3   A SOURCE OF CREATIVE TENSION

Literati Jesuits and Priestly Duties

The Jesuits’ literati identity generally combined well with the humanist one adopted by many Jesuits in Europe, despite the many innovations and alterations it entailed for missionaries’ social identity. But did it also combine well with their evangelical work? Was the literati identity compatible with the missionary vocation to convert infidels and tend to the religious needs of the converted, irrespective of their gender and social standing? And, more specifically, was it possible for literati missionaries to evangelize non-Catholic women, and tend to Catholic women’s religious needs, without transgressing the taboos of “curtains and screens”?

Recent research on the roles assumed by religious specialists in Chinese religious life suggests that it was in fact difficult to steer a middle course between literati lifestyle and missionary vocation. Ritual specialists in China, indeed, did not enjoy the high social prestige of priests in Catholic Europe. While European priests assumed leading roles in local communities, ritual specialists were rather marginal figures held in low esteem by Chinese society.1 Lay devotees rarely felt especially attached to one single monk or priest, preferring, rather, to use the paid services of various specialists with different religious affiliations, according to their religious needs and the efficacy attributed to them.2 Ritual specialists were especially despised by members of the literati class, many of whom were inclined to anticlericalism.3 Religious specialists’ social inferiority was, in the eyes of the literati, confirmed by their tendency to disregard gender boundaries, increasing suspicions that they interacted with women in an indecent way.4

According to one of the most eminent scholars of Chinese Catholicism, Erik Zürcher, this image of ritual specialists in China posed a major obstacle to the China mission, and it may even have “contributed to its final breakdown in the early eighteenth century.”5 Zürcher maintains that “the Jesuits had to play two very different roles that typologically belonged to two different spheres”: that of the priest (sacerdos/duode) and that of the literatus (xiansheng). In his view, the Jesuits “performed admirably [on both scores], but it created an inner tension that never was dissolved.”6 Zürcher’s view implies that Catholicism’s growth in China was impeded by the divergent behaviors toward women expected from the ideal-typical priest and literatus. This tension, however, was not necessarily purely obstructive for the Jesuits’ China mission. On the contrary, the incompatibility between the two roles produced creative solutions in priests’ daily performance. The Jesuits, in response to antagonisms between their literati identities and their catechetical and ritual duties, developed inventive strategies, integrating practices of gender segregation into their priestly performance and thus easing the tension between priest and literatus.

GENDER DISTINCTIONS AND EVANGELIZATION

The Jesuits’ change of attire prompted them to make several modifications to their strategy for evangelizing women during the first three decades of the mission. Matteo Ricci, who initiated the Jesuits’ adoption of the literati identity, had converted a first group of Chinese women, among them “some respected ladies.” That was in the spring of 1589, during his last year in Zhaoqing, and when he was still wearing the Buddhist monk’s garb.7 After his change of attire in 1595, however, Ricci entirely abandoned women’s evangelization. According to Ricci’s close associate, João da Rocha, the “many difficulties in baptizing and dealing with [women]” had prompted Ricci to “concentrate on the conversion of men and to conceal for a moment the [conversion] of women.”8 In order to fully live up to his new social role of Western literatus, Ricci preferred to strictly maintain the ideal of the separation of the sexes. By the time da Rocha wrote his statement in 1602, however, the situation had already started to change again. After a short interlude of six years, Niccolò Longobardo—a young Sicilian who had arrived in China in the end of 1597 and had quickly become famous for adopting more popular evangelization strategies—started to baptize women, beginning in the southern residence of Shaozhou in 1601.9 This change of strategy was seen as a major innovation by the missionaries in China. Several of them, including the famous procurator Nicolas Trigault, praised Longobardo’s move as an important turning point in the history of the China mission, opening the door to a great number of potential converts previously beyond the missionaries’ reach due to the seclusion of Chinese women.10

One of Longobardo’s admirers, Fernão Guerreiro, described how the Sicilian had begun his experiments with the evangelization and baptism of women.11 According to Guerreiro, Longobardo did not instruct the women but contented himself with instructing their male relatives, who then, in turn, took it upon themselves to catechize their female family members. Longobardo only met the female catechumens on the occasion of baptism. This ceremony usually took place in the women’s homes. An altar with an image of the Lord was temporarily erected for the occasion in the main hall of the residence. Longobardo then examined the female catechumens’ knowledge of the catechism in the presence of male relatives. Guerreiro noted that “each [woman answered] from the place where she was” (cada huma do lugar onde esta) during this examination. It is possible that this meant that the women were not even in the same room as the missionary, but were shielded from the latter’s gaze by a curtain or door, as suggested by missionary reports describing the contacts with women “through curtains and screens” on other occasions.12 If the women proved to be proficient in the catechism, Longobardo would eventually administer baptism. Guerreiro was at particular pains to highlight the women’s readiness to interact with the missionary, an outsider to the family and a man. That “they were courageous and confident and did not refrain from being seen and examined by foreign men” was, for him, “a very new and strange thing” and a sign of divine intervention.13

Although Guerreiro praised the women for their courage during baptism, their male relatives were actually the key actors in Longobardo’s new evangelization strategy. The Italian had understood that access to women was most safely gained by attaining the male relatives’ confidence.14 He nurtured this confidence by fully submitting to the men’s authority over their families, making their consent a precondition for a woman’s conversion.15 This also meant that Longobardo did not refrain from rejecting women who presented themselves for baptism in the absence of male relatives. On such occasions, he asked the women to first obtain their fathers’, husbands’, brothers’, or sons’ consent and then return in their company.16 This approach enabled Longobardo to reconcile the evangelization of women with the Confucian taboo of curtains and screens. This sharply distinguished the Jesuits from Buddhist monks, who visited women in their private quarters without male relatives’ consent. It also meant, however, that the Jesuits did not accord to women the right to actively decide their religious identity. The missionaries accepted that it was the men who actually determined whether a woman was allowed to convert to the teaching of the Lord of Heaven. Even if women found ways to circumvent missionaries’ and male relatives’ authority, as I show later in the book, the Jesuits had clearly not originally envisaged an active role for women in China’s evangelization.

