condemned Galilean astronomy. His successor, Father Verbiest, made a series of longsrange cannon for the Emperor, with the name of a saint engraved on each; and he dedicated them wearing stole and surplice. In this way, Chinese congregations emerged in the big cities. It was claimed in 1664 that there were 204,980 Chinese converts. But this figure included multitudes of tiny children baptized at death. More important, there were virtually no Chinese priests; and the only Chinese prelate, Lo Wen-Tsao, made VicarApostolic for North China in 1674, spent eleven years trying to find bishops who would consecrate him. (He had no successor as a Catholic bishop until the twentieth century.) The problem of a native clergy would have been formidable in any case. But there was no prospect of mass conversion until Christianity adapted itself to a whole range of Chinese assumptions. Ricci, studying the long history of China, pointed out that a wholesale revision of the Old Testament was required. The Christian assumption that the world was about 0,000 years old (Archbishop Ussher of Armagh, in his Annales Veteris et Novi Testamenti, 1650-4, calculated that the date of Creation was 4004 Be, and this was widely accepted, especially in the Protestant world) was belied by Chinese chronology. If the Chinese were right on this point, might they not be right on others? To what extent could their burial customs or prayers, so crucial in almost every religion, be reconciled to Christian theory and practice? The Chinese were clearly not prepared to abandon what Europeans crudely termed ‘ancestor worship’, but which might be reinterpreted and adjusted to the doctrine of the resurrection and the first and second coming. An elementary system on these lines was worked out by Ricci and his successors. They incorporated Chinese nuances in references to God, and used the same Chinese word for mass as was customarily used for ancestor-ceremonies. The compromise was secretly noted by Franciscans and Dominicans in 1631, and a triumphant complaint made to Rome. The subsequent controversy over Asian rites was gradually broadened to include a number of other variations and translations, and became an explosive issue, as indeed it deserved to be. Was Christianity to throw off its European chrysalis and become at last the world religion, united in its central truth, infinitely varied in its presentation, which Christ implicitly and Paul explicitly had always intended? There was a time when the papacy seemed to be ready to grasp the opportunity. In 1615 Paul v had authorized a Chinese liturgy, and translations were made. In 1622 Gregory xv created a new Vatican Department of Propaganda, with the object of universalizing the missionary movement and freeing it from the narrow national horizons of Spain and Portugal. Francesco Ingoli, the first Secretary of Propaganda until his death in 1649, had a personal vision of global, post-European Christianity, and his philosophy was still reflected in instructions on propaganda sent out a decade after his death: ‘Do not regard it as your task, and do not bring any pressure to bear on the peoples, to change their manners, customs and uses, unless they are evidently contrary to religion and sound morals. What could be more absurd than to transplant France, Spain, Italy or some other European country to China? Do not introduce all that to them but only the faith, which does not despise or destroy the manners and customs of any people, always supposing that they are not evil, but rather wishes to see them preserved unharmed. . . . it is the nature of men to love and treasure above everything else their own country and that which belongs to it. . . . do not draw invidious contrasts between the customs of the peoples and those of Europe; do your utmost to adapt yourselves to them.’ The intention of this document was wise, indeed admirable; but of course the qualifying phrases laid it open to argument. How ruthless was Rome prepared to be in backing it up, against the protests of the conventional and orthodox? Or, to put it another way, how powerful was Rome's imagination in the vital process of reinterpreting Christian dogma in the light of strange cultures? In the event, Rome always proved more susceptible to European pressures, and to the arguments of colonial viceroys, bishops and vicarsgeneral, than to the more creative of the missionaries. The kind of battles that Paul won, Ricci and his successors and emulators lost. Latin was reestablished as a universal requirement for the liturgy. The 102