Handout #118

The first archbishop of Pekin

In the year of our Lord 1291 A.D., I, Brother John of Monte Corvino, of the Order of Friars Minor, left the city of Tauris, in Persia, and penetrated into India. For thirteen months I sojourned in that country and in the church of the Apostle St. Thomas, here and there, and baptized about a hundred people ... Resuming my journey, I arrived at Cathay the kingdom of the emperor of the Tartars, who is called the great Khan. In delivering to the said emperor the letters of the Lord Pope, I preached to him the law of our Lord Jesus Christ. The emperor is too rooted in his idolatry, but he is full of good will to Christians. And I have been twelve years with him ...

Isolated in this distant pilgrimage, I was eleven years without making my confession until the arrival of Brother Arnold, a German from the province of Cologne, who has been here for two years.

In the city of Khanbalik I built a church which has been finished six years. I added a campanile with three bells. I have baptized, I think, almost six thousand people in the church, and had there not been the campaign of calumny of which I spoke earlier, I would have baptized more than thirty thousand. I am often busy administering baptism. I have also bought, one by one, forty children of pagans below seven and twelve years of age. As yet they know no faith: I have baptized them and educated them in Latin letters and in our worship.

Through me, a king in this region, of the sect of Nestorian Christians, who was of the race of that great king called Prester John of India, adopted the true faith; he received minor orders and, robed in consecrated vestments, served me at mass. The Nestorians even accused him of apostasy: nevertheless, he brought the majority of his people to the Catholic faith. He built a fine church, worthy of his royal munificence. 

I beg you, brothers whom this letter may reach, to have a care that its content comes to the knowledge of the Lord Pope, the cardinals and the Procurator of our Order at the Roman court. Of our Minister General I ask alms of an antiphonary and readings from the lives of the saints, a gradual and a psalter to serve as a model for us, since here I have only a portable breviary and a small missal. If I have a model, the children will copy it.

At present I am in process of building a new church so that the children can be distributed in several areas. I am getting old and my hair is quite white, less from age- I am only fifty-eight years old - than from weariness and care. I have learned the Tartar language and script reasonably well; that is, the language customarily used by the Mongols. I have translated the whole of the New Testament and the Psalter into this language. I had it transcribed in superb calligraphy and I show it, I read it, I preach it and I make it known publicly as a testimony to the law of Christ.

And I had made an agreement with King George, mentioned below, had he lived, to translate the whole of the Latin office, so that it could be sung through all the territories of his state; during his life time the Latin rite was celebrated in his church in the language and scripture of his country, both the words of the canon and the prefaces...Text quoted in de Ghellinck, Revue d'Histoire des Missions, December 1928.

The letter reached Europe. Pope Clement V sent several bishops to the Far East. Those who reached Khanbalik consecrated John of Monte Corvino bishop and in this way he became the first Archbishop of Pekin. A bishop was installed at Zayton (Ts'iuan-Tcheou) in the south of China. However, despite reinforcements the mission gradually grew weaker, and disappeared completely when the Mongols were replaced by a new Chinese dynasty. 

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