Your search

Abstract New encounters in America, Africa, and Asia facilitated the "discovery" of non-Biblical religious traditions that were distinct from the ancient paganism known to Christian humanists and antiquarians from classical sources and patristic literature. Although Hinduism, Buddhism, and Confucianism did not exist as concepts in the early modern period, the three articles in this special issue illustrate the learning process by which a number of influential and pioneering Catholic missionaries came to distinguish these various traditions from each other. We argue that they did not simply "invent" new religions arbitrarily: instead, on the basis of the very broad categories of true religion and idolatry, they engaged in some close interaction and "dialogue"-albeit usually polemical-with local religious elites and their writings, including Eastern Christians. In addition, in the case of the Jesuits in particular, we note that these various engagements were often connected events...

Abstract In modern scholarship, much ink has been spilled over the significance of St. Augustine in the history of Western philosophy and theology. However, little effort has been made to clarify the legacy of Augustine in East Asia, especially his contribution to China during the early Jesuit missionary work through the Maritime Silk Road. The present article attempts to fill this lacuna and provide a philosophical analysis of the encounter of Chinese indigenous religions with St Augustine, by inquiring into why and how Augustine was taken as a model for the Chinese in their acceptance of the Christian faith. The analysis is split into three parts. The first part reflects on the contemporary disputations over the quality of the paraphrasing work of the early Jesuits, analyzing the validity of the allegedly careless inaccuracies in their introduction of Augustine's biography. The second part analyses some rarely discussed Chinese translations of Augustine, which I recently found in the Nanjing Union Theological Seminary, with particular focus on their ideological context. In particular, the paraphrased text concerning Augustine's theory of sin and the two cities will be highlighted. The third part goes a step further in exploring the reason why Augustine was considered an additional advantage in dealing with the conflicts between Christian and Confucian values. The primary contribution this essay makes is to present a philosophical inquiry into the role of Augustine in the early acceptance of Christianity in China by suggesting that a strategy of “Confucian-Christian synthesis” had been adopted by the Jesuit missionaries. Thereby, they accommodated Confucian terms without dropping the core values of the orthodox Catholic faith. The conclusion revisits the critics’ arguments and sums up with an evaluation of the impact of Augustine's religious values in the indigenization of Christianity in China.

The author analyzes the 125 articles published in The Catholic Historical Review between 1915 and the centennial. The first part contextualizes the individual contributions against landmark scholarship in the field of Catholic missions to colonial Latin America and Ming China. The second part presents statistical analyses of the articles by sub fields and decades, showing the preponderance of publications in Latin America (48 percent), North America (30 percent), and Asia (12 percent). It concludes with a succinct comparison of the profile of this journal in the field of missions history against other scholarly venues

IN ENGLISH: Studies of church connections to commercial interests in pre-nineteenth-century Southeast Asia have focused on the Catholic venture in the Spanish Philippines. This article uses a broader and more ecumenical framework to incorporate eastern Indonesia into this discussion by comparing the economic involvement of Spanish, Portuguese, and Dutch missionaries and church personnel. It contextualizes differences in church resources, secular oversight, and motivation, but also argues that clerical involvement with European economic ambitions helped to mark out a path toward the domestication of local Christianity. The perception of foreign priests and ministers as conduits for exploitation encouraged many Southeast Asian Christians to differentiate between the teachings of the religion they had adopted and the ways these teachings had been distorted in support of European control. // IN FRENCH: La recherche de l'Asie du Sud-Est pré-moderne touchant au rapprochement des relations de l'Église d'avec les intérêts commerciaux porte habituellement sur l'enterprise catholiques des Philippines espagnoles. Cette contribution par contre, a un cadre spatial plus vaste et au point de vue religion plus oecuménique. L'étude y inclut l'Indonésie orientale et elle compare la participation économique des missionaires et du clergé, tant espagnols, tant portuguais, tant hollandais. D'un part les différences des ressources ecclésiales, la supervision des laïques et la motivation cléricale sont étudiées d'après leur contexte, d'autre part la participation du clergé imbu d'ambitions économiques européennes est aussi explorée parce qu'elle a favorisé les modes locales du christianisme. C'est que l'image des prêtres et des pasteurs rapaces auprès les populations de l'Asie du Sud-Est stimulaient ces peuples à distinguer entre la religion adoptés par eux et la déformation de l'instruction religieuse du clergé qui visait à faciliter le contrôle européen. Reprinted by permission of Brill Academic Publishers

