LEBBE, VINCENT. - Missionary of St. Vincent, "apostle of modern China," b. in Ghent on 17 Aug. 1877, d. in Nanking on 24 June 1940 (in China known under the name Lei Ming Yuan). He left for China while still a subdeacon, in Feb. 1901, where he was ordained a priest on 10 Oct. of that year. He was a tenacious and bold champion of the new approach to missionary apostolate: to graft Christianity onto the civilization and customs of the evangelized peoples, eliminating every form of Europeanization. Guided by this idea, much contested, and by the thought that to obtain a real progress of Christianity it was indispensable to reach the "masses" and the soul of the people, he took Chinese nationality and made himself in everything "Chinese with the Chinese."
In 1911 he began a thoroughgoing effort to win over public opinion by organizing lecture halls; he prepared a group of capable and active collaborators, who were to carry the ferment of the Christian message into the ruling classes, and he boldly created a Catholic press. In 1915 the daily l'ichepao appeared, later described as "the king of newspapers." Then came l'ichepao della sera, an illustrated women's weekly, and two fortnightly cultural and apologetic publications. Since a typically Chinese monasticism was lacking, in 1926 he founded the Little Brothers of St. John the Baptist and in 1929 the Little Sisters of St. Teresa. Between 1920 and 1926 he worked in Europe among Chinese students, and in 1923 he brought to life the Unio Catholica Inventoris Sinensis. In 1927 he founded the Société des Auxiliaires des Missions, composed of priests and laypeople whose purpose is to place themselves at the service of indigenous bishops. During the Sino-Japanese War he went with his monks to the combat front, where he organized the medical service and a corps for service to the people. On the day of his death, by presidential decree, he was declared a day of national mourning. He suffered much for the defense of his ideas and his works, but he also had the consolation of seeing the principles of his missionary action fully approved by the Maximum illud of Benedict XV and the Rerum Ecclesiae of Pius XI.
L. set out the principles, methods and results of his missionary apostolate in various occasional writings, for the most part published in Annales de la Mission from 1912 onward and in various other periodicals or congress reports.
Bibliography
Annibale Bugnini