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Nuns Navigating the Spanish Empire tells the remarkable story of a group of nuns who traveled halfway around the globe in the seventeenth century to establish the first female Franciscan convent in the Far East. In 1620 Sor Jerónima de la Asunción (1556-1630) and her cofounders left their cloistered convent in Toledo, Spain, journeying to Mexico to board a Manila galleon on their way to the Philippines. Sor Jerónima is familiar to art historians for her portrait by Velàzquez that hangs in the Prado Museum in Madrid. What most people do not know is that one of her travel companions, Sor Ana de Cristo (1565-1636), wrote a long biographical account of Sor Jerónima and their fifteen-month odyssey. Drawing from Sor Ana (TM)s manuscript, other archival sources, and rare books, Owensâ (TM)s study offers a fascinating view of travel, evangelization, and empire

We analyze the writings of Br. Jacinto de Deus (1612-1681), whose output was extensive, including literature on spirituality, a mirror for princes, and the work Vergel de plantas e flores (Garden of plants and flowers), in which is narrated the history of the Franciscans in the Portuguese Asian Empire, as an effort at preserving the memory of the Observant Franciscans (Capuchin), after achieving institutional autonomy in relation to the Province of Portugal.

Gregorio López was a Chinese Christian who, after becoming a Dominican friar and priest, was appointed bishop and apostolic vicar of Nanjing. Previous biographies did not touch on the difficulties of admitting a Chinese Christian as a friar, and explanations of his late and problematic consecration remain insufficient. The documentary sources presented in this article contribute to a better understanding of these issues. Obstacles in his consecration are explained in the context of institutional and national conflicts. It is shown how Gregorio was proposed as bishop by French vicars seeking more effective control of the mission in China. A Dominican friar was supposed to become his theological adviser to settle the Chinese Rites Controversy. However, this plan failed. New documents reveal in detail how the Chinese bishop was engaged by Jesuits and Augustinians to support their position against the French vicars and to defend their opinions on Chinese rites.

Catholics in Macau, Taiwan and Hong Kong are divided over the provisional agreement between China and the Vatican on the appointment of bishops.

We analyse the importance of the generation of Jesuit pioneer missionaries at the service of the Portuguese Patronage for the implementation of quốc ngữ [national language] in present-day Vietnam and the linguistic description of the tonology of Annamese or Tonkinese (former names of Vietnamese). We analyse, in particular, the manuscript Manuductio ad Linguam Tunckinensem (ca. 1745 [ante 1623]) by Francisco de Pina, S.J. (1585/1586–1625), and the Dictionarium Annamiticum Lusitanum et Latinum and the grammatical treatise Linguae Annamiticae seu Tunchinensis Brevis Declaratio (Rome 1651) by Alexandre de Rhodes, S.J. (1593–1660). We corroborate that Pina was indeed the first to use the Romanization system of Tonkinese, and we establish that he was also the first to describe its six tones in detail. Rhodes expanded Pina’s knowledge, which is particularly explicit in the description of Tonkinese tonology. We also explain that Rhodes used lost manuscript dictionaries written by Gaspar do Amaral, S.J. (1594–1646) and António Barbosa, S.J. (1594–1647), which is evident mainly in the use of the “Portuguese” digraph <nh> to represent the phoneme /ɲ/.

This article assesses how Lutheran and other Reformation doctrines spread and were countered in the Portuguese seaborne empire. Portugal's inquisitorial and episcopal repression of ‘Lutherans’ was extended to Brazil and Asia, where it was supported by the Society of Jesus. The Portuguese empire's transcontinental connections favoured the emergence of interconnected histories, facilitating the circulation of books, engravings and beliefs and thus provided non-Portuguese people with links to the reformed world that spread amongst and disturbed the Portuguese living in India and Portuguese America. By opening up routes the Portuguese, paradoxically, functioned as vectors for other ways of interpreting Christianity.

The paper offers a historical perspective on the division within the Roman Catholic Church in mainland China, focusing on the appointment of bishops, ...

