LEBBE, VINCENT. – Missionary of St Vincent, “apostle of modern China,” born in Ghent on 17 August 1877, died in Nanking on 24 June 1940 (in China known by the name Lei Ming Yuan). He left for China while still a subdeacon in February 1901, where he was ordained a priest on 10 October of the same year. He was a tenacious and audacious advocate of a new approach to missionary apostolate: grafting Christianity onto the civilization and customs of the peoples evangelized, while eliminating every form of Europeanization. Guided by this much-contested idea, and by the conviction that, in order to achieve real progress for Christianity, it was indispensable to reach the “masses” and the soul of the people, he took Chinese nationality and made himself entirely “Chinese with the Chinese.”
In 1911 he began a thorough campaign to win public opinion by organizing lecture halls; he prepared a group of capable and active collaborators, who were to carry the leaven of the Christian message into the governing classes, and he boldly established 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 cultural and apologetic fortnightlies. 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 established the Unio Catholica Inventoris Sinensis. In 1927 he founded the Société des Auxiliaires des Missions, composed of priests and laymen whose purpose was to place themselves at the service of indigenous bishops. During the Sino-Japanese War he went with his monks to the battlefront, where he organized the medical service and a corps for service to the people. On the day of his death, by presidential decree, a national day of mourning was declared. He suffered greatly in defending 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 forth 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.