Thomas of Tolentino and the Franciscan Way to the Mission in China
A conference in the hometown of the friar martyred in India in 1321 while he was on his way to Beijing focused on the contribution to evangelisation of the Franciscan spiritualist current linked to the theology of Joachim of Fiore. For Father Criveller, these movements “were the most attentive to missionary openings because they believed that history is guided by God” and “had anticipated what the magisterium and theologians teach today”.
A conference titled "Diplomats of the Gospel" centred on Franciscan friar Br Thomas of Tolentino was held on 25 September in his native town of Tolentino, in the Italian region of Marche. The missionary, who was sent to China by Pope Clement V, was martyred in India in 1321. His fellow countryman, Jesuit Matteo Ricci, had him in mind when he left for China (more than two centuries later). Father Gianni Criveller, AsiaNews editorial director, spoke at the conference about the importance of Thomas of Tolentino and the Franciscan missions in China in the 13th and 14th centuries. We publish below large excerpts of his address.
The first Christians who arrived in China in the 7th century (AD 635) following the Silk Roads were East Syriac Christians from the metropolis of Seleucia-Ctesophon (near present-day Baghdad), led by a monk-bishop known by the Chinese name of Alopen. This mission is eloquently illustrated by the well-known stele of Xi'an, where Christianity is defined as the Teaching of Light.
Starting in the second half of the 13th century, Franciscan missionaries took to the Silk Roads with a double mandate as evangelisers and diplomats. On 24 July 1246, the friars John of Pian del Carpine (1182-1252) and Benedict of Poland arrived at the court of the Mongol Khan Güyük, in the city of Karakorum, bearers of a letter from Pope Innocent IV.
During the Council of Lyons (1245), the pope put on the agenda a remedium contra Tartaros, sending emissaries to stop the Mongol expansion then threatening Europe. Innocent IV’s letter contained an invitation to the Khan to convert to Christianity and stop the westward conquest of Christian territories. In response, the khan asked the pope and all the other rulers to submit to him.
A few years after Innocent's initiative, French King Saint Louis sent Belgian William de Rubruck (1252-1253), accompanied by Br Bartholomew of Cremona, on a mission with the same purpose. In the winter of 1253, the two friars reached the court of Kublai Khan. Bartholomew remained in Kambaliq (today's Beijing) where, in 1265, the Kublai Khan gave Marco Polo a letter in which he asks the pope for six "wise men”. Marco Polo – whose travels are said to have taken place between 1271 and 1291 – delivered the missive to Cardinal Visconti, the future Gregory X. Meanwhile, the Mongols founded the Yuan 元 dynasty in 1279, picking Khanbaliq as the capital of what was the largest contiguous empire in human history.
Brother John of Montecorvino (1247-1328) led the third Franciscan mission to China. Montecorvino, who belonged to the order’s spiritual current, began his mission in the East in 1279, first as a diplomatic envoy to Armenia, whose monarch gave him a letter for Nicholas IV, the first Franciscan pope. After delivering the letter, Giovanni da Montecorvino left for China in 1289, reaching Khanbaliq in 1293. Two of his letters have survived. He writes that he built churches (the first in Beijing in 1299), baptised several people, and translated the Psalms and the New Testament into Mongolian. Montecorvino learnt the Mongolian language and was in contact with ethnic Mongolians from Central Asia.
In the summer of 1307, Br Thomas of Tolentino (c. 1245 - 1321) delivered two letters to Pope Clement V. Thomas was active among spiritual Franciscans, even going to prison for this, like many reformers and those who advocated a vow of poverty, following the doctrines of Joachim of Fiore (1130-1202). In 1294 Thomas joined the pauperes eremitae domini Celestini, i.e. the group of Celestine V, which was shut down after the latter’s abdication and the accession to the papal throne of his adversary, Benedetto Caetani, as Boniface VIII.
Strong spiritualistic sentiments permeated the Marche region. Thomas’s companions in fortune and misfortune included friars originally from this area: Angelo Clareno (or da Cingoli), Pietro da Macerata, Angelo da Tolentino, and Marco da Montelupone. With them he shared not only prison but also the mission in 1290, sent to Cilicia, i.e. the kingdom of Armenia in modern southern Turkey.
As is well known, the story of the spirituals is very complex. Persecuted by Boniface VIII and in disagreement with the conventuals, they were in turn divided between the most intransigent (among them Angelo Clareno, Thomas's fellow prisoner and missionary) and those, like Thomas of Tolentino, who were more open to mediation with Church authorities.
