[2][3] These two Portuguese Goa-based Jesuits had the benefit of the syncretic policy of Akbar (1542–1605), maintained by his son Jahangir (1569–1627), which allowed them to develop freely in an environment under Muslim authority.

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.

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.

[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] In 1736, the Spanish cardinal Luis Antonio Belluga y Moncada supported the Capuchin missionary Francesco della Penna when the latter sought help for his evangelization in Tibet.

[14] 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]).

[26] Nine years later (1914), Jean-Théodore Monbeig, another French missionary working in the Sichuan-Tibetan border region, was killed by lamas near Lithang, not long after helping revive the Christian community at Bathang.

These were young missionaries seasoned in the Swiss Alps, who also had a project of building a hospice in 1933 in the Latsa pass, between the valleys of the Mekong and Salween rivers.

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.

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.

[35] In 1945, Valais-born Maurice Tornay was appointed parish priest of Our Lady of the Sacred Heart Church at Yerkalo, after completing his theological and local language studies in Weisi.

Tornay from his parish, but ultimately led him to travel to Lhasa disguised as a pilgrim seeking to appeal to the 14th Dalai Lama for religious toleration to be granted to Tibetan Christians.

[36] Both militant state atheism and severe anti-religious persecution began immediately and have continued ever since the invasion and Annexation of Tibet by the People's Republic of China.

Both clergy and laity were arrested and sent to Laogai concentration camps and "thought reform centers", where they experienced severe psychological abuse in a vindictive prison setting.

All legal worship has to be conducted in government-approved churches belonging to the Catholic Patriotic Association, which is State controlled and rejects papal primacy.

[38] Even so, Roman Catholicism still has followers among ethnic Tibetans and the strictly illegal and Pro-Vatican Underground Church continues to remain active throughout the region.

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.

[44] 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.

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.