In 1627, there were about a hundred converts in the kingdom. Catholicism also spread to Rudok, Ladakh (Indian Tibet) and Ü-Tsang (Central Tibet), and was welcomed by the ruler of the kingdom of Ü-Tsang, where in 1626 Andrade and his companions established a Jesuit outpost at Shigatse.[5] In 1635, a six-missionary expedition to Tsaparang, capital of Guge, was led by Nuño Coresma [fr], a Spanish Jesuit.[6]
After some months of intensive study he entered the Sera Buddhist monastery, one of the three great monastic universities of the politically ascendant Gelukpa sect. He was permitted to offer the Tridentine Mass at a Roman Catholic altar erected inside his rooms. There Fr. Desideri both studied and debated with Tibetan Buddhist monks and scholars, who he found were every bit as curious about Roman Catholicism as Desideri was about Tibetan Buddhism. Desideri befriended many of these scholars and, despite their religious disagreements, recalled them warmly in his memoirs. He learned the Classical Tibetanliterary language (unknown to Europeans before) and became a voracious student of Tibetan literature, philosophy, and culture.
Between 1718 and 1721 he composed five works in the Classical Tibetan literary language, in which he sought to refute the philosophical concepts of rebirth (which he referred to as "metempsychosis") and Nihilism or 'Emptiness' (Wylie: stong pa nyid; Sanskrit: Śūnyatā), which he felt most prevented conversions from Tibetan Buddhism to the Catholic Church. In his books Fr. Desideri also adopted and utilized multiple philosophical techniques from Tibetan literature for scholastic argumentation. Fr. Desideri also used multiple quotations from the dharma and vinaya, and even brought the Scholasticism of St. Thomas Aquinas into a debate with the nihilistic Madhyamaka philosophy of Nagarjuna to argue his case for "the superiority of Christian theology."[8] Further Jesuit missions to Tibet and the publication of Fr. Desideri's writings were later forbidden by the Vatican's Congregation for the Propagation of the Faith, and his writings remained in unpublished manuscript form until the 19th, 20th, and early 21st centuries.[9] The 18th century also saw the arrival of several Capuchin missionaries supported by donations from New Spain,[10] who built the no longer extant Catholic Church of Lhasa in 1726.[11] Beginning in the 17th-century, the growth of Catholicism was encouraged by some Tibetan monarchs, their courts and the Buddhist monks of the Karmapa school to counterbalance the influence of the Gelug school until 1745, when all missionaries were expelled at the insistence of the Tibetan Buddhist monks.[12] Tibet was closed to foreigners, although this district came under the authority of the Mission sui iuris of Hindustan in 1792, no more missionaries arrived until 1844.[13]
19th century
In 1844, Évariste Régis Huc, a French Lazarist, prepared his trip to Tibet at the suggestion of the Apostolic Vicar of Mongolia (Joseph-Martial Mouly [fr]). In September 1844 he arrived in Dolon Nor and made preparations for his journey. Shortly after, he was accompanied by a young fellow Lazarist, Joseph Gabet.[14] In January 1845 they reached Tang-kiul, a frontier trading post between the Chinese, Mongolian, and Tibetan cultural spheres. Instead of undertaking an independent four-month trip to Lhasa, they waited eight months for a Tibetan embassy to return from Peking. Meanwhile, under the guidance of an intelligent teacher, they studied the Tibetan language and Buddhist literature. During the three months of their stay they resided in Kumbum Monastery, which was said to have capacity for 4,000 people.[15]
In 1930, Pascual Nadal Oltra [es], a Pego-born Spanish Franciscan friar and artist, arrived in Mosimien (a.k.a. Boxab by its Tibetan name), a small town located in Sichuanese Tibet. With the support of the Bishop of Tatsienlu (Pierre-Philippe Giraudeau [fr]) and his coadjutor Pierre Valentin [fr], Oltra, the Father Guardian Plácido Albiero, a Canadian friar Bernabé Lafond and an Italian José Andreatta formed the founding community of a leper colony established near St. Anne's Church,[29] known as St. Joseph's Home.[30] In May 1935, a Chinese Red Army column led by Mao Zedong (Mao Tse Tung) was fleeing Chiang Kai-shek's regular army to northwest China through the Mosimien area, part of a military retreat later known as Long March. According to the Valencian Franciscan friar José Miguel Barrachina Lapiedra, author of the book Fray Pascual Nadal y Oltra: Apóstol de los leprosos, mártir de China, and a report published in Malaya Catholic Leader, the official newspaper of the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Singapore: "The communist soldiers entered the leper colony, they looted the residence and arrested the friars and sisters. Many of the lepers tried to defend the missionaries, but they were shot by the soldiers. The Franciscans were then brought before Mao Tse Tung, who interrogated them, imprisoned two of them, Pascual Nadal Oltra and an Italian friar Epifanio Pegoraro, and released the rest. There were more than 30,000 Reds in the band, including a large number of women. Before their departure, the soldiers ransacked the village, carrying away everything movable and edible, left the people of the district without means of subsistence. Days later, on 4 December 1935, the army reached Leang Ho Kow [zh], Tsanlha, where the two Franciscans were beheaded with a sword."[31][32][33] Nevertheless, the missionaries managed to recover and welcome back the sick after the devastation, who in 1937 were 148 people.[34]
In 1952, following the expulsion of Pierre Valentin [fr], the then Bishop of Kangding, the communist regime put an end to the missionary presence in Tibet, since then the Diocese of Kangding has been left without a bishop.[38] According to a report by the Catholic International Press Agency [fr], in 1989, a community of Catholics were found living in Lhasa, the capital of Tibet. A Church collaborator in Chongqing told the agency that there were approximately 10,000 Tibetan Catholics in the Diocese of Kangding. He further stated that, at the time, no one knew exactly the situation of the Catholic Church in that country.[39][40]
On September 3, 2011, an attack occurred against a nun and a priest in Mosimien. Sister Xie Yuming and Father Huang Yusong were attacked by a dozen unknown assailants after attempting to recover two former properties of the Diocese of Kangding. The nun was brutally beaten while the priest suffered minor injuries. The properties, a former Latin school and a boys' school, are among several properties that were confiscated by authorities in the 1950s but were due to be returned to the diocese. At that time, the Latin school was demolished by the government and the land occupied by a private company; the boys' school was used as housing for officials of the Mosimien regional government. The attack sparked anger among many parishioners who gathered to protest in front of St. Anne's Church.[43]
According to Baptiste Langlois-Meurinne, a member of the Raiders Scouts, in 2014, while helping with the development of the Tibetan Catholic populations of the Mekong and Salween valleys through the Sentiers du ciel association, he met a Vatican priest —that is, not affiliated to the official Chinese Patriotic Church but with the underground church— who organized a clandestine camp for Bareng children where he taught them Tibetan, English and catechism.[44]
The Apostolic Vicariate of Lhasa —which would become the Diocese of Kangding a century later— was erected on March 27, 1846, with the briefEx debito from Pope Gregory XVI. This bishopric had been in full communion with the Pope in Rome until the establishment of the state-sanctioned Catholic Patriotic Church (1957) after the fall of mainland China and Tibet to communism in 1949 and 1951, respectively.
