Matteo Ricci by Michela Fontana Read Free Book Online

Greek and Latin to the older pupils at the mission school, attended by over four hundred local children and adolescents. Many of these were orphans, entrusted to the Jesuits in accordance with customary practice and inculcated by them with Christian values.
    Living in Goa, Ricci realized that the Hindu and Muslim populations were being forcibly coerced into conversion. The city’s Hindu temples had been destroyed by the Portuguese soldiers in 1540, and a law prohibited Christians from having “infidel” servants, thus obliging whoever needed to work with the Portuguese to become Catholic. Moreover, all converts were required to abandon their caste and customs, take a Portuguese name, and adopt Western dress. The situation in which Ricci found himself in that world of blurred boundaries between the sacred and the secular, where religion was mixed up with trafficking, war, coercion, and death, was a far cry from any idea of a mission he may have formed during his years at the Roman College. The harrowing experience of having to adapt to such an extreme reality, as well as to the torrid climate, something still harder to bear for a physique already sorely tried by a long voyage, weakened him to the point where he fell seriously ill. In order to hasten his recovery, the Jesuit authorities transferred him to the town of Cochin on the Indian coast south of Goa, where he stayed for nearly a year, continuing to study theology and to teach Latin and Greek to pupils of the local Jesuit school. It was in Cochin that Ricci was ordained into the priesthood three months before his twenty-eighth birthday and celebrated his first mass on July 26, 1580, as he related in a letter to Ludovico Maselli a few months later: “And on the feast of Saint Ann I sang a solemn mass to the great rejoicing of the fathers and my pupils.” 13
    In the same letter, written three years after his departure from Italy, Ricci spoke to the superior, whom he recalled with filial affection, of his nostalgia for the time he had spent in Rome:
    I cannot say what things I imagine at times and how they arouse in me a certain sort of melancholy . . . thinking that the fathers and brothers I loved and love so much at the college, where I was born and raised, might forget me while I hold them all so fresh in my memory. And so one of the good prayers I say with many tears in my misery is to remember you, Most Reverend Father, and the other fathers and brethren at the college. 14
    Ricci returned to Goa at the end of 1580 in order to attend the second- and third-year courses in theology while waiting to be assigned to a mission. Many changes had taken place in the meantime. In 1578, two years earlier, Sebastian I had been killed in the battle of Alcázarquivir against the Turks, and Portugal too had come under the rule of Philip II of Spain while Ricci was in Cochin. This dynastic change was to have no effect on trade or the life of the missions in the East, as it had been decided that the division into areas of Spanish and Portuguese influence would remain in force in accordance with prior agreements.
    Ricci was also informed about the fate of the companions who had already left the college in Goa. The previous year, after a few months on the coast of Malabar, Michele Ruggieri had received orders to go to Macao and await a favorable opportunity to gain entry into China. Rodolfo Acquaviva was on a mission with two companions at the court of Akbar, the Muslim ruler of the immense Mughal empire 15 in the northern part of India, where he was to stay for three years in an attempt to open the way for Christianity. On his return, when Ricci had already left, the young Acquaviva, now head of the mission at Salcette near Goa, was to be killed, together with four other Jesuits, by natives. According to historical reconstructions of the event which took place in 1583, the cause of the attack was a hatred for priests due to the destruction of hundreds of Hindu temples by Portuguese