Church History in Plain Language

by Bruce L. Shelley

The doorway to China that Xavier failed to find opened to his spiritual successor, Matthew Ricci (1552–1610). In 1567 a small island off the coast of China, Macao, became a Portuguese colony. For years, however, entrance to China seemed impossible. The ruling Ming dynasty had no interest in contacts with the outside world. They considered the Chinese as the givers of culture, not the receivers. Confucianism was dominant in the empire and the state; the family and ethics were governed by its ideals and teachings. According to one story Allessandro Valignani, a leader of the Jesuits in the Orient, looking out his window at Macao in 1579 cried out toward the Chinese coast, “Oh, Rock, Rock, when will you open?” Valignani recalled a thirty-year-old Italian Jesuit teaching at the time in a seminary in Goa. Matthew Ricci had studied mathematics, astronomy, and cosmology in Rome before heading for India. He seemed unusually prepared for work among the Chinese, so Valignani called Ricci to Macao and placed the burden of China upon his shoulders.