Why Is Matteo Ricci Important To The Roman Catholic Church?

The group of Jesuits were a group of people who, originally from the Roman Catholic Church, were Catholic missionaries to the entire world; its original name was the Society of Jesus. In certain views, the patron of the Jesuit Mission was not quite a saint: clever in the ways of power, Matteo Ricci acted more like a minister (Corsi 7). Matteo Ricci, a man who believed in a better life for Christians; a man who believed that the culture of a person did not need to be abandoned in order to be converted to Christianity. Where other Jesuits had failed, he was considered to succeed by the result of perseverance and the spirit of adaptation (Gernet 450).
Matteo Ricci was born in 1522, in Macerata in the Marche region of Italy. At seventeen years
Ricci came to realize that many Hindu and Muslim populations were forced to abandon their belief system and their culture in order to accept Christianity. In fact, Portuguese soldiers burned down the city’s Hindu temples in 1540. The converts of Christianity were required to abandon their castes and customs, even adopting Portuguese names. This shocked and scandalized Ricci; it was a rude awakening for him (Mong 387). There was more Ricci didn’t understand about the Jesuits. For instance, The Jesuit authorities had forbidden ethnic Indians studying for the priesthood from attending courses on philosophy and theology for fear that they would be too proud of their learning and thus refuse to work with the poor. This was an ill-founded policy, Ricci thought. He questioned why European novices were allowed to be educated in the entire syllabus while the Indians were forbidden. He believed that many of the Jesuit authorities didn’t use their knowledge to the gain of the Christianity, but that didn’t stop him from going to China (Mong 387). It gave him even more ambition to leave and spread the gospel in a different