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Beijing's "Benedictine" Age: A Report On China's Renewal In Catholic Worship, Anthony E. Clark

History Faculty Scholarship

Confucius’ disciple, Yan Hui, once asked the Master how to become a good person. “Goodness,” the Master said, comes about when “one forms himself according to ritual.” China has never quite lost its Confucian sense of ritual, for ritual is what forms a person in goodness, and in his final exhortation to his inquisitive student, Confucius suggests that ritual forms our vision, our speech, and our actions. Little wonder, then, that when Jesuit missionaries first went to China in the late sixteenth century, one of the aspects of Christianity that attracted Chinese most was the richness of Catholic ritual. Few …