RICCI, SCIPIONE de'. — Bishop of Pistoia and the most distinguished representative of Italian Jansenism; b. in Florence on 9 Jan. 1741, d. in exile at Rignano near Florence on 27 Dec. 1809.
RICCI, MATTEO — Portrait executed immediately after his death by Fr. Emanuele Jennenhoei or Pereira, S.J., and brought to Rome in 1614 by Fr. Nicola Trigault, S.J. — Rome, Residenza del Gesù.
RICCI, MATTEO — The Chinese Emperor Wanli, protector of Ricci during his stay in China.
Matteo Ricci was born in Macerata on 6 October 1552 and entered the Society of Jesus in 1571. After completing his studies in Rome, he was sent to the Portuguese mission in India in 1578. In 1582 he arrived in Macao, and in 1583 he went to Zhaoqing (Sciacoe), then in 1595 to Nanjing (Nanchino) and later to Nanciam; in 1598 he returned to Nanjing and then to Beijing (Pechino), before going back to Zhaoqing. In 1601 he settled definitively in Beijing. In 1597 he had been elected superior of the mission, where he won the favor and esteem of the Court and Emperor Wanli.
At the time of his death, Christianity counted 2,000 converts, of whom 400 were in Beijing; among them were many nobles and members of the ruling class. Notable among them were Paolo Xu (Siu), Ricci’s collaborator in the composition of his Chinese books and future chancellor of the Empire, founder of the Christian community in Shanghai (who gave his name to the suburb of Zikawai); Leone Li, who later obtained from the authorities the gift of a plot of land for Ricci’s burial; and Michael Yang, who risked his life to shelter the Fathers during persecution. On his tomb in Zhaoqing (he was the first foreigner, not an ambassador, to be buried in China), a memorial stone was placed (recording the memory of the deceased) and perhaps also an inscription by the Prefect of Beijing, Wanliushia. Finally, in 1650, the current inscribed stele was erected.
The principles on which Ricci based his extraordinary work were simple and in keeping with the spirit of the directives left by St. Ignatius and the orders given by Fr. Alessandro Valignano: the greatest sympathy and respect for the spiritual and intellectual values of the Chinese, the most perfect possible knowledge of the language, the use of science for an apologetic end, the apostolate of the pen and conversation, care for the educated classes from which the government of the people derives, and the primacy granted to supernatural virtues (cf. P. D'Elia, *L'uomo più strano della Cina*, in *Ecclesia*, II [1952], pp. 477–81). A clear testimony to this is found in his literary activity; in addition to numerous letters and memoirs, he composed more than twenty works in Chinese on apologetics, mathematics, and astronomy (cf. the list in P. D'Elia, *Fonti Ricciane*, III [index], pp. 239–43). Among the principal ones are: *On Friendship*, *Catechetical Conversations*, *Solid Treatise on God*, *Christian Doctrine*, *Ten Paradoxes*, *Treatise on the Four Elements*, and *Treatise on Heaven and Earth*.
Ricci, Matteo - Tomba del p. M. R. - Pechino.
He spent his final years in nana nel Chianti, immersed in the study of the Church Fathers, compiling his extensive correspondence, composing devotional booklets and his Memoirs. He saw himself as a survivor of the "ruines du Port-Royal," an exiled confessor, a martyr; and he reflected upon Quesnel, Saint-Cyran, Arnauld, and the great figures of French Jansenism, almost as if to conform to them even in death. One after another, his friends had vanished in death or been overwhelmed by the violence of political events. Pressured by the affectionate urgings of the Florentine archbishop, his relatives, his friends, and even the Grand Ducal court itself, on 9 May 1805 he met with Pius VII in Florence and submitted to him a declaration of submission. Had he not written the Memoirs in those years, perhaps the sincerity of such submission might have been believed; instead, one must acknowledge that the ambition, hypocrisy, and duplicity of the Roman student and the Florentine canon accompanied him even to the brink of the grave. He signed the abjuration, but "purely and simply," as he wrote in the Memoirs. He would say that he had not wished "to declare himself guilty of a fault he had not committed," nor "to condemn anything except errors and heresies as they were qualified." It was thus a hypothetical submission, a "grammatical sacrifice." For this reason, after his death, he enjoyed sympathies among the epigones of the Italian Risorgimento as a "seer" and therefore a martyr of "Roman intrigues," and equally biting antipathies from ecclesiastical historians. He thus had a varied and questionable bibliography. Certainly, his moral stature does not rise above an honest mediocrity.
Devoid of a solid theological formation, he devoted himself more to liturgical, disciplinary, and ecclesiastical reforms than to theological novelties, poisoning even reforms—then premature but later justified by time and favored and implemented by the Church—with a spirit of schism and heresy. Such reforms included the return to a liturgical piety through translations of the Missal and prayers for particular functions, a greater simplicity in worship at a time when churches threatened to become theaters, and a sense of enlightened piety that was to guide all actions of life in a more adequate fulfillment of ecclesiastical and religious duties. Thus, the common desire for reform of the Breviary and for a revision of sacred hagiography, the wish for a worship purified of superstitious elements and for a more discerning and critical sense of history, the support given to the culture and intellectual education of youth, an equitable and just distribution of ecclesiastical goods and honors, the lively sense of parish life, Communion "infra Missam," etc., constitute today the aspirations and fruitful labor of the Church. But de' R., placing himself before the Pope, sinned through episcopalism. By granting his parish priests rights of divine jurisdiction, he sinned through parochialism. He then rendered to Caesar what he had withdrawn from God and severed from the Church, and thus dried up all his beneficial activity.