12
The End of the First Missionary Era
The West had largely been converted to Christianity by the year 1000, while the rest of the world was, for various reasons, inaccessible to Europe. Thus, with the failure of the Crusades, Christian missionary activity all but ceased for half a millennium, except for the Nestorians of Persia and Mesopotamia, who spread their faith across Asia. The Nestorians reputedly founded monasteries in China in the eighth century, encouraged by emperors who accepted Christianity as one kind of wisdom among several, and there were still Nestorians in China four hundred years later.
The Mughals
The Mughals (Mongols) of the early thirteenth century were the last of the great marauding peoples, sweeping across the globe under the legendary Genghis Khan (d. 1227) and others, conquering territory that stretched from China, where Nestorians also became established at the Mughal court, to Hungary.
In 1245, Innocent IV sent a delegation under an Italian Franciscan archbishop, Giovanni da Pian del Carpini (d. 1252), to acquaint the Great Khan Kuyuk (d. 1248) with the Catholic faith and ask him to cease the wholesale slaughter of conquered peoples. Members of the mission described the Mughals as a moral and religious people who were nonetheless given to extreme cruelty. Kuyuk expressed puzzlement at the Christian message and countered it by claiming that the Mughal victories demonstrated that the gods did not favor the Christians. Louis IX of France also sent emissaries to the Khan, one of whom, the Flemish Dominican William of Rubrouck (d. 1293), participated in a formal debate in which the monotheistic Christians and Muslims vanquished the polytheistic Buddhists.
Kublai Khan (d. 1294) asked the Venetian merchant Marco Polo (d. 1324) to have the Pope send a hundred Christian scholars to his court, in order to establish the truth of conflicting religious claims. The scholars were not sent, but a second papal delegation went to China under another Italian Franciscan, John of Montecorvino (d. 1328). John made a favorable impression on the Great Khan Timur (Timur the Lame—Tamerlane, d. 1405) and made some converts. John was made an archbishop at Beijing (Peking), with jurisdiction over several suffragan sees, a mission that lasted until the Mughals were themselves conquered by the Ming Chinese in 1370.
A New Age of Discovery
The humanist spirit of the Renaissance stimulated a general curiosity about the world, a curiosity that could be satisfied for the first time because of the remarkable technological achievements of the Middle Ages in sailing and navigation.
Interest in the wider world was also fed by religious currents. The Portuguese Prince Henry the Navigator (d. 1460) was a pious ascetic who dreamed of discovering new worlds to replace those lost to the Muslims. The Italian sailor Christopher Columbus (d. 1506), who was influenced by some of the messianic expectations of Joachim of Flora, believed that the conversion of distant pagan peoples would usher in the last days.
Henry encouraged exploration that bore fruit as Portuguese voyagers began to open large parts of the world to the Europeans, for the first time confronting vast areas of the globe of whose existence they were barely aware, whole societies of people who had never heard of Christ. Under the leadership especially of the religious orders—first Franciscans and Dominicans, later Jesuits—the Church began her greatest period of missionary activity in terms of extent and complexity.
God, Gold, and Glory
The Europeans may have traveled mainly for love of adventure, but they were soon followed by merchants willing to risk large sums in perilous voyages and by government officials and soldiers claiming the rights of the crown over new territories. Explorers were invariably accompanied by priests, and on landing in each new territory, Mass was celebrated, the cross raised, and the flag planted, thereby claiming the territory for a European monarch.
The motives for expansion have been summarized as “God, gold, and glory”—the first the priority of priests, the second of merchants, the third of government officials and soldiers—and from the beginning, European expansion embodied a tension between religious and worldly motives. Learning languages that had no relation to any European tongue was the most immediate, and often most difficult, challenge the Europeans faced. Soldiers led the way, learning what was necessary to obtain basic information from the natives, such as the location of major settlements.
