- Francesco Brancati
Francesco Brancati (
Sicily , 1607-China , 1671) was an ItalianJesuit missionary.Life
He entered the Society of Jesus in 1624 and went to the Chinese Missions in 1637. For nearly thirty years he labored in the province of
Kiang-nan , building, it is said, more than ninety churches and forty-five chapels. In 1665, he was exiled fromPeking to Canton, where he died (according to Sommervogel, atShanghai ).Works
He wrote and published numerous books in Chinese, most of which were reprinted by the Jesuit missionaries in the nineteenth century. Among these are a treatise on the
Eucharist , instructions on theDecalogue and on theCommandments of the Church , a refutation ofdivination , and particularly aCatechism , entitled in Chinese "Conversations of the Angels". The RussianArchimandrite , who was at the head of the Orthodox mission at Peking, published in the second decade of the nineteenth century an extract of this catechism, adapted to theGreek Rite , in which he omitted everything that disagreed with the Russian Orthodox teaching.Brancati also composed in Chinese several volumes of sermons and homilies for the Sundays and feast days of the ecclesiastical year. His work on the Chinese rites was published in two volumes at Paris in 1700. It bears the title "De Sinensium Ritibus politicis Acta."
References
*Sommervogel, Carlos, "Bibliotheque de la Campagnie de Jesus", II, 81-83
*Michaud, Biog. univ., s.v.External links
*"This article incorporates text from the 1913 "
Catholic Encyclopedia " article " [http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Catholic_Encyclopedia_%281913%29/Francesco_Brancati Francesco Brancati] " by B. Guldner, a publication now in thepublic domain ."
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