The Role of François Marie de Tours in the Capuchin Mission in India and Tibet

Abstract

This paper describes the activities of the French missionary François Marie de Tours who in the beginning of the 18th century laid the foundation of the Capuchin mission to Tibet, which was at that time a rather risky venture. On the one hand he was well prepared by his missionary work in Northern India, where he had started linguistic research by writing a thesaurus of what he called Lingua mogallana (a predecessor of Hindustani). On the other hand, he had no experience of the land of the lamas. What had motivated him, was the ancient rumour that there might have been Christian communities in Tibet which had only to be “revitalized”. François Marie presented his Hindustani thesaurus to the Vatican authorities in order to suggest them to agree to his Tibet plan. Besides that, the paper throws some light on François Marie’s theological attitude (perceptible in his discussion of certain missionary methods).