Longobardo’s evangelization of women was part of a new strategy that aimed at converting the broader population, including the poor, the uneducated, and women. However, unlike the Jesuits’ other experiments with popular preaching, which were mainly attempted in the countryside, women’s evangelization soon gained momentum in urban centers.17 That it was carried out with the consent of male relatives made it acceptable even to upper-class families. As a consequence, a growing number of influential converts and sympathizers granted the missionaries access to their homes and allowed them to evangelize their female family members. Missionaries spent prolonged periods, for instance, in the homes of scholar-officials such as Xu Guangqi, Yang Tingyun, and Li Zhizao. Extended contacts with these gentry families facilitated the missionaries’ access to women, and it is hardly surprising that women from these families became leading figures in Chinese Catholicism during the seventeenth century.18 Less influential converts, however, also provided the missionaries with hospitality. The Catholics of Nanjing, for instance, showed solidarity with the missionaries during the anti-Christian repressions of 1616 and 1617. They permitted them to hide in their homes, something that, according to Nicolas Trigault, allowed them to evangelize the women of many of these families.19

When women’s evangelization became, once again, an established practice in the China mission, it forged a distinct pattern of communication between missionaries and women during the evangelization process. The missionaries started to rely on different groups of intermediaries and media to establish channels of indirect communication. If personal contact between missionaries and women was inevitable, meanwhile, arrangements for controlled communication were made, sometimes literally involving conversation “through curtains and screens.” These practices allowed the Jesuits to convert a growing number of women without transgressing the gender boundaries to which they were bound by their role as Western literati.20

Among the intermediaries the Jesuits relied upon for women’s evangelization, four groups stand out. Male relatives were preferred as women’s catechists because of their great social authority. However, this group was soon joined by another, which enjoyed the distinct advantage of having direct and frequent contact with women: children. Children were especially helpful intermediaries because they were not expected to respect the boundaries of gender segregation. They were praised, furthermore, for their quick perception, which made it easy for them to learn Latin prayers—whose incomprehensible syllables were difficult to remember for Chinese neophytes.21 While missionaries were pleased that children often acted as catechists without being asked to do so, others experimented with deliberately employing children for their missions. Gaspare Ferreira, for instance, is reported to have taken small children with him on a rural mission near Beijing for the special purpose of teaching young women the basics of Catholic doctrine.22

The servants of rich households formed a third group of women’s catechists. This is well illustrated by the conversion of the widow of a Nanchang literati family, who heard the teaching of the Lord of Heaven from her personal servant.23 Nicolas Trigault reported that the lady became interested in the foreign doctrine during her conversations with the servant, asking him “to bring her an image of the Savior from the fathers in order to revere it, and a summary of the doctrine to learn [the teaching], and a rosary to recite [prayers].”24 In 1610, after a short period of instruction, the lady was baptized in a splendid ceremony—an event seen as a major success for the fathers at the Nanchang residence.

A fourth group of intermediaries were eunuchs. This group was highly valued by the Jesuits, especially for the conversion of imperial palace ladies during the last years of the Ming dynasty. The Jesuits had probably converted the first palace eunuchs in Beijing during the early 1630s. In 1638 the Catholic eunuch Joseph started to convert palace women within the Forbidden City. Until the fall of the dynasty in 1644, female Catholics thus converted numbered around fifty. As Nicolas Standaert has pointed out, this group of Catholic imperial women remained “marginal and ceased to exist after the fall of the Ming.”25 This example provides, nonetheless, a vivid illustration of how effectively the Jesuits were able to reach women through intermediaries, at least in the setting of the court at Beijing.26

Although these groups of intermediaries all played an important role in the evangelization of women, the most important catechizers of women were, however, Catholic women, a group that does not fit neatly into the concept of “intermediary.” In a society that encouraged homosocial bonding, Catholic women had many occasions to interact with non-Catholic women. They aroused non-Catholic women’s interest in their religion by interspersing light conversation with commentary about the new doctrine (typically when interacting with non-Catholic female relatives or servants living under the same roof) or, alternatively, by providing neighboring women whose families were afflicted by illness or misfortune with salutary Christian objects, such as medals, branches, or holy water.27 Women’s role as catechists was accentuated by special papal dispensations granted to the China mission, allowing “mixed marriages” between Catholic and non-Catholic spouses.28 Women who converted to Catholicism after marriage could, therefore, act as missionaries to their mothers, unmarried sisters, and sisters-in-law when visiting their families at home. And Catholic women marrying into non-Catholic families frequently tried to introduce their husbands’ families to Catholic devotions. This predominant role for women in catechizing other women led to the emergence of a specifically female version of Catholic religiosity, which developed its own organizational forms and distinct expressions of piety.