Missions and Colonialism
Missionaries had to depend on worldly men merely in order to reach distant lands, and over time, few missions succeeded unless they were connected with permanent outposts of European civilization. As a result, missionary activity was unavoidably implicated in what came to be called colonialism or imperialism—European countries conquering or otherwise dominating other areas of the world. Thus from the beginning, the modern missionary movement was closely tied to the various European powers, which gave missionaries access to new lands and financial support by governments but also brought them endless political interference
America
Columbus
Contrary to stereotype, Columbus’ belief that the world was round was not ridiculed; most educated people of the time thought so. Bishop Alejandro Geraldini (d. 1525) supported Columbus at the Spanish court pointing out that many earlier writers, including saints, had been in error about geography. By sailing west from Spain, Columbus hoped to find a shorter route to India, and when he landed on the Caribbean island he named San Salvador (“holy Savior”), he thought he had succeeded. (Geraldini became the first bishop of San Salvador [renamed Santo Domingo—“Holy Lord”] and wrote one of the earliest accounts of the geography of the new land.)
Spain and Portugal
In the fifteenth century, a series of papal bulls gave Portugal the authority to explore and claim new lands. But in 1493, because of Columbus’ voyages, the Spanish Pope Alexander VI drew a line that divided the entire world between Spain and Portugal in such a way that Spain was able to claim most of the territory of the New World, although Portugal got the huge territory that became known as Brazil.
“Indians”
The first “Indians” whom Columbus encountered seemed peaceful and gentle, although several of his men were later killed. Columbus’ treatment of the Indians vacillated between kindly and harsh. He brought six of them back to Spain as slaves, where they became Catholics. Ferdinand and Isabella served as their godparents and immediately forbade further enslavement. Columbus was soon shunted aside by the more ruthless and rapacious conquistadors (“conquerors”).
Aztecs
The various natives of Mexico lived in terror of the brutal Aztecs, whose great empire was said to be rich in gold and silver. In 1518, the conquistador Hernando Cortes (d. 1547) invaded Mexico, defeated Aztec armies much larger than his own, and received from Emperor Montezuma II (d. 1520) an acknowledgment of Spanish rule. The Spanish were greatly helped by the Indian nations who saw their arrival as an opportunity to throw off the yoke of the Aztecs, as well as by their own possession of firearms and horses, neither of which the Aztecs had. But the circumstances of the conquest were also closely involved with religion.
Montezuma may have deferred to the Spanish because of an Aztec legend that white gods had once visited Mexico and would one day return; and, paradoxically, Cortes’ often brutal tactics probably increased his religious authority. During his advance toward Tenochtitlan (Mexico City), he systematically destroyed “mosques” (as he called the Aztec temples) and smashed their idols. But rather than causing the Aztecs to resist more forcefully, this may have confirmed their suspicion that the invaders possessed a divine power greater than their own. The Spanish capture of Montezuma had the same effect, since it demonstrated the emperor’s impotence; in fact, it soon provoked a rebellion of some of his own people, who assassinated him.
As warriors, there was perhaps little difference, morally, between the Spanish and the Aztecs. But the Spanish were deeply shocked by the Aztec practice of human sacrifice, in which, over the years, thousands of people, especially enemies taken in battle, had been led to the top of a great pyramid and ritually slaughtered in order to placate the gods of war.
The Rights of the Natives
The most basic question, which the Spanish attempted to address to some degree, was their right to be in the New World at all. While some theologians justified the conquest, the Dominican Francisco de Vitoria (d. 1546) boldly proposed that each local community, although subject to some kind of international law, was autonomous and self-governing, including those of the Indians. Their paganism, therefore, even including human sacrifice, did not deprive them of their rights. The Dominican theologian Cajetan, perhaps the leading Catholic theologian of the day, held a similar view, and Pope Paul III also insisted that pagan Indians had rights.
