Matteo Ricci, S.J. Great Explorer Tipped for Sainthood?

Matteo Ricci is well described in Jonathan Spence's great biography, The Memory Palace of Matteo Ricci, as having a phenomenal gift for mnemonic devices, [i.e., things and methods to employ to increase one's power of memory]. But Pope John Paul II opened up the process for his beatification in 1984 and the project got a new boost in 2010. The man should be canonized for sheer brainpower alone, but he lived a pious life in Macau and Beijing, where he was the VERY FIRST FOREIGNER ever allowed to be buried---due to the Ming Emperor Wanli's admiration for his personal qualities.

Ricci was the second person to learn classical Chinese thoroughly, taught by his fellow Jesuit Fr. Ruggiero, and learned the entire Confucian code of an ethical life and the "Lord of Heaven" concept which accompanies Confucianism. He and some fellow Jesuits gained immense influence in the Imperial Court by predicting solar eclipses, which were highly important to the Chinese and one of the few arts this highly intelligent culture had yet to master.

In addition, Ricci built clocks and other western timepieces, and in his spare time constructed a map of the world so modern and detailed that it amazes scholars to this day that a man could have the erudition to do so. His ability to continually amaze and impress the most influential members of the Ming court led to the Emperor Wanli to consider one of history's greatest counterfactuals.

The Emperor, whom Ricci never met face-to-face because of his reclusive nature, was so influenced by the Empress about Ricci's preaching that Confucianism was a stepping-stone to Christianity, which adored "The Lord of Heaven" even more fervently than the Confucians, that he was said to have been willing to convert to Catholicism were the Mass to be recited in Chinese instead of the Latin language.

However, the Pope was persuaded by [jealous?] Dominican and Franciscan advisors that the Jesuits in China had acquired such immense influence by trimming elements of The True Faith to the sails of the Confucian tenets---hence what the Pope would be doing were he to approve this highly iffy exception to the universality of the Latin Mass, according to the Savonarolas surrounding the Pope, would be sanctioning another form of Protestantism or a heterodox form of Christianity at best.

And so this unsung geniuses near-brush with immortality was quashed by Roman courtiers whose Jansenist and Calvinist attitudes were already hampering the Jesuits' heroic efforts to launch an effective "Counter-Reformation" in countries already overrun by the Lutheran, Calvinist, and Anglican versions of Christianity. Luckily for the Jesuits, Poland remained faithful to Rome, largely out of their dislike of the Russian Orthodox and Saxony Lutheran enemies eager to carve up their Sejm, and the "eternal treaty of 1698 giving the Ukraine to Czar Peter the Great in perpetuity. But that's another story.

Ricci also had much influence on a Korean delegate to the Imperial Palace in Beijing, who brought back some Jesuit ideas to his country.

Like St. Francis Xavier, who was the first westerner to reach Japan, Ricci was a Jesuit priest whose love of God and learning combined to forge new avenues of communication between cultures long before globalization became a byword for post-modern diversity.