Women’s catechists usually relied on texts, images, and objects for their instruction of female neophytes. These media were important tools, serving as mnemonic devices for catechists and helping them to correctly instruct neophytes. Because missionaries were often (but not always) involved in their production and distribution, furthermore, they also granted missionaries a certain degree of control over the evangelization process.29

If religious instruction involved a literate person, it usually relied on Chinese catechetical books, referred to in Western sources as Doctrina Christiana and praised by missionaries as “domestic missionaries.”30 The first Chinese catechism was published by Matteo Ricci under the title Outline of the Teaching of the Lord of Heaven (Tianzhu jiaoyao) in 1605.31 This work was inspired by the catechisms published in the 1590s by Robert Bellarmin, the famous Italian Jesuit and promoter of post-Tridentine religiosity. It included a collection of the basic Catholic prayers, such as the Our Father, Hail Mary, and Apostles’ Creed, as well as an outline of the most important foundations of doctrine, such as the Decalogue and the seven sacraments.32 It thus provided neophytes with the same basic knowledge of doctrine that Catholic reformers hoped to make a prerequisite for every European Catholic admitted to the sacraments.33 Ricci’s catechism was reprinted in a great number of modified and expanded editions, including Alfonso Vagnone’s Short Explanation of the Doctrine (Jiaoyao jielüe, 1615), João Soeiro’s Abridged Record of the Holy Scriptures of the Lord of Heaven (Tianzhu shengjiao yueyan, 1606), and many others, whose authors are not clearly identified. Unlike the mathematical and humanist texts published by the Jesuits, whose elegant prose was intended to capture the interest of a scholarly readership, the catechisms were written in plain, simple language. This made them accessible to people with only basic levels of literacy—among them women from wealthier families who had mastered some basic reading skills.34

The Jesuits regarded the “apostolate through books” as an especially convenient means of reaching upper-class women, who, unlike commoner women, often had a remarkably high degree of literacy, especially in the urbanized Jiangnan region.35 Among these women, there were some whose interest in the foreign doctrine was awakened by Catholic literature. Others, by contrast, are reported to have relied on it for their daily devotions. Some of them, including the famous Catholic lady Candida Xu, were even able to correspond with missionaries by letter about religious matters, using this as another channel of indirect communication.36 Despite these exceptions, however, the missionaries knew that most Chinese women were not able to read Catholic texts by themselves. Illiterate women could only benefit from the Jesuits’ written catechesis indirectly, either by attending religious congregations where texts were read or by receiving text-based oral instruction from the literate on other occasions.37

It is highly probable that images and devotional objects played a key role in the evangelization of those unable to read Catholic catechetical literature. Unfortunately, only little is known of the cheap printed Christian images and devotional devices that were readily available to large groups of people.38 As indicated by the conversion story of the Nanchang widow recounted above, rosaries and printed images of Jesus were popular devotional objects gifted to neophytes. Other devotional objects circulating in Catholic networks included veronicae (pendants imprinted with an image of Christ’s face), nomina (medals bearing the name of Jesus or Mary), coronae (a variant of the rosary made out of thirty-three beads), and, of course, the highly popular rosary.39 The presence of these objects reminded neophytes of doctrine and sustained them in their daily devotions.

Although the Jesuits preferred to delegate women’s evangelization to intermediaries and to communicate with women through written and visual media, they nevertheless encountered situations where personal instruction by a missionary or Chinese lay brother was inevitable. In such situations, teachers were ordered to pay painstaking attention to maintaining decorum. Most importantly, the Jesuits were admonished to only speak with women in the presence of husbands, fathers, “or a person comparable in trustworthiness.”40 The missionaries tried to impose this rule even in situations where women were of humble social background. Nicolas Trigault reported that Jesuit lay brothers were instructed never to enter a female neophyte’s home if her husband was not there, even if the woman should insist on their so doing.41 On some occasions, especially in upper-class households, the Jesuits communicated with women through “curtains and screens,” shielding them from the missionaries’ gaze. Matteo Ricci thus reported how in 1605 the Chinese lay brother Pascal Mendez instructed the mother of Joseph, a member of the royal family, in his Nanchang palace—doing so separated from the lady by a curtain hung in a doorway.42 A curtain was also hung between the missionaries and female devotees on the occasion of confession, this at a time when the confessional had only just started to spread in European churches.43

Personally instructing small groups of women in their homes was a tiresome task for missionaries and claimed much of their precious time. It had, however, the benefit of providing the Jesuits with opportunities to expand the geographic reach of their mission. Missionaries often associated with members of the literati class in urban centers and were subsequently invited by these new supporters to visit their homes to instruct female family members. As the literati’s hometowns were frequently situated in more peripheral regions, the Jesuits were thus able to travel to regions that had not previously been part of their missionary circuits.44 On such occasions the Jesuits sometimes baptized large extended families.45

Once a family had converted to Catholicism, access to women for religious instruction ceased to be a pressing problem. Catholic instruction was now passed on among family members. Daughters of the family as well as young wives entering the household were instructed by their female relatives—typically by mothers and mothers-in-law. In this context, the question of how to instruct women was replaced by questions of how to organize their religious practice within the gendered spatial arrangements of Chinese households and of how to administer to Catholic women’s religious needs.

