By One of the great things about Roman Catholicism is that it provides roughly 1.3 billion people with a standardized system of belief, or so we would like to believe that it does.
While the church has standardized liturgical practice, it has never been able to fully standardize the relationship of faith to one’s life due to differing cultural perceptions. This idea may be challenging to grasp, but it becomes fairly straightforward when examining the cultural influences of various Catholic communities.
For example, Catholicism in the United States has a wide swath of cultural influences but could historically be distilled down to a joint Anglo-German-Hibero (English-German-Irish for those unfamiliar with Latin) melting pot due to the origin of many American Catholics who fled the post-Reformation protestant powers of Europe.
Each group came to the United States with slightly different ideas about their cultural interpretation of Catholicism. Individual syncretisms, or “reconciliations and fusions of belief whose result is often heterogeneous,” according to Merriam-Webster, often occur due to previous cultural or religious traditions that existed before Catholicism.
The guiding commission of the church’s mission can be found in Matthew 28:16-20 which records Jesus’s command to the apostles to make “disciples of all nations,” but the logistics of said commission do have a habit of getting messy.
Throughout its nearly 2000-year history, the Roman Catholic Church has become an integral part of the lives and practices of people in a myriad of different cultural contexts, and in a world being ever defined by identity, it’s important to examine the history and how the church’s stance on cultural practices has formed. The church has refined its approach through centuries of history and controversy, bringing us to the main case study of this article.
One of the significant historical crises surrounding the syncretic interpretation of church doctrine arose in the mid-17th century in a series of events known as the Chinese rites controversy.
The controversy started as a theological dispute between the Jesuits, Franciscans, and Dominicans during their intersecting missions in China.
The now Venerable Matteo Ricci, an Italian Jesuit priest, spearheaded the Jesuit mission to China. Instead of presenting Catholicism as diametrically opposed to the Eastern way of life, Ricci sought to learn Chinese, transliterate western texts, and present Catholicism in a uniquely Chinese context. This approach to spreading Catholicism in China became known as the “Rule of Matteo Ricci” and provided the ideological foundations for the Jesuit’s mission in China.
At the time of these missions, the Qing Emperor of China, other public officials, and the Chinese populous were expected to participate in a variety of Confucian rituals to ring in the new year, open court, consecrate a new school, or pay homage to the dead among other things.
Ricci and other Jesuit scholars examined these rituals and argued that they were of a secular nature, not religious. As such, in Jesuit eyes, Chinese Catholics could continue participating in their ancestral traditions without contradicting their Catholic faith. The Jesuits also allowed various other conventions to take place within the Chinese Catholic community. Examples include using the name Tiān or Shàngdì for the Christian god, both of which had previously been names for the divine in several other Chinese religions.
The Franciscans and Dominicans disagreed with the Jesuits’ approach and argued that the rituals were pagan and that the naming convention of the Christian God should be rendered literally into Chinese and free from any past connotations.
Eventually, these disputes reached then Pope Clement XI, who sided with the Franciscans and Dominicans in 1704 and banned further discussion on the issue.
The Qing emperor’s response to the new decree was a swift expulsion of many and persecution of the rest of the Christians in China, further straining the relationship between the east and west.
Subsequent Popes, such as Benedict XIV, upheld Pope Clement’s degree, and the issue seemed to be settled for a time.
However, the controversy was not quite over.
In 1939, Pope Pius XII consulted the now-dissolved congregation for the Evangelization of Peoples and relaxed Clements’s and subsequent Pope’s decrees.
In a return to the Jesuit position, Pius XII separated the cultural and religious interpretations and declared the following in his Papal decree Plane Compertum:
“It is abundantly clear that in the regions of the Orient, some ceremonies, although they may have been involved with pagan rites in ancient times, have – with the changes in customs and thinking over the course of centuries- retained merely the civil significance of piety towards the ancestors or of love of the fatherland or of courtesy towards one’s neighbors.”
With this decree, the Catholic Church refined its theological metric for examining religious and civil practices. The sentiment of Pope Pius XII and the findings of the congregation are now a standard theological marker for the way the Catholic Church evaluates the difference between religious worship and cultural practice and are upheld by the successor institution to the congregation, the Dicastery for Evangelization.
On December 17, Matteo Ricci was declared venerable for his contributions to Catholic history and Catholicism.
Matteo Ricci’s life and approach to missionary work provide many lessons for the contemporary Catholic. Often, missionary work or spreading the church’s message can be obscured by a lack of cultural understanding and honest effort to engage with different traditions.
Ricci’s example and the church’s eventual response to the Chinese rites controversy show the continual development of magisterial teaching and how the church has adapted its theology throughout history.
