The approaching 500th anniversary of the Protestant Reformation (1517) provides an ideal opportunity to reflect in a deeper and new way on the history of the relationship between the Protestants and the Jesuits who were founded twenty-three years later (1540). For better or worse, much ink has been used to write about their animosity, especially in the European context. While this important historical chapter will be explored in other venues, the international conference in Macau aims to re-examine the encounters between the Jesuits and the Protestants and their respective traditions in the context of Asia.

Supported by the Catholic monarchies of Portugal, Spain, and France, the Jesuit Order played a significant role in bringing Christianity and European culture, sciences, and the arts to Asia from the sixteenth through to the late eighteenth century, when a Franciscan pope suppressed the Jesuits. After the Restoration of the Order by another pope (1814), the Jesuits returned to several Asian countries at various historical moments and they found more Protestant missionaries than they left a few decades earlier. Indeed, the latter intensified their missionary efforts through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries with the rise of the imperial powers of Great Britain, France, and the US in the region.

This historical development lends itself to an obvious comparison between the Jesuit and Protestant methods of presenting Christianity to Asian societies, in which—with the exception of the Philippines that followed the path of Latin America—Christians never became a majority. The Jesuits themselves, however, used different strategies in different cultural circumstances. Francis Xavier who was among the first Europeans to approach Japan employed different methods than did Matteo Ricci who was allowed to enter the Forbidden City. Roberto de Nobili’s missionary style in the caste-divided society of Madurai was different from that of Alexandre de Rhodes who penetrated the Kingdom of Annam. In spite of this variety of approaches within the Society of Jesus itself, accommodation became a trademark of Jesuit missions. Knowing that charges of syncretism were a mainstay of Protestant anti-Jesuit polemic, a question that comes to mind, then, is what was the extent to which the generations of Protestant missionaries in Asia adopted Jesuit approaches to cultural accommodation. What were their approaches to studying and codifying local languages, to transmitting Western science? What was the relationship between missionaries and political/commercial elites on both sides of the confessional divide? When the Jesuits themselves began rebuilding their missions after the Restoration, did they continue their pre-Suppression traditions?

The cooperation and conflict between the Dutch merchants and the Jesuit missionaries in Japan appears to be better studied but can the same be said about the encounters between the Jesuits and the Protestant Dutch missionaries in Taiwan and Malacca, or between the Jesuits and the German Pietist missions in China and India? How did the Jesuits relate to their Protestant colleagues in the competition to gain Asian souls, say, in late nineteenth-century Korea?

These are just a few examples of complex questions about the encounters between the Jesuits and the Protestants, and their traditions, that this international conference hopes to explore in an interdisciplinary academic conversation in Macau—a city that lay at the crossroads of European explorations of Asia.