Teodorico Pedrini and the Ruin of the Christian Mission to China

From the 17th to the 18th centuries, Catholic Europe was consumed by the controversy over the Chinese Rites to Confucius and the ancestors. In China, the Jesuits had decided that these were civil rather than religious and could therefore be ‘accommodated’. In 1704, however, Pope Clement XI had declared them as superstitious and therefore incompatible with Christianity, a decision which the Jesuits fiercely contested. The Lazzarist, Teodorico Pedrini (1671-1746), was sent by Propaganda Fide to enforce Catholic orthodoxy. Almost 2000 pages of his correspondence reveal the extraordinary lengths to which the Jesuits went to thwart the papal rulings. To silence him, they imprisoned him in their house in Beijing, bringing him close to death. He was finally released on the orders of the new Yongzheng Emperor. Pedrini’s writings cast an entirely new perspective on the events leading up to the proscription of the preaching of Christianity in China in 1724.