The question of what li, ritual, actually means became, unexpectedly, a live controversy within European Catholicism, when Jesuit missionaries in seventeenth-century China had to decide whether Confucian ritual practice, ancestor veneration among them, was compatible with Christian conversion.
Matteo Ricci and the Jesuit mission he led argued that these rites were civil observances honoring ancestors and a revered teacher rather than acts of worship, and that converts could continue performing them alongside Christian practice, a position, the Chinese Rites, that allowed the mission to make headway among Chinese elites for whom abandoning ancestral ritual would have meant abandoning their whole social position. Dominican and Franciscan missionaries argued the opposite, that the rites were genuinely religious, involved real supplication to the dead, and were therefore idolatrous regardless of any civil gloss Chinese officials placed on them.
The dispute escalated to Rome; Pope Clement XI ruled against the Jesuit accommodation in 1704 and 1715, reaffirmed by Benedict XIV in 1742, and the Kangxi Emperor, offended by papal intervention into a settled matter of Chinese civil custom, banned Christian missionary activity, contributing to the decline of the Christian mission in China for two centuries. The episode is regularly cited as a case where two traditions disagreed not about the correctness of ritual belief but about the harder question, whether a given practice counts as religious at all, a question Confucian scholars themselves debated internally, since Xunzi's naturalistic account of ritual efficacy is not obviously more religious than Ricci's own civil reading of it.