Most of the laymen attracted to the New World seem to have been driven by a hardhearted lust for wealth and power, so that neither the temporal nor the spiritual welfare of the Indians meant much to them. Mexico turned out not to be rich in gold, which was not discovered in abundance until the Inca kingdom of Peru was conquered several decades later, but Indians were forced to work in wretched mines or on encomiendas—large estates set up to produce various profitable commodities.
The popes forbade the slave trade early in the fifteenth century, when it had begun to revive in the expanding Portuguese empire, and the prohibition was reenacted periodically. But the prohibition was essentially ignored, and in the drive to make the new lands profitable, Indians were often treated as slaves, a practice that Columbus himself favored. Ferdinand and Isabella issued decrees to mitigate the Indians’ condition, but the crown itself claimed most of the profits from the colonies, and it was difficult to control the men actually on the scene. (One viceroy was assassinated in Peru when he tried to enforce the royal decrees.)
Churchmen tended to be sympathetic to the Indians—when settlers complained to a bishop that the Indians gave off a foul odor, he replied, “It is you who stink to me!” The Indians’ greatest champion was Bartolomé de Las Casas (d. 1566), a Spaniard who originally came to Mexico to take possession of an encomienda. He was ordained a diocesan priest and, after a Dominican denied him absolution in confession because of his treatment of the Indians, underwent a conversion and returned to Spain to plead the Indian cause, later returning to Mexico as a bishop.
Besides being opposed by laymen with vested interests, Las Casas was also opposed by some Franciscans who justified the bad treatment of the Indians. After a time, he returned to Spain to plead the Indian cause passionately once again and, in a formal debate at the royal court, vanquished a theological opponent who relied heavily on the justification of slavery made by Aristotle. Las Casas went so far as to explain, if not to justify, the practice of human sacrifice, on the grounds that all men knew they were creatures and owed their existence to their Creator. Thus, without the benefit of divine revelation, the Aztecs might naturally think that God demanded from them the sacrifice of human lives.
Las Casas wrote several books recounting in sickening detail the mistreatment of the Indians—books that, ironically, became a principal source for the English Protestant “Black Legend” about Spanish Catholic cruelty, a legend that seldom acknowledged that it was a Spanish bishop who was the source of the story.
The Decimation of the Natives
While many Indians were worked to death in mines and on encomiendas, and many were killed outright by cruel masters, by far the greatest damage was unintentional: the Spanish carried germs and viruses to which the Indians had no previous exposure, hence no resistance. During the course of the sixteenth century, millions died of diseases, especially smallpox, all over Latin America.
Mestizos
The Spanish attitude to the Indians was complex. Unlike the English, who tried to keep the Indians at a distance, the Spanish rather freely intermingled with them, even taking Indian wives and concubines, so that ultimately the predominant strain in Latin American society became the mestizos (“mixed race”).
The Imperative of Evangelization
Originally, there was some debate among the Spanish as to whether the Indians were men of the same race as their conquerors. A few clergy thought that the apparent innocence of some tribes showed that they had not shared in the Fall of Adam and thus had no need of redemption, while the savagery of the Aztecs led others to judge that they were subhuman. But Church authorities quickly decreed that the Indians were human and therefore ought to be evangelized.
Dominicans in particular insisted forcefully that all Christians, not only the missionaries, had an obligation to convert the heathen and that churches must be built and every effort made to lead the Indians to the faith. Ferdinand and Isabella forbade the use of force to convert them, but that decree too was often ignored. The Spanish effort to convert the Indians was unmatched by Protestants, possibly because of their belief in predestination, which implied that those who had not heard the Gospel were not intended by God to hear it. (The New England Puritans tended to dismiss the Indians as merely children of the devil.)
Thomistic theology held that God had planted in human hearts both a yearning for Himself and a knowledge of right and wrong, so that, following those instincts, good pagans would in time realize the falsity of their religion and embrace Christianity when it was preached to them. (Left unclear was whether those who had never heard the Gospel could be saved.)
