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Francis Xavier, SJ, venerated as Saint Francis Xavier, was a Basque cleric. He was a Catholic missionary and saint who co-founded the Society of Jesus and, as a representative of the Portuguese Empire, led the first Christian mission to Japan.
This timeline of Christian missions chronicles the global expansion of Christianity through a listing of the most significant missionary outreach events.
Alessandro Valignano, S.J., sometimes Valignani, was an Italian Jesuit priest and missionary born in Chieti, part of the Kingdom of Naples, who helped supervise the introduction of Catholicism to the Far East, and especially to Japan.
The Japanese term Kirishitan, from Portuguese cristão, meaning "Christian", referred to Catholic Christians in Japanese and is used in Japanese texts as a historiographic term for Catholics in Japan in the 16th and 17th centuries.
In Christianity, inculturation is the adaptation of Christian teachings and practices to cultures. This is a term that is generally used by Catholics and the Orthodox, whereas Protestants, especially associated with the World Council of Churches, prefer to use the term "contextual theology".
The Catholic Church in Singapore is part of the worldwide Catholic Church, under the spiritual leadership of the Pope in Rome. In 2016, the Catholic Foundation of Singapore reported the Catholic population in Singapore to be over 373,000.
Christianity in Japan is among the nation's minority religions in terms of individuals who state an explicit affiliation or faith. In 2022, there were 1.26 million Christians in Japan, down from 1.9 million Christians in Japan in 2019. In the early years of the 21st century, between less than 1 percent and 1.5% of the population claimed Christian belief or affiliation.
The Catholic Church in India is part of the worldwide Catholic Church under the leadership of the Pope. There are over 20 million Catholics in India, representing around 1.55% of the total population, and the Catholic Church is the single largest Christian church in India. There are 10,701 parishes that make up 174 dioceses and eparchies, which are organised into 29 ecclesiastical provinces. Of these, 132 dioceses are of the Latin Church, 31 of the Syro-Malabar Catholic Church and 11 of the Syro-Malankara Catholic Church. Despite the very small percentage-wise population that Indian Catholics make up in the country, India still has the second-largest Christian population in Asia, after the Catholic Church in the Philippines.
The Catholic Church in Macau is part of the worldwide Catholic Church, under the spiritual leadership of the Pope in Rome. The history of Catholic church in Macau can traced back to 1576 under the leadership of the Pope. Catholic church in Macau was built not only with the purpose of prayers and atonement but also as rally point for Portuguese to gather up and act as a midway for missionaries going to deeper part of China and south east Asia. The Catholic church within Macau has played an important role on the spread of Catholicism in Japan, Vietnam and China and other parts of south east Asia. The Catholic church in Macau has provided schooling, missionary training and preaching the gospel to the local catholic and non-catholic communities. There are around 30,000 Catholics in Macau, which forms a single diocese, the Diocese of Macau. The current bishop of Macau is Stephen Lee Bun-sang.
Anjirō (アンジロー) or Yajirō, baptized as Paulo de Santa Fé, was the first recorded Japanese Christian, who lived in the 16th century. After committing a murder in his home domain of Satsuma in southern Kyushu, he fled to Portuguese Malacca and he sought out Saint Francis Xavier (1506–1552) and returned to Japan with him as an interpreter. Along with Xavier, Anjirō returned to Japan with two other Jesuits, two Japanese companions, and a Chinese companion who had been baptized to Catholicism to form the first Jesuit mission to Japan.
Missionary work of the Catholic Church has often been undertaken outside the geographically defined parishes and dioceses by religious orders who have people and material resources to spare, and some of which specialized in missions. Eventually, parishes and dioceses would be organized worldwide, often after an intermediate phase as an apostolic prefecture or apostolic vicariate. Catholic mission has predominantly been carried out by the Latin Church in practice.
The Martyrs of Japan were Christian missionaries and followers who were persecuted and executed, mostly during the Tokugawa shogunate period in the 17th century. The Japanese saw the rituals of the Christians causing people to pray, close their eyes with the sign of the cross and lock their hands together – this was seen as psychological warfare against the Japanese and this was punished as such. More than 400 martyrs of Japan have been recognized with beatification by the Catholic Church, and 42 have been canonized as saints.
Juan Fernández was a Spanish Jesuit lay brother and missionary. He was the first European to write a grammar and lexicon of the Japanese language.
Christian missionaries arrived in Japan with Francis Xavier and the Jesuits in the 1540s and briefly flourished, with over 100,000 converts, including many daimyōs in Kyushu. It soon met resistance from the highest office holders of Japan. Emperor Ōgimachi issued edicts to ban Catholicism in 1565 and 1568, but to little effect. Beginning in 1587, with imperial regent Toyotomi Hideyoshi's ban on Jesuit missionaries, Christianity was repressed as a threat to national unity. After the Tokugawa shogunate banned Christianity in 1620 it ceased to exist publicly. Many Catholics went underground, becoming hidden Christians, while others died. Only after the Meiji Restoration was Christianity re-established in Japan.
St. Paul's College of Macau, also known as College of Madre de Deus, was a university founded in 1594 in Macau by Jesuits at the service of the Portuguese under the Padroado treaty. It claimed the title of the first Western university in East Asia.
Christianity and colonialism are associated with each other by some due to the service of Christianity, in its various sects, as the state religion of the historical European colonial powers, in which Christians likewise made up the majority. Through a variety of methods, Christian missionaries acted as the "religious arms" of the imperialist powers of Europe. According to Edward E. Andrews, Associate Professor of Providence College Christian missionaries were initially portrayed as "visible saints, exemplars of ideal piety in a sea of persistent savagery". However, by the time the colonial era drew to a close in the later half of the 20th century, missionaries were viewed as "ideological shock troops for colonial invasion whose zealotry blinded them", colonialism's "agent, scribe and moral alibi".
Istoria della Compagnia di Gesu is a monumental six folio-volume work about history of the Society of Jesus published in Rome in 1650–1673 by the Jesuit historian Daniello Bartoli. It is the most extensive classic of Italian literature, over ten thousand pages long. It begins the centenary history of the Jesuits between 1540 and 1640 with an authoritative if somewhat ponderous biography of the founder Ignatius Loyola.
The history of the missions of the Jesuits in China is part of the history of relations between China and the Western world. The missionary efforts and other work of the Society of Jesus, or Jesuits, between the 16th and 17th century played a significant role in continuing the transmission of knowledge, science, and culture between China and the West, and influenced Christian culture in Chinese society today.
References
- ↑ Cañizares-Esguerra, Jorge; Maryks, Robert Aleksander; Hsia, Ronnie Po-Chia (13 August 2018). Encounters between Jesuits and Protestants in Asia and the Americas. BRILL. ISBN 978-90-04-37382-2.
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