The first contact between Thomas and the mission in China goes back to June-July 1307, when the friar from Tolentino delivered the last two letters of his missionary confrere in Beijing, John of Montecorvino, to Clement V, an Avignon pope who was in the region of Gascony at that time. After this, the pope sent seven new Franciscan bishops to the East to consecrate John. According to some sources, Thomas himself may have been among them, but this is not very likely.
Only three friar bishops, Gerardo Albuini, Pellegrino da Castello, and Andrea da Perugia, arrived in Beijing in 1309 for ordination. In 1313 the Diocese of Citing (Quanzhou, today's Xiamen, Fujian) was also established, where all three friars, in succession, served as bishops.
We know that in 1320, Br Thomas of Tolentino was on the island of Hormuz (Persian Gulf) coming from Tabriz, Persia, together with his confreres James of Padua, Peter of Siena, Demetrius of Tbilisi, and the Dominican Jordan Catala of Sévérac, bound for China. After they embarked for southern India, Thomas and his companions ended up in Thane, on the central-western coast of India, where he and his Franciscan confreres were summoned by the authorities to illustrate their faith, an act that included, in the minds of Thomas and his companions, the condemnation of Muhammad with the prospect of martyrdom.
The friars were in fact arrested, tortured, and sentenced to be burnt at the stake. Since he was 80 years old by then, Thomas was spared, and only the youngest, Brother James, was burnt at the stake. On 9 April 1321, the city’s court had Thomas and his surviving brothers seized and killed. Some monks contemporaries of Thomas drafted a report on his martyrdom as did Odoric of Pordenone, who was also in China from 1320 to 1330 (in Beijing from 1325 to 1328), a keen traveller, explorer and observer of life in the Chinese empire, its customs, family life, as well as social and military organisations.
Thomas was buried together with his confreres by the Dominican Jordan. The relics were transferred in 1326 by Odoric of Pordenone to one of the two Franciscan convents in Quanzhou (now Xiamen) in China. Thomas's head was later moved to Tolentino, but under unknown circumstances. He was beatified by Pope Leo XIII in 1894.
Thomas’s story reflects well the idea of mission as the action of the Trinity in history, like that of Joachim of Fiore, the first narrative theologian. In his view, the three states of human history correspond to the age of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. They narrate God's relationship with humanity: the first state is spent in slavery, the second is characterised by sonship, 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 old, the second is that of the young, the third is that of the children. The first period is that of slaves, the second is that of children, the third is 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 belonged, were the most attentive to missionary openings because they believed that history is guided by God. The Holy Trinity is the subject, the main player of history. They had anticipated what the magisterium and theologians teach today, namely that history and mission are the work of the Trinity. The great Franciscan missions in the Middle Ages and the early modern period, among the Arabs, in the Holy Land, in Asia and later (after geographical expansion) in the Americas, were influenced by a great aspiration for evangelical renewal.
This is made clear in Francis’s recommendations to missionaries who live among Muslims. Chapter 16 of the unconfirmed rule of 1221 reads: “whoever of the brothers may wish, by divine inspiration, to go among the Saracens and other infidels, may conduct themselves in two ways spiritually among them. One way is not to make disputes or contentions; but let them be ‘subject to every human creature for God's sake,’ Ancorayet confessing themselves to be Christians. The other way is that when they see it is pleasing to God, they announce the Word of God, that they may believe in Almighty God, Father, and Son, and Holy Ghost [. . .].”
Joachim’s visionary prophecies, Francis of Assisi’s enthusiasm showing that it was possible to live the Gospel to the letter and without comment, and the expectations aroused by the papacy of Celestine V were the sources of the spiritual and other movements, who sought alternatives to the institutional Church, which was perceived by many as no longer corresponding to the apostolic form.
With respect to the mission, this vision had God or rather the Holy Trinity as the main player, author of the mission. Believers and missionaries participate in a symbolic way in a mission fully realised by the Trinity. Some events attest that the mission was being accomplished: Jerusalem reconquered, reaching the ends of the earth, and the evangelical reform of the Church that had the opportunity to return to the evangelical genuineness, to the apostolic form of its origins, to the primacy of the Spirit, abandoning all forms of power and wealth.
By reaching the ends of the earth, the utopian design seemed to be fulfilled. True Christianity would not be that of the church of temporal power, but the renewed church of the age of the Spirit. After far distant borderlands were finally reached, the new Church could be reborn according in its apostolic form. Here, the main activity of the mission, according to this spiritual and utopian vision, was not the conversion of individual pagans otherwise destined to eternal damnation, but collaboration in a symbolic-spiritual form in realising God's plan for humanity.
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