FROM ORATORIES TO WOMEN’S CHURCHES (1600–1640)

Due to the Jesuits’ concern for the separation of the sexes, new arrangements for spaces of Catholic worship that differed sharply from those in Europe emerged in China. In contrast to European Catholic communities, where men and women usually performed religious devotions together in the church’s public space, separated only by an aisle, Chinese Catholic communities strictly separated men’s and women’s worship spaces.46 Men and women, moreover, preferred different worship spaces. While missionaries soon started convoking their male converts in churches, they encouraged women to worship at home. House oratories, as a consequence, became primary sites of female Catholic worship. In the period from around 1600 to 1630 they were, indeed, the only worship spaces available to women, before later being complemented by women’s churches.47

Although even before their change of attire the missionaries were already following a strategy of not encouraging Catholic women to visit churches, they seem to have started actively encouraging the construction of house oratories at the turn of the seventeenth century.48 One of the first oratories recorded in the sources was established in 1601 by Anna and Maria Zhong, Longobardo’s first female converts in Shaozhou.49 Only slightly later, the Qin family in Nanjing established an oratory within the confines of their home, which also comprised a house next to the chapel “for the father,” where he stayed when he came “to say Mass.”50 A house oratory was built in the capital, in the home of the Beijing literatus Li Yingshi (1559–1620), most probably in 1602. The rich convert amply embellished the chapel at his own expense, adorning it with beautiful images and other ornaments.51 The role of house oratories as the primary female religious spaces was formally approved by the visitor and the superiors of the China mission in 1621. In the vice-province’s foundational statement, they urged the missionaries to encourage the establishment of house oratories “where they could baptize the women, say Mass to them, and make them exercise their devotions.”52

The domestic female piety that resulted from the missionaries’ promotion of house oratories not only differed considerably from the Catholic female piety common in seventeenth-century Europe, but it also sharply contrasted with Buddhist popular piety, which was often attached to temples outside the home.53 By strictly confining women’s Catholic devotion to their homes, the missionaries prevented Catholic women’s visits to churches from becoming the scorn of literati moralists. Indeed, they modeled Catholic female piety on Confucian female piety, something that, according to Confucian moralist authors, should ideally be focused exclusively on domestic ancestral rites.54

Like Chinese houses, which ranged from sumptuous manorial estates to simple peasants’ cottages, house oratories could take various forms. Annual letters record that poor commoner families usually established a simple niche in the main room of their houses, where they worshipped in front of printed images of the Savior or characters written on paper pasted on the wall. Such simple oratories were probably combined with altars dedicated to the ancestors, which were also situated in the main halls of Chinese houses and were tolerated by seventeenth-century Jesuits.55 These simple oratories contrasted with the house oratories of wealthier families, who often erected spacious separate chapels on their family estates. An outstanding example of such a Catholic gentry oratory was the large women’s church built within the Xu residence around 1640, which subsequently became the most important religious center for Catholic women in Shanghai.56 Spacious oratories in the houses of rich Catholic families were not only used by family members but were also used for religious gatherings, where women from the neighborhood or visiting female relatives from other households would be invited (see chapter 6). Other oratories were destined for individual women’s worship only. Annual letters mention “tiny oratories” (oratoriozinhos), where Catholic women conducted worship in non-Catholic households.57 In some cases, separate Catholic oratories seem also to have been installed on the “dew platform” (lutai), an upper-story room in the inner quarters where Chinese gentry women customarily had their Buddhist altars.58 This indicates that Catholic devotion sometimes directly replaced Buddhist devotion for gentry women.59

Women’s oratories, as religious spaces situated in the inner realm, corresponded well with the Confucian norms that the Jesuits upheld. Missionaries soon discovered, however, that administering to growing numbers of women in small, family-based house oratories had one major drawback: it was time-consuming. As Catholicism entered into its first period of substantial growth on the eve of the Manchu invasion—when the numbers of Catholics increased from about thirteen thousand in 1627 to about sixty thousand in 164060—the time had come to find alternative organizational forms for female piety. And in the 1630s, as a consequence, the missionaries started to build separate churches for women.61 The lessening of social control due to the political turmoil of the late Ming period seems to have facilitated this endeavor.62 In 1633 the first women’s church was opened in the prefecture-level city of Jianchang, Jiangxi, followed by churches in Jiangzhou, Shanxi (1634); Nanjing (1635); and Xi’an (1639).63 By the end of the 1630s the establishment of women’s churches, which Catholics usually referred to as “Holy Mother’s churches” (Shengmu tang), had become an established practice for the China mission.64 Where no Holy Mother’s church existed, moreover, missionaries began inviting women to visit men’s churches. In these cases, they usually said Mass twice, once for males and once, at another time, for females.65 As Giandomenico Gabiani recorded in his 1667 history of the mission, therefore, “Under Tartar rule [women] for the first time were enabled to leave their homes in order to frequent the holy temples—although in different places and at different hours than men.”66

It is difficult to specify the exact numbers and sizes of the women’s churches that were established from the 1630s onward. An overview of ecclesiastical architecture dating from 1680 shows that women’s churches were established not only in Catholicism’s urban strongholds, such as Shanghai, Songjiang, and Hangzhou, but also in remote places, such as the small city of Yanping (Fujian). Most Catholic communities possessed only one women’s church. The well-situated Catholic community of Beijing, however, boasted two women’s churches toward the end of the century.67 The churches were established in buildings either bought or constructed for this purpose by the missionaries.68 According to the French Jesuit Jean de Fontaney, women’s churches were sometimes extremely small, resembling more “a little chapel in the form of a salon or hall” than a European church.69 They had, nevertheless, become a distinctive feature of early modern Chinese Catholicism.

