RUBINO, ANTONIO. - Jesuit, missionary, b. at Strambino (diocese of Ivrea) on 1 March 1578, d. 22 March 1643 at Nagasaki (Japan).
Having entered the Order in 1586, he set out in 1602 for India, where, ordained a priest in 1605, he received the kingdom of Bisnagar as his field of work. He remained in India until 1638 and, always devoted to teaching, catechesis, preaching and important missions, he accomplished an immense amount of good there. Nor did he neglect his tireless scientific activity; some letters to Fr. Clavius and to Griemberger, professors at the Roman College, a brief description of the whole world and a description of the kingdom of Bisnagar attest to his expertise in cosmography and cartography, while his interest in Galileo's discoveries, noted in those same letters, shows him to have been a skilled cultivator of the mathematical sciences, and the Catena evangelica, in 7 thick volumes, shows him to have been an expert exegete.
But one work above all, composed in 1641, illustrates the theologian and the apostolic man: Metodo della dottrina che i Padri della Compagnia di Giesù insegnano ai neofiti nelle missioni della Cina con la risposta alle obiettioni di alcuni moderni che la impugnano. In 1638, in fact, he had gone over to China, with the office of visitor of the Japanese province and the Chinese vice-province, and because of his immediate application to the study of the languages and books of China and Japan, he was soon able to enter into dispute with the bonzes. With the Method of the doctrine he intended to justify the conduct of his missionaries in China, setting out clearly the practice followed in evangelization, in order to refute the objections of the religious of other Orders and of some among the Jesuits themselves (v. RITES, QUESTION of). The work, written in Portuguese, was not printed until many years after the author's death, translated into Italian by another missionary, Fr. G. F. Marini (Lyons 1665). In 1686 it was placed on the Index, where it still remains. In 1643, having embarked with his companions, all disguised as Chinese, for Japan, they landed on 12 Aug. on the island of Satauma; but discovered by the spies of the persecutors, they were seized, taken to Nagasaki and, after harsh imprisonment, condemned, it seems, to the torture of the pit.
To R. was attributed by Jansenist and Enlightenment adversaries the work: Difesa del giudizio formato dalla Santa Sede Apostolica. Turin 1760 (?). concerning the Chinese rites and ceremonies, where iconoclastic judgments are contained against the use of the Crucifix in Churches and on altars. The calumny simply falls of itself, because at the date of Clement VI's decree on the Chinese rites (1704), to which the work refers, and even more at the date of its promulgation in Peking through Card. de Tournon (1707), R. had already passed from this life. The author is instead a doctor of the Sorbonne (cf. anonymous, La verità difesa col disvelarsi nella sincera esposizione dei fatti, Florence 1761).
Bibliography4 works
Margherita Letizia Fontanesi