The office of the procurator of the papal Sacred Congregation for the Propagation of the Faith (Sacra Congregatio de Propaganda Fide) offers a unique case study of noncommercial interloping in the long eighteenth century in the Pearl River Delta, and reveals the complexity and fluidity of life at the intersection of Asian and European maritime environments in that special human ecosystem. The oceanic infrastructure of the Age of Sail and the Sino-Western trade system in Canton sustained the Catholic missionary enterprise in Asia, and the professional figure of the procurator represented its economic and political linchpin. Procurators were agents connected with both European and Qing imperial formations, yet not directly at their service. They utilized existing maritime trade networks to their own advantage without being integral parts of those networks’ economic mechanisms. All the while, they subverted Qing prohibitions against Christianity. Using sources preserved in Rome, this article offers new insights into the global mechanisms of trade, communication, and religious exchange embodied by the procurators-interlopers and their networks, with significant implications for the history of the Sino-Western trade system, Qing policies toward the West and Christianity, and the history of Asian Catholic missions.

1. Nota preliminar

Geographical explorations and the subsequent intensification of external commerce made many political actors of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries AD drag in religion and its various institutions as pliable devices for strengthening their claims of monopoly and control over the political and commercial life of the newly discovered regions. In the midst of these developments, the pre-colonial struggles for appropriating surplus from the European possessions in Asia were at times in the form of struggles between different religious institutions and administrative machineries within the same belief system professed by the various European powers. These conflicts often arose when some of the religious institutions, which were devised at different points of time in history to transmit various types of spiritual experiences to the believers, were appropriated by power-mongers for realizing their political and economic agenda. One of the religious institutions that were often utilized for political purposes during the early modern period was the church administrative system of patronage or the Patronato that the Spaniards introduced in America and the Padroado Real that the Portuguese set up in Asia. As per the right of patronage that the Pope conceded in AD 1455, the Portuguese Crown became the sole authority that could send missionaries to the lands controlled by the Lusitanians, which eventually created a certain type of monopoly for them in matters of Christianity in areas under their influence and kept missionaries of other nationalities out of Asian and Brazilian soil. When the religious issues in Asia began to get increasingly embroiled in the politics of the times, thanks to the dominance of Lusitanian interests in the Padroado system, Pope Gregory XV devised the Propaganda Fide in AD 1622 as an alternative church administrative system for Asia, which in fact was meant to provide opportunities basically for non-Portuguese people, both Indians and Europeans, for missionary work in Asia. However, this led to a chain of conflicts between the ecclesiastical administrative institutions of the Padroado Real and those of the Propaganda Fide, in Asia in general and India in particular, where the core issues of contestation began to revolve around matters of politics and the exercise of power. The central purpose of this article is to examine the nuanced nature of the conflicts that arose between the church administrative systems of the Padroado and the Propaganda at different points in time and also to see how the religious conflicts were appropriated and politicized by the various European colonial powers to further their politico-economic agenda in India.

Este estudo pretende alertar para a existência de importantes lacunas e imprecisões no conhecimento diacrónico da Arquitectura Religiosa de Origem Portuguesa em Macau e, simultaneamente, trazer à luz novos dados que permitam confirmar e aumentar o que dela sabemos. Centrar-nos-emos na Época Moderna, em alguns edifícios , e, recorrendo a fontes gráficas e escritas, procuraremos conhecer a sua evolução. Futuramente, um estudo diacrónico aprofundado permitirá um real entendimento sincrónico e uma valorização de um núcleo classificado como Património Mundial, testemunho de um encontro intercultural, no contexto do Mundo Português e nas suas filiações Portuguesa e Europeia.