LEBBE, VINCENT. - Missionary of St. Vincent, “apostle of modern China,” b. at Ghent on 17 Aug. 1877, d. at Nanking on 24 June 1940 (in China known by the name of Lei Ming Yuan). He left as a subdeacon for China in Feb. 1901, where he was ordained priest on 10 Oct. of the same year. He was a tenacious and bold advocate of a new approach to missionary apostolate: to graft Christianity onto the civilization and customs of the peoples evangelized, eliminating every form of Europeanization. Guided by this idea, much opposed, and by the conviction that to achieve real progress of Christianity it was essential to reach the “masses” and the soul of the people, he took Chinese nationality and made himself in all things “a Chinese among the Chinese.”
Beginning in 1911, he launched a thoroughgoing campaign to win public opinion by organizing lecture halls; he trained a group of capable and active collaborators who were to carry the leaven of the Christian message into the ruling classes, and boldly established a Catholic press. In 1915 there appeared the daily *Ichepao*, later called “the king of newspapers.” Then followed *Ichepao della sera*, a weekly illustrated women’s magazine, and two fortnightly cultural and apologetic journals. Since there was no typically Chinese form of monasticism, 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 founded the *Unio Catholica Juventutis Sinensis*. In 1927 he established the *Société des Auxiliaires des Missions*, composed of priests and laity whose purpose was 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 medical services and a corps for service to the people. On the day of his death, by presidential decree, national mourning was declared. He suffered much for the defense of his ideas and works, but he also had the consolation of seeing the principles of his missionary action fully endorsed by *Maximum illud* of Benedict XV and *Rerum Ecclesiae* of Pius XI.
L. set forth the principles, methods, and results of his missionary apostolate in various occasional writings, mostly published in the *Annales de la Mission* from 1912 onward and in various other periodicals or congress reports.