Having entered the Society of Jesus in 1718, he taught rhetoric and philosophy in Siena (1725–31) and theology in Rome (1743–49); then he served as spiritual director of the students at the Collegio Romano (1751–55), later as secretary to the General L. Centurione (1755–58), and finally as General (25 May 1758).
His generalship was marked by unceasing anxiety and martyrdom. As soon as Clement XIII was elected pope, Ricci submitted a petition against the injustices committed by Cardinals Saldanha and Atalaja during their visitation of Jesuit houses in Portugal, and received in return, with the warmest demonstrations of affection, three counsels for those stormy times: silence, patience, and prayer, which Ricci in turn recommended in subsequent circulars to his subjects. Clement XIII spared no effort to aid the General, and a sign of his benevolence was the bull *Apostolicum pascendi* of 7 January 1765. Yet this did not avert the storm unleashed by the Order’s adversaries: in 1759 the Jesuits were expelled from Portugal; in 1763 from France; in 1767 from Spain; until the brief of suppression arrived in 1773. Ricci was imprisoned first in the English College, then in Castel Sant’Angelo, where he languished amid harsh treatment for more than two years. Five days before his death, as he received the Viaticum, he repeated before the vice-gerent the protest he had already lodged in writing, declaring his own innocence and that of the entire Order (cf. E. Rosa, op. cit. in bibl., pp. 437–39). Thereupon justice was rendered him with solemn funeral rites at San Giovanni dei Fiorentini, with the approval of Pius VI.
Ricci was reproached by many of his own religious for excessive weakness and passivity, as though capable only of prayer and endurance and not of acting to defend the Order; yet in reality he lacked neither prudence nor active exertion, though he had to conceal every step, even from his intimates, as the preserved documents show. As for the tale that two Jesuits received from Ricci the order to poison Clement XIV, see B. Duhr, *I Gesuiti, favole e leggende*, I, Florence 1908, pp. 62–75. Regarding the celebrated phrase *Sint ut sunt aut non sint*, it should be noted that it is not Ricci’s but Clement XIII’s, uttered against the proposal of the French government to nationalize the French portion of the Order, separating it from the rest (cf. F. X. de Ravignan, op. cit. in bibl., I, p. 105).