Of all the competitors Anglicans might have feared, the Catholics long seemed the least likely to succeed. After upheavals in both Europe and India, Catholic institutions had suffered disruption, decline, and dissension. The suppression of the Jesuits in 1773 had left many congregations abandoned. When Capuchin attempts to acquire Jesuit properties in India failed, Missions Etrangeres de Paris, with only six missionaries in Pondicherry—three elderly and infirm (one a bishop) and three novices—had struggled to avert extinction. The French Revolution, Napoleonic Wars, occupation of Rome, weakened papal authority, and failing communications and funding from Europe had left local priests, many half-trained, to fill the void.
Three centuries of Catholic expansion seemed to be in jeopardy. Missionaries belonging to Catholic orders, with considerable autonomy from Lisbon or Rome, had once gone forth from monastic and collegial citadels into the countryside outside of the Estado da India. Fisherfolk along the coasts, such as the Paravars and Mukkavars, had turned Catholic, in defiance of Hindu and Muslim rulers. The Jesuit ‘Brahmans’ Roberto de Nobili and Constantius Giuseppe Beschi had established a Catholic presence in Sanskrit scholarship. ‘Caste’ people from respectable families, such as Brahmans, Vallalars, and Kammas, had become Catholic in towns all along both coasts of the peninsula. Yet, ongoing disputes between the Padroado Rial (the right of Portuguese royal patronage) and the Vatican’s propaganda fide (created 1622) endangered all these achievements. Despite Portugal’s decline in world power and flagging zeal in Lisbon, claims of the Padroado Rial had not weakened. While suffragan sees in Cranganore, Cochin, and Mylapore had lain vacant for decades, papal missionaries moving into areas under Padroado authority were being thwarted. Agents of vicariates apostolic still aroused fierce resistance. Catholic institutions languished, and many flocks remained untended.
Change began in the 1830s, when Cardinal Cappellari of propaganda fide became Pope Gregory XVI. The plight of Catholics in India prompted him to establish new vicariates apostolic—in Madras (1832), Bombay (1833), Calcutta and Ceylon (1834), the Coromandel Coast (1835), and Pondicherry and Madurai (1836). Within a century the map of Catholic India showed twenty- eight bishops, twenty-five within the Madras Presidency. The restored Society of Jesus (Jesuits) returned to Madurai (1837). New dioceses, within domains of the Padroado but answering to propaganda fide, challenged Padroado institutions. Next, by the decree Multa Praececlare, Pope Gregory boldly asserted papal supremacy over all Catholics in India. Henceforth, any area within the diocese of Mylapore not assigned to a vicar apostolic was to come under the new vicariate of Madras. Neglected parishes in Cranganore and Cochin were assigned to the vicariate of Malabar. The Archbishop of Goa would no longer have authority outside Goa.
But it was one thing to make such pronouncements and another to implement them. With centuries of experience among ‘country priests’, padroadists had perfected skills of delay and obfuscation. They hoped, thereby, to outlast this Pope and then ‘turn’ his successor. Even after 1846, when Pius IX ascended the Holy See and after the Concordat of 1860, disputes continued. Only after a series of synods under Clement Bonnand, Bishop of Pondicherry and Vicar Apostolic of the Coromandel Coast, did real changes occur. Foundations were laid—for a comprehensive educational system, stretching from villages to institutions of higher learning, and for the training of a native Indian clergy within an English-speaking Indo-British world. The significance for Catholicism in India of the formation of the Catholic Hierarchy of India in 1886 can hardly be exaggerated.
The most constructive initiative of Bishop Bonnand was to come to terms with the Raj. Catholic disputes settled by the British ended most interventions from Goa or Rome. Repeal of the Test Acts in 1828 and the Catholic Emancipation Act of 1829 had removed most legal disabilities for Catholics throughout the Empire. Irish immigration to England and other parts of the Empire was making Catholicism a more normal part of the denominational scene than had been so for three centuries. Once English-speaking Irish vicars apostolic arrived, padroadist versus propagandist disputes could be turned over to the Raj for adjudication. In turn, the Raj ‘devised a Protestant-style principle to the effect that a change of jurisdiction was possible if a majority of local people wanted it. Such proposals prompted official investigation, and the Company frequently became involved in local affairs of the Roman Catholic Church.’32 In short, Catholic institutions and missionaries within the Indian Empire, like other non-British missionaries, Xourished as never before. Having no illusions or pretensions to being part of the establishment, either ecclesiastical or imperial, they could carry on with their programme beneath the radar of official sensitivities.