Claude de Visdelou

Claude de Visdelou (12 August 1656 – 11 November 1737) was a French Jesuit missionary.

He entered the Society of Jesus on 5 September 1673, and was one of the missionaries sent to China by Louis XIV in 1687.

When the papal legate Charles-Thomas Maillard De Tournon came to China in 1705, chiefly to regulate the question of the Chinese Rites, Visdelou was the only Jesuit favourable to their prohibition.

Tournon appointed him Vicar Apostolic of Guizhou with the title of bishop of Claudiopolis in Isauria, but his superiors opposed the nomination, since Visdelou had not received papal dispensation from his vow not to accept ecclesiastical dignity.

With the missionaries who had submitted to the decree against the rites, Visdelou followed the legate to Macau, where he was secretly consecrated bishop, 2 February 1709.