quito and Rome, 18th Century

The discovery of an anonymous Quito Sermon dating back to 1741 in the Fondo Curia 2223 in the Archives of the Pontifical Gregorian University of Rome dealing with the historical and metaphorical transit between Rome and the “Orient” of the Jesuit missionary Francis Xavier (1506–52), suggests links between the universalist vocation of the Catholic mission, and the local American missionary experiences which the text omits. This article argues that the sermon has a universal resonance that invokes the East in America (as it is written to be read in public); it is a sensory experience that can be adapted to different realities (the trips, relics, and missions of Francis Xavier), but also noted is the omission of local missionary practices (i.e., the sermon is presented as produced in a place unmentioned in the text). It is above all, a reformulation of the “missionary in the world” of Western philosophical commentaries and texts that look toward the East but are enunciated in America.

Yin-Yang (Yijing) and the Bible

Chinese religions, philosophy, and especially Confucianism constituted a great challenge for the Catholic mission since its beginnings in China in early modern times. This essay looks at the way the missionaries, especially the Jesuits, made several attempts to solve the problem. Niccolò Longobardo s.j., for example, refused to use Chinese terms for the Christian God, dismissing them as insufficient or atheistic. Most Jesuits, however, advocated for terms such as Tian, Shangdi, Tianzhu, and Taiji for God in China. The Mandate of the Vicar Apostolic Charles Maigrot m.e.p., prohibiting the use of the Yijing and Taiji as the Chinese name for God, became a great challenge for Joachim Bouvet s.j. in developing his Figurism. With this system, he found complements for Christianity in China and created a new theology combining Eastern and Western ideas. These efforts were stopped by the prohibition of the Chinese rites and by the historical-critical method for reading the old Chinese books.

Orestes Brownson For and Against America

The compatibility, or lack thereof, between Catholicism and American citizenship is continually raised by Catholic political theorists. With each new political crisis we face as a nation, proponents and opponents trot out their arguments in an attempt to prove that Americanism continues to nourish, or poison, the Body of Christ. This argument has been raging for nearly 200 years, and today an important contributor to this conversation is often overlooked: Orestes Brownson. While in his magnum opus, The American Republic, he spoke eloquently of America’s providential and Catholic mission, in 1870 he confided in Isaac Hecker that he had lost all hope for America and saw her as a corrupting influence on the Church in America. In this essay I explore Brownson as for and against America, showing how his later book, Conversations: Liberalism and the Church, reveals a consistency between his apparently contradictory stances.

Prémare’s Notitia Linguæ Sinicæ, 1728-1893: the Journey of a Language Textbook

This article retells the story of a Chinese language textbook, the Notitia linguæ sinicæ, written by a Catholic missionary in China for the use of Catholic missionaries to that country, and eventually printed by a Catholic mission press in China for the same purpose. It would have been a simple and short tale, if not for the fact that this many-faceted journey took one-hundred-and-sixty-five years to complete, involved crossing and re-crossing the two leading Christian traditions of Catholicism and Protestantism, took the work across great distances from Canton to Paris, London, Malacca, back to Canton and then to Hong Kong, and required the use of the Chinese language, both its higher form and the more day-to-day version, but also of Latin and English.

Political Mysticism: Augustine Baker, the Spiritual Formation of Missionaries and the Catholic Reformation in England

Augustine Baker, the seventeenth-century Benedictine monk, is primarily remembered as an advocate of mystical spiritual contemplation. This reputation was shaped by a contemporary supporter, whose synopsis of Baker's works is the source most commonly consulted by historians. However, by reading Baker's complete ‘Treatise of the English mission’ and recontextualising this manuscript, it is evident that he was addressing problems of his day. His treatise is a polemical response to debates about the implementation of the Catholic Reformation in England, advocating a vision of clerical formation and personal spiritual reformation for all those active in the English Catholic mission.