Some Europeans thought that the natives, although most were polytheists, already grasped certain basic elements of the Christian faith, such as the creation of the universe by an all-good God and the rudiments of the moral law. Some explorers thought they recognized images of the Virgin Mary in pagan temples and concluded that Mary had graciously appeared to native peoples who did not realize who she was.
Obstacles
But from the beginning, conversion efforts were plagued by problems that would never be entirely resolved: a chronic shortage of priests, despite which Indians were excluded from ordination; a semi-feudal social system in which the poor (mostly Indians) were often treated abominably; and a popular piety that was intense but also semi-pagan.
The Problem of Inculturation
On the other hand, anticipating the insights of modern anthropology, a few missionaries recognized that the native world was a seamless web of beliefs, rituals, social structures, and nature itself, all so closely interwoven that an entire world would have to be changed if the natives were to be truly converted. As in Europe during the Dark Ages, the Church thus confronted the issue of how the Gospel could be incarnated in a culture very different from that of the missionaries themselves.
Indians were not educated in the Western sense, so that issues of doctrine, so passionately debated in Europe, meant little to them. They learned the catechism by rote, and when the Spanish crown set up the Inquisition in the New World, it did not inquire into possible heresy among the Indians, who were deemed too simple to embrace false doctrine, but attempted instead to root out witchcraft. (Two conquistadors, however, were burned as heretics in 1528.)
Mestizos’ culture thus created its own kind of Catholicism, with the missionaries incorporating elements of the native cultures, sometimes deliberately, sometimes because the people simply continued in many of their old ways. Most perhaps continued living in two worlds, invoking both pagan and Christian powers, sometimes in the same rituals. Many transferred the cults of their old gods to Catholic saints, with Catholic rituals and the priests who performed them thought to have magical powers. Indians responded strongly to vivid descriptions of the rewards and punishment of the afterlife.
Thus, as in the Dark Ages, conversion was less a matter of accepting new beliefs than of submitting to a new power that was recognized as superior to the old—Jesus and His saints could conquer demons, including the old gods, and save men from every kind of evil. Because of the pagan worship of the sun, monstrances were often crafted with a circle of gold rays around the center, showing that Christ was the true sun, the source of all light. (In a reversal of influence, this radial type of monstrance was introduced into Europe from the New World.)
As in late Roman times, churches were often erected on the foundations of pagan temples, with the idols buried beneath them and basins that had been used to collect the blood of sacrificial victims turned into baptismal fonts, demonstrating that Christ had triumphed over the old gods and that one good God had created everything, so that even objects devoted to evil could be turned to good. Particularly significant was the fact that, since Christ shed His blood for everyone, the old bloody sacrifices were not needed to appease an angry god.
Guadalupe
Conversions were slow in coming, but a crucial change occurred in 1531, when St. Juan Diego (d. 1548), an Indian convert who was somewhat elderly by the standards of his society, heard singing while on his way to Mass and saw a vision of a beautiful lady who addressed him affectionately in his native tongue. She identified herself as the Mother of God and told Juan Diego that she wanted a church built on the site of her appearance, establishing a link between the New World and the Old by identifying herself with Guadalupe, a Marian shrine in Spain.
At first, the bishop was skeptical, but he was convinced when, at the lady’s bidding, Juan Diego brought roses blooming in the cold of winter. As the roses tumbled out of his cloak, an image of the lady appeared on the cloth: dark-complexioned and wearing a kind of belt used by pregnant Indian women. A church was then built to enthrone the image, which now rests in a modern structure on the same site.
This Marian apparition seemed to affirm dramatically the suitability of Indian culture to receive the Christian message and the inherent worth and dignity of the Indian people themselves. This dramatic expression of the Catholic faith soon brought nine million native converts into the Church—the greatest mass conversion in history—and Our Lady of Guadalupe became the focal point of Mexican Catholicism and eventually the patroness of the Americas.
