A conference titled “Diplomats of the Gospel” remembered on September 25 in his homeland of Tolentino – in the Italian region of Marche – the figure of the Franciscan Thomas of Tolentino, a missionary sent to China by Clement V and who died a martyr in India in 1321. A figure that his fellow Jesuit Matteo Ricci also had in mind when (more than two centuries later) he left for China. The editorial director of , Father Gianni Criveller, spoke at the conference about the importance of Thomas of Tolentino and the missions of the Franciscans in China in the 13th and 14th centuries. We publish below excerpts from his speech.
The first Christians to arrive in Chinese territory in the 7th century (635) along the Silk Road were Syrian-Eastern Christians from the Christian metropolis of Seleucia-Ctesophon (near present-day Baghdad), led by a monk -bishop known by the Chinese name of Alopen. This is the mission eloquently illustrated by the well-known stele of Xi’an, where Christianity is defined as the Teaching of Light.
The silk routes were repopulated with missionaries from the second half of the 13th century: they were Franciscans with the double mandate of evangelizers and diplomats. On July 24, 1246, the brothers Giovanni da Pian del Carpine (1182-1252) and Benedict of Poland They arrived at the court of the Mongolian khan Güyük, in the city of Karakorum, carrying a letter from Pope Innocent IV.
At the Council of Lyon (1245), the Pope had included in the agenda a remedium against Tartaros, that is, sending emissaries to try to stop the threatening expansion of the Mongols towards Europe. The letter of Innocent IV contained an invitation to the Khan to convert to Christianity and a brake on the westward advance of the conquest of Christian territories. In response, the Khan asked the Pope and all other rulers to submit to him.
A few years after Innocent’s initiative, the French king Saint Louis sent the Belgian friar William (William) of Rubrück (1252-1253), accompanied by brother Bartholomew of Cremona, on a mission with the same purpose. In the winter of 1253, the two friars arrived at the court of Kublai Khan. Bartholomew remained in Kambaliq (present-day Beijing) and here, in 1265, Marco Polo received a letter from Kublai Khan requesting six “sages” from the Pope. Marco Polo – whose travels date between 1271 and 1291 – will deliver the message to Cardinal Visconti, the future Gregory of humanity.
The third Franciscan mission in China was led by friar John of Montecorvino (1247-1328), friar belonging to the spiritual current. Montecorvino began his mission in the East in 1279: first as a diplomatic envoy to Armenia, from whose sovereign he received a letter for Nicholas IV, the first Franciscan pope. After delivering the letter to the Pope, John of Montecorvino left for China in 1289. He arrived in Khanbaliq in 1293. Two of his letters have survived to us: he writes that he built churches (the first in Peking, in 1299), baptized many people and translated the Psalms and the New Testament into Mongolian. Montecorvino learned the Mongolian language and was in contact with the ethnic Mongolian population from Central Asia.
In the summer of 1307, the two letters-reports were delivered to Pope Clement V by Brother Thomas of Tolentino (ca. 1245 – 1321). Thomas had also militated – with conviction and even paying with prison – in the party of the spiritual Franciscans, following, like many reformers and pauperists of the time, the doctrines of Joachim of Fiore (1130-1202). In 1294, Thomas joined the pauperes eremitae domini Celestini, or group of Celestine V, dismantled following the abdication and accession to the papal throne of Celestine’s opponent, Benedetto Caetani, under the name Boniface VIII.
The Marches were permeated with strong spiritualist feelings: Thomas had as companions in fortune and misfortune friars from these neighborhoods: Angelo Clareno (or da Cingoli), Pietro da Macerata, Angelo da Tolentino and Marco da Montelupone. With them he shared not only the prison but also, in 1290, the mission. They were sent to Cilicia, the kingdom of Armenia, in southern Turkey.
The passages in the history of the Spiritans are, as we know, very complex: persecuted by Boniface VIII and at odds with the conventuals, they were divided among the most intransigent (among them Angelo Clareno, Thomas’ companion in prison and on the mission). and those willing to mediate with the ecclesiastical authorities, among them Tomás de Tolentino.
The first contact between Thomas and the Chinese mission dates back -precisely- to June-July 1307, when the friar of Tolentino delivered to Clement V, pope of Avignon who was then in the region of Gascony, the last two letters of his missionary confrere in Beijing, Juan de Montecorvino: it was after them that the pope sent seven new Franciscan bishops to the East to consecrate Juan. According to some, Tomás himself could have been among them, but this is a hardly credible hypothesis.
