Francesco Brancati was an Italian Jesuit 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 from Peking to Canton

Guangzhou

Guangzhou , known historically as Canton or Kwangchow, is the capital and largest city of the Guangdong province in the People's Republic of China. Located in southern China on the Pearl River, about north-northwest of Hong Kong, Guangzhou is a key national transportation hub and trading port...

, where he died (according to Sommervogel, at Shanghai

Shanghai

Shanghai is the largest city by population in China and the largest city proper in the world. It is one of the four province-level municipalities in the People's Republic of China, with a total population of over 23 million as of 2010...

).

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

Eucharist

The Eucharist , also called Holy Communion, the Sacrament of the Altar, the Blessed Sacrament, the Lord's Supper, and other names, is a Christian sacrament or ordinance...

, instructions on the Decalogue

Ten Commandments

The Ten Commandments, also known as the Decalogue , are a set of biblical principles relating to ethics and worship, which play a fundamental role in Judaism and most forms of Christianity. They include instructions to worship only God and to keep the Sabbath, and prohibitions against idolatry,...

 and on the Commandments of the Church

Commandments of the Church

In the Roman Catholic Church, the Commandments of the Church or Precepts of the Church are certain laws considered binding on the faithful. As usually understood, they are moral and ecclesiastical, broad in character and limited in number. In modern times there are often said to be six, or...

, a refutation of divination

Divination

Divination is the attempt to gain insight into a question or situation by way of an occultic standardized process or ritual...

, and particularly a Catechism

Catechism

A catechism , i.e. to indoctrinate) is a summary or exposition of doctrine, traditionally used in Christian religious teaching from New Testament times to the present...

, entitled in Chinese Conversations of the Angels. The Russian Archimandrite

Archimandrite

The title Archimandrite , primarily used in the Eastern Orthodox and the Eastern Catholic churches, originally referred to a superior abbot whom a bishop appointed to supervise...

 (Nikita Bichurin?), 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 the Greek 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.

External links

• This article incorporates text from the 1913 Catholic Encyclopedia
  Catholic Encyclopedia
  The Catholic Encyclopedia, also referred to as the Old Catholic Encyclopedia and the Original Catholic Encyclopedia, is an English-language encyclopedia published in the United States. The first volume appeared in March 1907 and the last three volumes appeared in 1912, followed by a master index...
  
  article "Francesco Brancati" by B. Guldner, a publication now in the public domain
  Public domain
  Works are in the public domain if the intellectual property rights have expired, if the intellectual property rights are forfeited, or if they are not covered by intellectual property rights at all...
  
  .