The Holy Mother’s churches were a significant innovation in the domain of Chinese Catholic women’s piety. Their establishment marked the transition of Catholic women’s piety from domestic to at least partly public settings and thus a deviation from the Confucian ideal, which confined female religiosity to the inner realm. As a consequence, the churches occasionally attracted the attention of Confucian magistrates, who suspected that these worship spaces were used as places for the indecent mingling of the sexes. The Jiangzhou church, for instance, was demolished upon the order of a hostile magistrate in the mid-seventeenth century, because “he had the impression that it did not befit female modesty.”70 A magistrate in Huguang, in the same vein, addressed a long memorial to his superior in the late 1680s, demanding the shutdown of the Holy Mother’s churches in the area.71 The missionaries, in turn, exercised great caution with regard to the women’s churches. They canceled gatherings in women’s churches whenever bad rumors about Catholicism started to spread. Inácio da Costa, who was stationed in Xi’an in 1647, even canceled the women’s Christmas congregation because, as he explained, “the neighbors have accused us in front of the mandarins.” In such cases, the female Catholics had to perform their devotions at home and did not receive the sacraments from the priest.72

The vulnerability of women’s churches might have been one reason why they never fully replaced house oratories. As Chinese Catholic women continued to use established house oratories, Chinese Catholic families built new ones throughout the seventeenth century. The example of Hangzhou vividly illustrates this fact. A wave of women’s conversions in the 1630s did not instantly lead to the foundation of a women’s church, but resulted instead in a considerable increase of oratories.73 By the early 1630s four house oratories were already serving as gathering places for women’s congregations; a fifth was established in 1634, and, by 1638, there were six oratories housing women’s congregations.74 These congregations were formed by women from the same city neighborhoods, so that they did not have to travel far to join their devotional groups—a practice that might have given rise to suspicion. This practice of grouping together women’s congregations in oratories placed in different city neighborhoods was also established in other big cities, such as Beijing.75

Although house oratories remained focal points of female worship after the establishment of women’s churches, their function shifted after the 1630s. During the early years of the mission, they had performed a double function as spaces where women could practice lay devotions and as spaces where they could hear Mass and receive the sacraments. When a priest visited the house oratory, the whole family assembled, sometimes also with people from the neighborhood, and a son of the family sometimes served as an acolyte during Mass.76 After the establishment of women’s churches, missionaries were advised to avoid, as far as possible, reading Mass in private houses.77 The sacraments were now to be administered to women in the churches, where the women gathered “especially on major feast days.”78 House oratories consequently became spaces to be used mainly for lay devotions, where no priest was required. These independent devotions included everyday devotional practices, for which the family assembled, as well as periodic women’s congregational meetings.

Neither house oratories in the period before 1630, however, nor churches in the later period, provided women with a frequent occasion for receiving the sacraments. On the contrary, Catholic women, and especially those living in rural areas, were fortunate if a missionary passed by once a year to administer the sacraments. From the 1620s onward there was a constant dearth of missionary personnel.79 In the 1680s Juan Antonio Arnedo reported that one missionary could easily spend four months a year just visiting all the rural missions around Shanghai.80 Catholic men living in the countryside were free to travel to town to see missionaries or catechists at their residence. Gender propriety, however, did not usually allow such trips for women.81 Mass, furthermore, was only celebrated occasionally for women, not only in rural areas, but also in towns and cities. In mid-seventeenth-century Hangzhou, for instance, women only met three times a year to hear Mass in oratories.82 It is therefore probable, in fact, that most Chinese Catholic women’s religious practice consisted of lay devotions, without priestly presence. This is noteworthy in the light of contemporary developments in seventeenth-century European Catholicism, where the importance and frequency of administering the sacraments had dramatically increased in the wake of Tridentine reforms.83 It does, however, appear less surprising once the nature of Chinese religiosity has been taken into account. This was characterized by strong tendencies toward lay religiosity, practices unguided by ritual specialists.

CONTESTED CONTACTS: SACRAMENTS AND THE RITES CONTROVERSY (1640–1690)

Although the Jesuits’ dearth of manpower meant that Chinese Catholics received the sacraments relatively rarely, these rituals became, nonetheless, a major point of contention in the early modern China mission.84 They became, indeed, the only issue that ever caused the Roman Curia to focus their attention on the life circumstances of Chinese women. This controversy originated in a Jesuit decision to adapt their performance of some sacraments—Catholicism’s core rituals—to Chinese gender arrangements.85 Anxious not to damage their reputation as Western literati, the missionaries sought to avoid physical contact between priests and female devotees by omitting certain ceremonies accompanying the sacraments of baptism and extreme unction.86 More specifically, the ceremonies of the salt, saliva, and oil (discussed in more detail below) were omitted from the baptism of catechumens, as was the ceremony of anointing the feet (and sometimes the loins) with oil during extreme unction.87 Although these ceremonies were prescribed by the Rituale Romanum, the binding liturgical work the Roman authorities published in 1614, the Jesuits maintained that they possessed the necessary papal privileges for these adaptations, accorded them by Popes Gregory XIII (r. 1572–85) and Urban VIII (r. 1623–44).88 Their sacramental practice became a target for criticism, however, immediately after the arrival of the first mendicants in China in 1635.89 When the Dominican Juan Bautista Morales (1597?–1664) and the Franciscan Antonio Caballero de Santa María (1602–1669) landed at the coast of the southern province of Fujian, they found that the religious practices of the local Catholics were, as they saw it, infested by idolatry and superstition. The Jesuits’ adapted performance of the sacraments was, in their eyes, as little in accordance with Roman orthodoxy as their permissive attitude toward “pagan” ceremonies—such as those dedicated to Confucius, the ancestors, and the gods of walls and moats (chenghuang), which would later become the central issue in the Chinese rites controversy.90

