FRANCESCO ORAZIO de PENNABILLI. — The most illustrious Capuchin missionary of Tibet, born at Pennabilli (Pesaro) in 1680 to the Olivieri family, he entered the Capuchins of the Picene province on 8 Nov. 1700 and died at Patna (Nepal) on 20 July 1745.
Together with five other confrères, he formed the third missionary expedition to Tibet, which set out on 25 Aug. 1712; he reached Chandernagor (Bengal) on 1 Sept. 1713 and continued on to Patna (Behar); in Dec. 1714 he was sent to establish a station in Nepal; on 4 Aug. 1716 he set out for Lhasa, the capital of Tibet, where he arrived on 1 Oct. of the same year. Appointed prefect of the mission in 1720, he received the decree of appointment on 15 Sept. 1725. Exhausted by hardships and enormous difficulties, he withdrew to Nepal in Aug. 1732.
In 1737 he came to Rome in search of aid and published the interesting Breve vaguaglio dell'operato da Cappuccini nella missione del Thibet (Rome 1738; cf. Analecta Ordinis Min. Cappuccinorum, 37 [1921], pp. 285-94; 38 [1922], pp. 57-61), which was published and translated several times. In 1738 he headed, as prefect, the ninth Capuchin expedition, including Fr. Beligatti Cassinino da Macerata and Fr. Bernini Giuseppe da Gargano, to the difficult mission of Tibet, reaching Lhasa on 6 Jan. 1741. Reduced to the limits of endurance and driven out by persecution, on 20 Apr. 1745 he departed for Patna, marking the end of the Tibetan mission proper. He wrote another Relazione sul principio e stato presente della missione del gran Thibet (Rome 1742, cf. Analecta cit., 4 [1888], pp. 279-283, 315-19, 340-43).
He also distinguished himself in literary work; an expert in the local languages, he left in manuscript the first Vocabolario italotibetano, containing approximately 35,000 entries, and an Vocabolario italiano-hindi. To facilitate the understanding and refutation of the Buddhist religion, he translated various sacred books of the Lama into Italian. He translated St. Roberto Bellarmino’s Doctrina Christiana and Tourlot’s Thesaurus religionis Christianae into Tibetan, as well as the Gospels and the Acts of the Apostles; he also composed in Tibetan an Apologia del cristianesimo contro il buddhismo, which he presented to the king in 1713, and a Vita di Maria S.ma. His linguistic and ethnographic manuscripts were utilized by other authors.