Only three brother bishops, Gerardo Albuini, Pellegrino da Città di Castello and Andrea da Perugia, arrived in Beijing in 1309 for ordination. In 1313 the diocese of Zaiton (Quanzhou, present-day Xiamen, in Fujian) was also established, of which the three friars were successively bishops.
On the other hand, we know that in 1320 brother Thomas of Tolentino was on the island of Hormuz (in the Persian Gulf), where he had arrived from Tabriz (Persia), together with his brothers James of Padua, Peter of Siena, Demetrius from Tiflis and the Dominican Jourdain Catalani from Sévérac. They were heading to China and, after embarking for southern India, Thomas and his companions were taken to Thane, on the central-western coast of India, where they were summoned by the authorities to explain their faith, an act that included, in the mind of Thomas and his companions, the condemnation of Muhammad and, therefore, the prospect of martyrdom.
In fact, the friars were arrested, tortured and sentenced to the stake. Tomás, now in his eighties, was saved, while the youngest, Santiago, was condemned to the stake. However, on April 9, 1321, the city’s judicial authorities had Thomas and his surviving brothers captured and killed. A report on the martyrdom was written by brothers contemporaries of Thomas and later by Odorico da Pordenone, also in China from 1320 to 1330 (and in Beijing from 1325 to 1328), extraordinary traveler, explorer and observer of customs, family organization , social and military of the Chinese empire.
Thomas was buried alongside his brothers by the Dominican Jourdain. The relics were transferred in 1326 by Oderico da Pordenone to one of the two Franciscan monasteries of Quanzhou (today Xiamen), in China. Tomás’ head, under unknown circumstances, was later transferred to Tolentino. He was beatified by Pope Leo XIII in 1894.
The story of Thomas reflects well the idea of mission as an action of the Trinity in history, characteristic of Joachim of Fiore, the first narrative theologian. In his vision, the three states of human history correspond to the times of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. They narrate God’s relationship with humanity: the first state takes place in slavery, the second is characterized by filiation, the third will take place under the banner of freedom. The first is marked by fear, the second by faith, the third by love. The first is the time of the elderly, the second that of the young, the third that of children. The first period is that of slaves, the second that of children, the third that of friends. Joachim of Fiore seems to echo the words of Jesus himself: “I no longer call you servants, but friends.”
The medieval spiritual movements, to which Thomas of Tolentino joined, were the most attentive to missionary openings because they believed that history is guided by God. The Holy Trinity is the subject, the protagonist of the story. They anticipated what the Magisterium and theologians teach today: history and mission are the work of the Trinity. The great Franciscan missions of the Middle Ages and early modern times, among the Arabs, in the Holy Land, in Asia and later (after geographical expansion) also in America, were influenced by a great aspiration for evangelical renewal.
Francis’ recommendations to missionaries among Muslims, contained in chapter 16 of the Regola non bollata of 1221, bear witness to this: «The brothers who go among the infidels, and especially among the Saracens, can live and behave with them, spiritually, in two ways. One way is that they do not stir up quarrels or disputes, but that they submit, for the love of God, to every human creature, and confess that they are Christians. Another way is that, when they see that it pleases the Lord, they proclaim the word of God and believe in God almighty Father and Son and Holy Spirit…”
The visionary prophecies of Joachim, the enthusiasm of Francis of Assisi, who demonstrated that it was possible to live the Gospel literally and without comment, the expectations raised by the papacy of Celestine V were the sources of the spiritual movement and of others. alternative movements to the institutional Church, perceived by many as no longer corresponding to the apostolic form.
On the missionary front, this vision had as its protagonist God, or rather the Holy Trinity, author of the mission. Believers, missionaries symbolically participate in a mission fully carried out by the Trinity. Some events would attest to the fulfillment of the mission: Jerusalem reconquered; the arrival to the ends of the earth; the evangelical reform of the Church that experienced the opportunity to return to evangelical authenticity, to the apostolic form of its origins, to the primacy of the Spirit, abandoning the forms of power and wealth.
Reaching the ends of the earth, the utopian design seemed to be fulfilled. Authentic Christianity would not be that of the church of temporal power, but that of the renewed church of the age of the Spirit. At the ends of the earth, finally reached, the new church could be reborn according to the apostolic form. Where the main activity of the mission – according to this spiritual and utopian vision – was not the conversion of individual pagans otherwise destined for eternal damnation, but rather to collaborate in a symbolic-spiritual way in the realization of God’s plan for humanity .
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