What, however, was the actual nature of the ceremonies accompanying the sacraments that the Jesuits altered or omitted? The relevant liturgical texts indicate that they were regarded as an important part of the sacraments promulgated by the Council of Trent. Indeed, although the Council stated that the ceremonies did not affect the actual validity of the sacraments, it nonetheless prohibited any disregard, omission, or alteration of them.91 It held that they had powerful salutary effects on the faithful and were therefore important elements of the baptismal ritual.92 These salutary effects were closely intertwined with the body of the faithful and their physical contact with the priest. A closer look at the ceremonies accompanying baptism illustrates this point well. Initiation into the catechumenate included an exorcism. This consisted of the priest breathing three times upon the face of the candidate and saying blessings when he made the sign of the cross on the candidate’s forehead and heart, placing some salt into the candidate’s mouth. The ceremonies accompanying actual baptism included an exorcism where the ears and nose were anointed with spittle and the chest and back with oil. After the actual christening with water the candidate was finally anointed with chrism, symbolizing “the sacred quality of the newly-baptized Christian.”93 The importance attributed to physical contact between the priest and the candidate of baptism reflected the Catholic belief that priests could, as Christ’s representatives, mediate divine grace. Priests’ bodies were sanctified through the sacrament of ordination, and physical contact with their sanctified bodies ensured the transmission of the salutary effects of baptism to the body of the baptismal candidate.94

In China, however, the Council’s guidelines confronted the sensitivities of a society whose elite generally despised physical contact, greatly valued the separation of the sexes and the inaccessibility of female bodies, and was especially suspicious of male-female physical contact during rituals.95 The Jesuits’ administering of baptism to women was, indeed, a primary criticism of the anti-Christian pamphlets collected and published by Shen Que, the magistrate who suppressed missionary activity in the city of Nanjing in 1616.96 Shen’s Memorial to the Throne [Petitioning for] the Deportation of the Foreign Barbarians (Faqian yuanyi huizou shu) criticized the missionaries for “anointing [people] with oil and sprinkling water over them, even if they are women”—a practice that, in his view, was proof of the Jesuits’ “bad customs.”97 Xu Congzhi, another anti-Christian official involved in the Nanjing incident, also criticized the missionaries’ suspect practice of publicly sprinkling women with water, an obscure ritual that was accompanied by “barbarian incantations” (yizhou).98 Xu Dashou, a lay buddhist who was the author of a detailed refutation of Catholicism written in 1623, was very explicit about the impurity that he suspected as a result of the Jesuits’ sacramental practices:

[The foreigners] have established a prohibition which runs: “Thou shalt not look at thy neighbor’s wife.” As for the wives and daughters of their followers, however, they let them mingle with the crowd in order to receive the secret teaching of the barbarians. They pour holy water on them, drip holy oil on them, hand them the holy casket (Agnus Dei), let them sip the holy salt, light holy candles, share holy bread with them, wave the holy fan, cover themselves with a purple strip (stole) and wear strange vestments, and all this in the dark night and [men and women] intermingling. What more [do I have to tell]? The Book of Rites says: “If no distinction between males and females were observed, disorder would arise and grow,” and I would not know on what their disorder is based?99

In Xu’s eyes, that the Catholic priests (allegedly) committed “the crime of secretly lusting after [women] by placing their hands on five places of their bodies” was a clear sign of their doctrine’s heretical character.100 Other authors shared this view, comparing the “teaching of the Lord of Heaven” to Chinese sectarian groups such as the White Lotus Movement (Bailian Jiao) and the Non-Action Movement (Wuwei Jiao), which Confucian magistrates constantly accused of transgressing the boundaries of sexual decency under cover of darkness.101 We do not know for sure when, exactly, the Jesuits started to adapt the performance of the sacraments to Chinese gender sensitivities.102 It seems reasonable to assume, however, that the Nanjing hostilities, together with other accusations of sexual harassment raised against the missionaries, precipitated the Jesuits’ decision. The impeachment by Shen Que caused a severe setback to the missionaries’ evangelization project in the southern capital and was thus probably a lesson for the Jesuits.

