Matteo Ricci s.j. (Macerata 1552 - Beijing 1610)

Was a Jesuit missionary and he was the first European to start a cultural relationship with China, the enormous empire that remained closed to all contact with the European colonial countries.

He was assigned to the missions in the Far East as were many of the most fervid novices of the Roman College which he entered after the Jesuit school in Macerata.  Ricci left at the age of twenty-six embarking from Lisbon to the Portuguese Indies.

He was ordained priest in Goa in 1580. He arrived in Macao in 1582 and the following year he founded the first Jesuit mission in China.

After many successive stays and much preaching, despite various difficulties, in 1601 he was permitted to enter Peking, thanks to an imperial decree that allowed to him to live there with the title of mandarin until his death in 1610.

The Jesuits brothers received a small area with a pagoda from the Emperor to give him a dignified burial, an enormous and unusual sign of respect for a foreigner.

Matteo Ricci possessed a solid theological and philosophical preparation of an educated missionary

as well as a very wide astronomical and mathematical knowledge. He also devoted his attention to mathematics and astronomy under the direction of the celebrated Father Christopher Clavius and finally he boasted an extraordinary ability for mnenotechnics and cartography.

Matteo Ricci succeeded in building up a direct relationship to the oriental world by studying the language and Confucius’s classical texts.

The perception of the social organization within which he lived induced him to dress the same as the educated classes in order to ease the contacts with the sphere of dignitaries to whom he desired to address his preachings.

The Chinese globe

He was tireless in his work to divulge the western sciences. He translated the first six books of Euclidean geometry and published between 1584 and 1608 five successive editions of his universal map, the Chinese globe.

He introduced the use of clocks and provided numerous proofs of his astronomical knowledge.

As for the evangelization his most important work was the Explanation for The Lord of Heaven, the catechism published in 1603. The Ricci’s method is characterized by the deep research and the most effective adaptation for missionary work.

The need to explain the catholic doctrine determined the rigorous elaboration of a conceptual structure and of a terminology theologically acceptable and unexceptionable and at the same time understandable to people.

In 1608 he started to write about his mission that had taken him to the court of the Emperor Wan Li, about his joining the Society of Jesus in China. He couldn’t finish this work and it was completed in Rome in 1614 by Trigault who also added some parts after the death of Ricci. The first integral edition of this work was published in 1911.

Ricci’s works, including those written together with his Chinese disciples are about thirty.