The levels of civic engagement in terms of social services and civic activism in the Catholic churches of Hong Kong, Macau, Taipei, and Shanghai are very different. While the former three churches have a higher level of social services, Shanghai does not. Hong Kong has a higher level of civic activism than the other three dioceses. This paper explains the similarities and differences among these cities by using an analytical model of political, cultural, and individual opportunity structures. Our findings and analysis are derived from a collaborative research project on the Catholic Church’s civic engagement in the four cities using both quantitative and qualitative research methods. In a time of rapid political, economic, and social transformation in China, religion is beginning to play an increasingly important role. Our study sheds light on what roles Catholicism or other religions might play in this process, and it has important implications for church-state relations in greater China.

Diego de Pantoja vivió en Pekín de 1601 a 1617, pero falleció en Macao al año siguiente debido a la primera expulsión de los jesuitas de China. Su vida tiene los perfiles de una inesperada síntesis cultural capaz de iluminar hoy día el diálogo intercultural. En 2018 diversas autoridades e instituciones iberoamericanas y chinas, en el 400 aniversario de su fallecimiento, celebraron 2018 Año Diego de Pantoja , para conmemorar a aquél que no solo fue el más estrecho colaborador de Matteo Ricci en Pekín en lo referente a la política de adaptación , sino también el garante de que esa feliz estrategia de inculturación no declinase al morir el maestro en 1610. Pantoja tiene una parte esencial en los méritos de aquellos sabios venidos de Occidente y en la huella tan profunda que dejaron hasta hoy en China.

This study focuses on two persons of the same family, Antônio e Domingos Monteiro, both involved in the Japan trade, whose way of life was marked by mobility within the coasts of South East Asia, trading in a wide variety of goods. Their network of contacts reveals the presence of members of their kin, especially nephews, as well as merchants from Porto, suggesting that the Portuguese model of emigration to Brazil during the nineteenth century was already at work in Asia. The purveyors of the dead and absentees were in charge of transmitting assets to inheritors in Portugal, but the misericórdias also performed this role, even if in practice the interference of the representatives of the king was impossible to avoid. In spite of the intention of directing the money to mainland Portugal as soon as possible, long voyages, conveniences of maritime trade, royal bureaucracy and judicial litigations transformed transfer into a morose process.

Em 1549 os missionários da Companhia de Jesus estabeleciam a missão do Japão, inaugurando um período de evangelização católica que se prolongou até à década de 1640. O sucesso da conversão dos nipónicos levou a que, a partir da década de 1590, as ordens mendicantes fossem no encalço dos jesuítas. O período coincidiu com o momento em que o regime Tokugawa impôs no Japão um processo de centralização política de cariz autoritário. A doutrina católica e as atitudes dos missionários colidiram com a nova ordem estabelecida pelos Tokugawa que, por isso, promoveram uma política sistemática anticristã. O sucesso da evangelização deu lugar a uma missão martirizada que serviu para alimentar uma vasta produção tipográfica na Europa Católica de Seiscentos, tanto mais que ia ao encontro das tendências devocionais da Europa da Contra-Reforma e da espiritualidade do Barroco. Por esta via, a Europa tomou contacto com a longínqua Ásia. Mas os textos missionários impressos não tinham apenas fins informativos. A dinâmica tipográfica gerada servia também para fazer a apologia de cada uma das ordens missionárias e assim influenciar os poderes políticos e religiosos a fim defenderem os seus direitos de evangelização. O martírio no Japão foi assim utilizado como arma de propaganda pelas ordens missionárias na Europa.

This article describes the processes that culminated in Pope Pius XT's historic 1926 consecration of the first native Chinese Catholic bishops of modern times. Since the first Chinese bishop had been named some 250 years before, the many obstacles that prevented the naming of nevo native bishops in the intervening centuries are explored. Spurred by progressive missionaries, the Church embarked on a reform program to indigenize the Catholic episcopacy in China. In doing so, the Holy See had to overcome opposition from powerful constituencies. A brief portrait of the six bishops provides insight into the reasons why Rome decided on this particular group of candidates.