To return to the two mendicants, Juan Bautista Morales and Antonio Caballero de Santa Maria, both took the view that the Jesuits’ adaptations of sacramental ceremonies in China needed closer examination by the Roman authorities and soon started to take appropriate measures. In the late 1630s it was decided that Caballero should travel to Manila to report this discovery to his superiors, and Morales was dispatched to Rome. Morales arrived in the Eternal City in February 1643 and handed a catalog of questions (quaesita) over to the Roman Curia, demanding that the Roman authorities take a closer look at the issue. Morales’s quaesita marked the beginning of the Chinese rites controversy as a major ecclesiastical debate, taking place simultaneously in Asia and Europe.103 It also made the Jesuits’ adaptation of sacramental practice—not previously a major subject of internal discussion among missionaries in China—an endlessly discussed problem, leaving behind an extensive record in the archives of the Propaganda Fide and the Holy Office.104

The Propaganda Fide answered Morales’s quaesita in a decree issued on 12 September 1645. It not only rejected the Jesuits’ permissive attitude toward Confucian rituals but also forthrightly condemned the Jesuits’ adaptation of sacramental practices: “[The experts (qualificatores) of the Holy Office] are of the opinion that the sacramentals [i.e., the ceremonies accompanying the sacraments—N.A.] have to be given to the women during baptism, and that the last unction has to be administered to women.” The theologians declared that the Jesuits’ justification for their adaptations—gender segregation in China—was illegitimate. Instead of adapting ceremonies to Chinese customs, they stated, the missionaries should take care “that these salutary rites and ceremonies are introduced and observed, and that the missionaries administer them with circumspection.” To make the rites acceptable to the Chinese, the missionaries were to instruct them about the meaning of the rituals. According to the qualificatores, that should suffice to dispel any suspicion.105

The decree from the Propaganda came as a blow to the Jesuits in China. Due to their papal privileges, they thought themselves in the right and, consequently, launched a counterattack. They sent a procurator to Rome to renegotiate the issue. The envoy was Martino Martini, who arrived in the Catholic capital in late 1654.106 In a memorial presented to the theologians of the Holy Office, he asked the Propaganda Fide to reconsider. He emphasized how the missionaries’ social intercourse with women scandalized the Chinese and seriously endangered their mission in China, because women there “surpassed all other nations of the world in honesty and modesty.”107 To strengthen his position, Martini drew on the Jesuits’ proto-ethnographic representations of China, which showed Chinese women not walking the streets freely and withdrawing to their private quarters whenever their husbands received friends. Martini also pointed to how they avoided physical contact with men whenever possible, a fact especially relevant for his request: “They believe it to be a vice to take anything from the hands of a man. If anything is offered to them, it is put on a table or bench, where the woman takes it, not with the naked hand, but covered with the sleeve of her dress.” According to Martini, that was why the Jesuits “did not administer [the ceremonies] to all women, but only to those who asked for them and in case there is no danger of insulting the infidels.”108 Martini’s insistence on the particularity of Chinese women’s situation induced a change of mind in the Roman Curia. Eight of the ten qualificatores in charge of the assessment of Martini’s memorial responded positively to his request. The Holy Office then issued a new decree on 23 March 1656, which stated that some ceremonies prescribed for baptism and extreme unction could be omitted “in case of serious necessity” (grave necessitate).109 With this decision, the Jesuits had officially regained the freedom to administer the sacraments to women in the way they found most suitable for Chinese conditions.

The new decision did not, however, put an end to the controversy. The Jesuits’ adaptation of sacramental practice was discussed once more in 1667–68. That followed an involuntary gathering in Canton of the missionaries in China—twenty Jesuits, four Dominicans, and a Franciscan—in the wake of the Calendar Case (1664–69). This anti-Christian incident provoked by magistrates at the imperial court resulted in Johann Adam Schall von Bell’s arrest and the expulsion of all Catholic missionaries to Canton.110 The latter then took this opportunity to hold a “conference” aiming at unifying their evangelical practices, including baptismal ones.111 The resolutions drafted at the end of the gathering regulated the ceremonies accompanying baptism to a level of unprecedented detail. They proposed that the oil of catechumens was to be administered only to little girls, and not to adult women, while missionaries were to completely desist from the administration of the saliva. They also suggested that adult women should be anointed with chrism, but that a silver pencil should be used in order not to anoint them “directly with the hand of the priest.” While they did not object to the practice of pouring water over adult women’s heads, they recommended that the women should not be forced to loosen their hair for this ceremony. Instead, the missionaries should pour the water over the uncovered parts of the face.112

The resolutions of the Canton gathering caused the conflict to flare up again. Not only the mendicants, who had been in the minority in Canton, voiced their discontent with the resolutions as soon as exile had ended, but a new protagonist entered on the stage in the 1660s.113 This was François Pallu, whom the Propaganda Fide appointed vicar apostolic to Tonkin and the southern Chinese provinces in 1658, and he was soon to become a convinced opponent of the Jesuits.114 Although Pallu was unable to enter China before 1684, he spent several years in Southeast Asia between 1662 and 1677 and was informed about the resolutions by a Dominican, Domingo Navarrete (1610–1689), during an accidental meeting in Madagascar in 1679.115 After this Pallu appealed to the Propaganda Fide against them. In documents handed over to the Propaganda in April 1678, he expressed his doubts about the lawfulness of the Canton “conference” (since it was held in his absence) and the resolutions it issued (since they contradicted the decrees issued by the Holy Office in 1645 and 1654, which allowed the missionaries to omit these ceremonies only in cases of “grave necessity”).116 According to Pallu, the resolutions resulted from the machinations of the Jesuits, who alone maintained their erroneous ways of administering the sacraments in China: “The Dominicans have never omitted [the ceremonies] in the two Provinces of their mission, … and the Franciscans only occasionally desisted from administering them.”117 The Holy Office theologians reacted to Pallu’s accusations in April 1678. They declared that the missionaries “were in no way allowed” (nullatenus posse) to hold a conference in the absence of the Vicar Apostolic and that they were obliged to observe the papal decrees of 1645 and 1656.118 Two decrees, furthermore, were issued in 1677 and 1678, to prevent any further acts of disobedience by the China Jesuits. These commanded that all missionaries in China were to pledge their loyalty to the Propaganda Fide in a formal vow, the giuramento.119