Jurisdictional changes made by the Catholic Patriotic Church and the Bishops' Conference of Catholic Church in China [zh] took place in the 1980s and the 1990s. On March 24, 1984, the territory of the Diocese of Kangding was placed under the jurisdiction of the Bishop of Ningyuan. On March 7, 1993, the Diocese of Jiading assumed authority over Kangding.[45]
•July 28, 1868: Renamed as the Apostolic Vicariate of Thibet (Tibet)
•December 3, 1924: Renamed as the Apostolic Vicariate of Tatsienlu (today known as Kangding, in Sichuanese Tibet)
•December 15, 1929: Lost territory to establish the Mission sui iuris of Sikkim
•April 11, 1946: Elevated as the Diocese of Kangting
^Russell-Wood, A. J. R. (July 31, 1998). The Portuguese Empire, 1415–1808: A World on the Move. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. p. 90. ISBN9780801859557.
^Sanderg, Graham (1973). The Exploration of Tibet: History and Particulars. Delhi: Cosmo Publications. pp. 23–26.
^Holdich, Thomas (1906). Tibet, the Mysterious. London: Alston Rivers. p. 70.
^Didier, Hugues (2002). Les Portugais au Tibet : les premières relations jésuites (1624–1635) (in French). Paris: Éditions Chandeigne. ISBN9782906462311.
^Wu, Kunming (1992). 早期传教士进藏活动史 [History of the activities of the first missionaries in Tibet] (in Simplified Chinese). Beijing: China Tibetology Publishing House. p. 163. ISBN7-80057-072-X.
^Markham, Clements R., ed. (1989) [1881]. Narratives of the Mission of George Bogle to Tibet, and of the Journey of Thomas Manning to Lhasa. New Delhi: Cosmo Publications. pp. 295–302.
^ "Mission to Tibet: The Extraordinary Eighteenth-Century Account of Father Ippolito Desideri S.J." Trans. by Michael Sweet, Ed. by Leonard Zwilling (Boston: Wisdom Publications, 2010), page 45.
^Grasdorff, Gilles van (2008). À la découverte de l'Asie avec les Missions étrangères (in French). Paris: Éditions Omnibus. p. 666. ISBN978-2-258-07693-8.
^Cordier, Henri (1912). "Tibet" . Catholic Encyclopedia. Vol. 14. see final para:- Missions - Since the Capuchins were expelled in 1760, except the Lazarists Huc and Gabet, who paid a visit to Lhasa in 1844, no missionary entered Tibet proper
^Dubernard, Étienne-Jules (1990). Tibet " Mission Impossible " : Lettres du Père Étienne-Jules Dubernard (in French). Paris: Le Sarment-Fayard. ISBN2866790588.
^Deshayes, Laurent; Lenoir, Frédéric (2002). L'épopée des Tibétains : entre mythe et réalité (in French). Paris: Éditions Fayard. p. 107. ISBN9782213610283.
^Bonet, André (2006). Les chrétiens oubliés du Tibet (in French). Paris: Presses de la Renaissance. ISBN2856168914.
^Barrachina Lapiedra, José M. (1990). Fray Pascual Nadal y Oltra: Apóstol de los leprosos, mártir de China (in Spanish). Valencia: Unión Misional Franciscana. p. 59. ISBN84-404-8209-4.
^"Chronologie historique détaillée du Tibet". tibet-info.net (in French). April 27, 2008. Retrieved September 22, 2023. Février 1952 : Expulsion par la troupe communiste chinoise du Père Valentin du Tibet oriental désormais sous contrôle de la Chine. Fin de 106 ans d'efforts de christianisation du Tibet.
^Langlois-Meurinne, Baptiste (October 2014). "Un chevriot sur le toit du monde"(PDF). mairie-chevrieres.fr (in French). p. 5. Retrieved September 22, 2023.
^Liu, Zhiqing (2013). "天主教在重庆和四川传播史略" [A brief history of the spread of Catholicism in Chongqing and Sichuan] (PDF). Catholic Church in China (in Simplified Chinese). No. 2. Beijing: Catholic Patriotic Association. p. 50.