About Macau Ricci Institute

Macau Ricci Institute

The Macau Ricci Institute (MRI; Chinese: 澳門利氏學社) is a non-profit study and research institution in Macau, founded in 1999. It is one of the Ricci Institutes named for Matteo Ricci (1552–1610), the Italian Jesuit who became known in China as a scholar and friend of Chinese officials and literati, and whose approach of learning Chinese language and culture from inside remains the institute's founding inspiration. The Macau institute describes its purpose plainly: to foster better mutual understanding between China and the global community.

The institute is an independent research institute affiliated with the University of Saint Joseph in Macau, where it is based at the university's Nape campus at Rua de Londres 106. It is directed by the Swiss Jesuit Stephan Rothlin. Small in staff compared with a university, the MRI works through conferences, forums, publications and partnerships, using Macau's centuries-old position as a meeting place between China and the West as both its subject and its setting.

Foundation and the Ricci Institutes

The Macau Ricci Institute was founded in 1999 by Jesuits including Yves Camus and Luis Sequeira, according to the record of its establishment. It belongs to a small family of Ricci Institutes; the journal it publishes notes that its logo is shared with its founding institution, the Taipei Ricci Institute, and that the founding of the Taipei institute coincided with the beginning of the Cultural Revolution in 1966. The Taipei founder, Yves Raguin (1912–1998), envisioned contemplation as a way of meditation that goes beyond words and as a privileged place for interreligious dialogue — an inheritance the Macau institute explicitly carries into its own programme of comparative spirituality.

Matteo Ricci himself is the connecting figure. As the institute's journal puts it, Ricci left a deep mark in China as he shared Western knowledge with his Chinese counterparts through his outstanding mastery of oral and written Chinese. The Macau institute takes friendship as the main entry point to all three of its areas of concern: in its reading, Ricci's paradigm of friendship — learning the other's language, respecting the other's wisdom traditions, and meeting as equals — is a method that can still be understood and implemented now.

Macau as a privileged door to China

The institute's self-description stresses place. The Macau Ricci Institute is focused on Macau's historic role as a privileged door to China: the city served as the crossroad of missionaries and a hub of cultural exchange between China and the West. Macau and the Jesuits, the institute notes, share together a common beginning and some 450 years of history, because Jesuit missionaries passed through and worked from Macau from the earliest decades of the China mission.

That history is not treated as nostalgia. The institute studies and promotes dialogue between the wisdom traditions of China — including Confucianism, Buddhism, Taoism and Islam — and the Christian faith in modern society, and it seeks to build bridges between China and the West. Biographies of missionaries such as Matteo Ricci, Alessandro Valignano, Johann Adam Schall and Giuseppe Castiglione, and the story of the Chinese Rites Controversy, form part of the historical material through which it examines how cultural encounter has succeeded and failed in the past.

First concern: comparative spirituality

The institute organises its work around a threefold focus. The first is comparative spirituality. Inspired by the Spiritual Exercises of Saint Ignatius Loyola, the contemplative dimension has played a crucial role at the institute as an instrument of dialogue with other wisdom traditions such as Confucianism, Taoism, Buddhism and Islam. Contemplation, in director Stephan Rothlin's explanation at the twentieth anniversary symposium in 2019, opens the necessary space for silence and reflection, which is the basis for a mission of the common good; a leader rooted in contemplation, he argued, is likely to be in a better position to take informed decisions.

The 2019 anniversary symposium, held on 17 and 18 October under the theme drawn from the Ignatian phrase in actione contemplativus — contemplation, mission and martyrdom — shows the concern in practice. It brought more than two dozen scholars to Macau, including Anton Jamnik, auxiliary bishop of Ljubljana, addressing mysticism, contemplation and Christian life, and sessions on the contemplative traditions of Asian religions. Rothlin referred on that occasion to Pope John Paul II's expressed hope that the contemplative wisdom traditions of Asia would have a crucial impact on modern societies.

Second concern: moral leadership

The second focus is moral leadership. The institute argues that the widening gap between rich and poor, and the growing ecological crisis, require new approaches to economics oriented to the common good. The history of missionary activity in Macau offers, in its reading, insights for values education, highlighting solidarity, subsidiarity, fairness and the importance of role models.