While the giuramento led to new conflicts between the Propaganda Fide and the Jesuits, it did not lead them to alter their sacramental practices in the Middle Kingdom. For when François Pallu finally reached China in 1684, he noticed that they were continuing to administer sacraments to women in the adapted way, regardless of the papal decrees—Rome was proving too far away to effectively enforce its decisions in China. This time, however, Pallu desisted from accusing the Jesuits in front of the Curia. Toward the end of the seventeenth century, he seems, instead, to have switched course to that of the Jesuits. That is, at least, the impression conveyed by a letter Pallu wrote to the Propaganda Fide in 1684. There the Vicar Apostolic explained that physical contact between men and women was, after all, a delicate matter in China and that “more than once it has happened that the missionaries were accused of fornication with women even without administering the sacramental ceremonies of baptism.” Although they never did receive Rome’s full approval for their practices, the Jesuits were thus, finally, the informal victors in the debate surrounding the adaptation of sacraments in China.120

While only a small part of the larger debate of the rites controversy, the debate on the adaptation of sacraments is of particular interest for how it brought the Jesuits’ accommodation to Chinese gender arrangements into the view of the Roman authorities. If the Curia was to make a reasonable decision, it faced the difficult task of obtaining reliable information about Chinese gender relations. Because of its geographic and cultural distance, it needed local knowledge acquired by missionaries in order to rule on the questions they raised.121 Jesuit authors advocating the adaptation of sacraments were aware of this paradoxical situation, and they repeatedly referred to their local knowledge in their memorials.

An especially extensive contribution to the debate, the Apology of [Our] Way of Proceeding (Apologia Modi Procedendi) written by the Visitor to Japan and China Antonio Rubino (1578–1643), aptly illustrates this point.122 According to Rubino, the Jesuits’ local experience was the strongest argument for siding with them in the controversy. Rubino pointed out that the Jesuits’ local expertise sharply contrasted with the mendicants’ limited understanding of Chinese culture. While the Jesuits “had stayed in China for more than sixty years, being present in thirteen provinces of this vast empire, having baptized more than sixty thousand souls, and having friendly relations with literati and mandarins,” the mendicants only had six or eight missionaries in China, and these were “youngsters without experience” (moços sem experiencia), who only evangelized commoners in the southern provinces.123

According to Rubino it was hardly astonishing that the rustic female populations of these areas happily grasped any opportunity that presented itself to escape the seclusion imposed on them by their fathers and husbands, and nor was it surprising that the mendicants encountered few difficulties in administering the sacramental ceremonies to women. Rubino’s reasoning was, implicitly, that the Jesuits’ intimate knowledge of China’s educated urban elite had familiarized them with “true” Chinese civilization, something that the mendicants only knew perverted rural variants of. The Jesuits, for their part, had already learned these lessons long ago. Rubino traced their adaptations back to Feliciano da Silva, who was in China from 1605 to 1614 and had experienced extremely hostile reactions to his attempts at administering baptism to women using the ceremonies prescribed by the Council of Trent.

Although not approved by the Roman authorities—the Apology was placed on the Index of Prohibited Books (Index Librorum Prohibitorum) fifteen years after the publication of an Italian translation in 1680124—Rubino’s strong emphasis on the Jesuits’ experience in China nonetheless gave expression to the Roman Church’s changing attitude toward knowledge in the late seventeenth century. Unlike scholasticism, this new understanding of knowledge conceded that empirical experience was pertinent to the assessment of theological questions and acknowledged that “the reference to the norm” had to be “tested against the particular case.”125 This new assessment of empirical knowledge made the Jesuits’ proto-ethnographic representations of Chinese women a powerful instrument in their hands. They could draw on their “curious” and “edifying” writings to strengthen their position in the ecclesiastical controversies over the administration of sacraments to women.

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The tension caused by the conflicting role models of the Catholic priest and the Confucian literatus made the Jesuits find creative ways to communicate with women. They developed means of indirect evangelization, created separate devotional spaces, and adapted sacramental ceremonies in order to reconcile their missionary vocation with Chinese expectations regarding scholars’ attitudes toward gender propriety. The Jesuits’ accommodation to Chinese gender sensitivities was not always uncontested by Chinese observers and ecclesiastical critics. It produced, nonetheless, workable solutions. Rather than being a mere obstacle for the Jesuits’ mission in China, it was also a source of creative tension, giving rise to specifically Chinese forms of women’s religiosity.

The next chapter turns to yet another issue straddling European Catholic and Chinese Confucian norms—the question of matrimony, which, although it touched less upon the question of the Jesuits’ literati identity, led ecclesiastical critics and Chinese Catholics to focus their attention on some of the fundamental tensions inherent in the Confucianized Catholicism that the Jesuits promulgated in China.