Autograph document signed. Co-signed by Jean-Sylvain de Neuvialle, superior of the French Jesuit China mission.
8vo. 1 p. In Latin. With 6 autograph lines by Jean-Sylvain de Neuvialle.
€ 3.500,00
An oath renouncing the practice of the Chinese rites taken by the Jesuit missionary as required by the Papal Bull "Ex Quo Singulari" (1742). The oath was sworn on the Bible and a signed autograph ("manu propria") of the formula had to be produced as evidence. Most of these documents are co-signed by church officials or superior friars as witnesses to an oath sworn in their presence ("in manibus meis"), in this case the superior of the French mission Jean-Sylvain de Neuvialle (1696-1764).
Born in Auvergne, Jean-Gaspard Chanseaume entered the Society of Jesus, province of Toulouse, in 1728, Although he reached Macau as early as the 1740s, the severe persecution of Christians in mainland China forced him to stay there until 1752, when he was sent to Jiangxi. After four years of missionary work, Chanseaume died of illness. Still in Macau, he wrote several letters on the persecution of Christians at that time and a long letter detailing the martyrdom of Saint Peter Sanz and his companions in Fouzhou on 26 May 1747.
Jean-Sylvain de Neuvialle served twice as superior of the French Jesuit China mission and is the author of a 1754 report on the diplomatic mission of Francisco Xavier Assis Pacheco e Sampaio Melo, Portuguese ambassador in Siam, to the Imperial Court in Beijing.
During the early years of their mission to East Asia, the Jesuits led by Matteo Ricci accommodated Catholicism to Chinese customs and Confucian practice in important ways, both for political reasons and in the hope of attracting more converts. Criticism of this syncretism is as old as the Chinese rites themselves, and Ricci's direct successor Niccolò Longobardo attempted to change course, which led to his replacement as provincial. When Dominican and Franciscan missionaries entered China, they reported critically on the Jesuit practices to Rome. A first condemnation was decreed by Pope Clement XI in 1704 and confirmed in the 1715 Bull "Ex Illa Die". In reaction to the condemnation, the Kiangxi Emperor, who initially tolerated the Christian missionaries and had especially good relations with the Jesuits, officially forbade Christian missions in China. In 1721, Carlo Ambrosio Mezzabarba, the Latin Patriarch of Alexandria, was sent as a Papal legate to Macau and Beijing. Despite the concession of "eight permissions" regarding the practice of the Chinese rites, officiated in a pastoral letter to the missionaries from 4 November 1721, the Emperor did not revoke the ban. Finally, in "Ex Quo Singulari", Pope Benedict XIV re-affirmed the Bull of 1715 and required all missionaries in the region to take the oath renouncing the practice of Chinese rites.
A transcription and translation of the document is available on request.
Minimally stained.
Louis Pfister, Notices biographiques et bibliographiques sur les jésuites de l'ancienne mission de Chine, 1552-1773, Chang-hai, 1932-1934 (Nendeln: Kraus Reprint, 1971), no. 385, p. 833 (Chanseaume) and no. 325, pp. 724-729 (Neuvialle).
