Title: A question of rites : Friar Domingo Navarrete and the Jesuits in China /
Authors: Cummins, J. S.
Publisher: Scolar Press,
Year: 1993
Subjects: Fernández Navarrete, Domingo,; Jesuits Missions China History.; Catholic Church Missions China History.; Jesuits Missions China.; Dominicans Missions China.; Chinese rites.; China Religious life and customs.
Abstract: The 'Question of Rites' - or the Chinese Rites controversy - created a scandal in the 17th and 18th centuries that shook the Catholic Church, horrifying Pascal and the Jansenists, delighting Voltaire and the free thinkers, and contributing, in the end, to the suppression of the Jesuits in 1773. The affair arose with the attempt to convert China to Christianity and revolved around the question of accommodation to a different culture (still a live issue today). Specifically, what attitude should the missionaries adopt to the ancestor veneration that was so integral a part of Chinese culture? The Jesuits, who came first, saw it as 'merely civic and social custom, tinged perhaps with superstition, but separable from it'; the friars as 'certainly superstitious and perhaps even idolatrous'. The struggle for the prize - the conversion of China - fuelled old Jesuit-Dominican antagonisms.^