Effects of Conversions
The Church in Latin America continued to grow, with almost all its inhabitants becoming at least nominal Catholics, and for many, the faith went very deep. Much from the church of Europe was replicated in the New World, including a system of education eventually including seventeen universities throughout Latin America, the oldest—at Lima and Mexico City—predating Harvard by more than a century. A number of great baroque churches were built all over Latin America, and the visual arts flourished. A cloistered Hieronymite nun from this period, Juana de la Cruz (d. 1695), is considered a major poet of the Spanish language.
Latin America also produced saints, including the Spaniard Turibius of Lima (d. 1606), a reforming archbishop who tried to protect the Indians; Rose of Lima (d. 1617), a native Peruvian who lived the mystical life in emulation of Catherine of Siena; Martin de Porres (d. 1639), born at Lima of a Spanish father and a black mother, who as a Dominican lay brother cared for the poor and destitute; and Peter Claver (d. 1654), a Spanish Jesuit who devoted his life to the slaves of the Caribbean. (Rose was canonized in 1671, the first saint of the Americas.)
But although a few were ordained, Indians were considered unsuited to the priesthood. Men of pure Spanish blood were preferred, with mestizos, Indians, mulattos (those of mixed black and white lineage), and blacks in descending order of preference.
The Paraguay Reducciones
In many ways, the most remarkable chapter in the history of the Latin American missions, and one of the most remarkable anywhere at any time, were the reducciones established by the Jesuits in Paraguay in the seventeenth century. By 1700, these communities embraced one hundred thousand Indians, perhaps the most successful social experiment ever attempted.
The missions took their name from the attempt—later tried in California—to “reduce” the Indians, that is, to settle them in compact, highly organized communities, since nomadic peoples or those living in scattered villages often lost the faith. Each reductionwas a large square, surrounded on three sides by the homes of the Indians and on the fourth side by a church, workshops, and other communal structures. Each reduccion was entirely self-sustaining, with the Indians taught agriculture, herding, and basic crafts. White men, especially merchants, were barred, and the Indians were even permitted by the Spanish crown to form armies for their own protection.
The reducciones were undone in the 1750s in the most brutal manner possible, as part of Pombal’s fanatical attack on the Church, after he managed to obtain Paraguay from Spain, perhaps precisely in order to suppress the reducciones, a manifestation of the spirit of Josephinism and Gallicanism. The Jesuits were ordered to announce to the Indians that they must leave the reducciones, with no provision of any kind, and when the missionaries protested, the Portuguese government sent a cooperative Jesuit to threaten them with excommunication. The local bishop was an appointee of the crown, and the timid Jesuit leadership in Rome also ordered the Paraguay Jesuits to obey. The Indians, however, kept up an armed rebellion for five years, until they were finally crushed and thereducciónes obliterated.1
Latin American Independence
The conquest of Spain and Portugal by Napoleon a generation later allowed a series of rebellions to erupt in Latin America, as a result of which most of the colonies gained their independence within a few years.
Clergy were on both sides of the struggle for independence. Some believed that their oath of fidelity to the Spanish monarch was morally binding, while others propagated radical Enlightenment ideas. Two Mexican priests—Miguel Hidalgo y Costilla (d. 1811) and José Maria Moreles (d. 1815)—helped to raise rebel troops, commanded them in battle, and were eventually captured and shot.
The Holy See vacillated, supporting the restoration of Spain’s colonies after the defeat of Napoleon but a few years later appointing bishops without reference to the Spanish king, which in effect recognized Latin American independence. (The future Pius IX was the first pope to visit the New World, as a member of a papal delegation in 1823.)
Endemic Troubles
After independence, the history of Latin American Catholicism was to a great extent the story of complex and troubled relationships between the Church, the governments in power, and various forces for political and economic change. Latin American Catholics had a deep piety and were loyal to the Church. But, in addition to the chronic shortage of priests, both clerical and lay concubinage was common (both Hidalgo y Costilla and Moreles fathered children), especially in rural villages. Religion was often experienced primarily as adherence to traditional rituals—some of them dubiously Christian—rather than as a force for moral and spiritual transformation.
