Conflitti e controversie in terra di missione. Carlo Giovanni Turcotti in Cina tra Sei e Settecento

[Machine translation] In the last decades of the seventeenth century, the missionary enterprise of the Society of Jesus in China reached its apogee, just as the attacks were being made against the entire Ignatian Order and its primitive theoretical model of evangelization, in the form of the infamous story known as the “controversy of the Chinese rites”. At a particularly troubled time for the Society of Jesus, the parable of Carlo Giovanni Turcotti (1643-1706) took place, who for more than twenty-five years was among the top figures of the Jesuit missionary structure in China: it is now possible to rediscover various aspects of that personal experience through the testimonies left to us by the Valsesian Jesuit in an interesting correspondence recently published. From a different position compared to the best-known scientific fathers active in Beijing, the Turcotti story offers the possibility of enriching the composite picture of the world of Chinese missions, their management and their internal tensions, at a crucial moment in relations between West and East.