Practically, the MRI is committed to sharing key insights from the lives of the missionaries with students from high schools in Macau, Hong Kong and beyond, and it has launched Cinema Forums that allow participants to understand Chinese culture better and specifically feature examples of Confucian ethics. Its journal's early issues carried the same theme into print, with contributions on the ideal of Junzi leadership and education for the common good, on Confucian perspectives on tertiary education, and on transforming the figure of homo economicus — the purely self-interested economic actor — into a model of responsible leadership.

Third concern: social innovation

The third focus is social innovation, extending to applied ethics, entrepreneurial responsibility and environmental stewardship. In addition to its inherited focus on comparative spirituality, the institute states, its programmes include topics promoting applied ethics, entrepreneurial responsibility and environmental stewardship, and its journal aims to strengthen moral education by exploring the sustainability and effectiveness of various Chinese approaches to ethics.

The social-innovation concern also connects the institute to contemporary policy questions. Its 2017 symposium on the Belt and Road Initiative examined how social innovation occurred historically along the Silk Road and what that history could teach today's innovators, while arguing that teaching and learning programmes in international business ethics are indispensable if the initiative's economic goals are to be realised. An early journal contribution on educational social innovation examined a responsible-leadership MOOC in China, illustrating the institute's interest in how values education can be delivered at scale.

Symposia and forums

The annual international symposium is the institute's flagship event. With its annual symposium and a variety of forums, the MRI brings together different circles of society and offers them different ways to dialogue with Chinese culture and wisdom traditions. The 2017 symposium, held on 22 and 23 November, explored the Silk Road Economic Belt and the 21st-century Maritime Silk Road and the challenge of cross-cultural exchange and communication. The twentieth anniversary symposium followed in October 2019 at the University of Saint Joseph's Don Bosco Auditorium and Saint Joseph Seminary venues.

The 2024 symposium, held on 18 and 19 October 2024 with the University of Macau, took as its theme cultural exchange between East and West, remembering Marco Polo at the 700th anniversary of his death. Its programme investigated the multi-faceted cultural exchange along the Silk Roads and maritime trade routes connecting China and the West from the thirteenth century to the present, in science, religion, education and the arts, and included a guided tour of Macau's historical centre. Papers ranged across figures such as the Franciscan traveller Benedict of Poland and the Jesuit adoption of Neo-Confucianism — the latter also the subject of a 2021 MRI public forum lecture by Thierry Meynard on François Noël's Philosophia Sinica of 1711.

The Journal of the Macau Ricci Institute

Since 2017 the institute has published the Journal of the Macau Ricci Institute (ISSN 2520-7903), an online, bi-annual journal subtitled a journal of moral leadership, social innovation and comparative spirituality — the institute's three concerns, carried into scholarly publishing. The journal is edited by Stephan Rothlin and was co-edited at its launch by Dennis P. McCann and Mike J. Thompson, with Thierry Meynard as associate editor. Accepted papers from the institute's symposia are considered for publication in the journal, linking its conference and publishing programmes.

The journal's founding article, by Rothlin, sets out its method: Matteo Ricci's legacy inspired the journal's foundation, challenging non-Chinese scholars to enter into dialogue with Chinese counterparts and discover in them, in the article's phrase, "our other self". The approach to interreligious dialogue in its pages is described as emphatically practical and oriented to the benefit of the common good, in the spirit the article attributes to Pope Francis's repeated emphasis on dialogue. Issue by issue, the journal has carried leaders on education for the common good and on transforming homo economicus, and society-section articles on environmental responsibility drawing on the encyclical Laudato Si'.

Relationship with the University of Saint Joseph

The MRI is an independent research institute affiliated with the University of Saint Joseph, Macau, and has developed programmes of cooperation with the university in teaching and research, as well as jointly sponsored conferences. It has jointly organised events with USJ including the international symposium series on the Belt and Road Initiative since 2017 and the MRI Forums. The affiliation gives the small institute a university campus, academic partners and students, while the university gains a specialised research unit devoted to China–West dialogue. The institute's director also leads its journal and its symposium academic committees, and Rothlin's dual role in Macau academic life is visible in the institute's joint programming with both USJ and, for the 2024 Marco Polo symposium, the University of Macau.

Place and official presence

The Macau Ricci Institute is recorded in this directory as a Macau-based research institute and study centre in the China section, reflecting Macau's status as a Special Administrative Region of China. Its official website is riccimac.org, and its journal is published online at its own journal site. For readers, its significance is disproportionate to its size: it is one of a handful of institutions worldwide explicitly continuing Matteo Ricci's method — language, friendship and dialogue between wisdom traditions — as a living research programme, practised in the city that was the historic doorway of that encounter.