Anticlericalism
At first, some of the newly independent states confirmed the special status of the Church. But, as with European Liberalism, the spirit of independence often came to be directed against the Church as part of the oppressive Old Regime. Anticlerical Freemasonry was a powerful influence among liberal leaders, and the Church was stripped of her extensive lands while her influence over education was curtailed. Ecuador, briefly, was an unusual exception under Garcia Moreno (d. 1875), who declared it to be an officially Catholic country dedicated to the Sacred Heart, where both the Masonic Order and all condemned books were banned, an experiment that came to an end when Moreno was assassinated.
India
The Portuguese
Pope Alexander VI’s division of the world applied to the Far East as well as to the New World and thereby gave the Portuguese a claim to India. As Columbus was discovering the West while searching for the East, Portuguese were traveling to the East around the southern tip of Africa. The Portuguese were quick to establish trading posts on the southern coast of the Indian subcontinent, primarily in order to exploit the vastly profitable spice trade.
An Ancient Culture
The Europeans’ attitude toward Asia was entirely different from their attitude toward America, since Asia was not wholly unfamiliar territory and its various kingdoms were very ancient, rich, and sophisticated, therefore not to be dismissed as almost subhuman. Strategically, the Europeans could not simply conquer but had to bargain with local princes for concessions.
St. Thomas Christians
The Europeans also found that Christianity was not entirely strange to Asia. The St. Thomas Christians (see Chapter Seven above, p. 211) were centered around the island city of Goa, which the Portuguese conquered and turned into a trading center. Goa was soon made a diocese, and from that base Franciscan missionaries were able to extend their activities into neighboring territories.
Xavier
Missionary activity of all kinds received a new impetus and new directions from the arrival in India in 1541 of St. Francis Xavier (d. 1552). Xavier had been one of Ignatius Loyola’s earliest companions, and Ignatius, who thirsted for the conversion of the world, sent him to the East only a year after the Society of Jesus was officially approved. Xavier’s mission was the first application of the new Jesuit system of formation and organization. Unlike the Franciscans and missionaries of other orders, he went to his new assignment entirely alone, knowing that he would probably never return. (Homesick for his brethren, he cut their signatures out of the letters he received and kept them in a locket.)
A Holy Man
Xavier’s asceticism fit well with the Indian image of the holy man. He wore sandals and a dirty tattered cassock, slept on the beach when necessary, observed stringent fasts, and tried to avoid the company of women. Begging, he found, far from being a cause of shame, was often respected as the sign of a holy man who had renounced all worldly goods. He was outspoken in his denunciation of the Europeans in India, not excluding some missionaries—men who lived scandalous lives, mistreated the natives, and were themselves the greatest obstacles to conversions.
The Devil’s Work
For Xavier, the realities were quite simple—innumerable souls were being lost because of a false religion that was probably of the devil. Just as human sacrifice proved to the Spanish that the Aztec religion was evil, so suttee in India—the custom by which a widow threw herself on her husband’s funeral pyre—proved the evil of Hinduism. Suttee was an obligation from which Christian converts were freed, and it was suppressed even among the Hindus in the lands the Europeans controlled. As in Mexico, some explorers found what they thought were images of the Virgin Mary in native temples, but Xavier demanded that all idols be destroyed. And he pressed men into giving up their concubines.
Mass Conversions
In journeys outside the security of Goa itself, Xavier quickly made large numbers of converts, whom he baptized as soon as possible, on the basis of minimal catechetics. He administered so many baptisms at one time that he sometimes had to have his arm supported as he poured the water. (His best-known relic, kept at Goa, is his right forearm.) He spent many hours hearing confessions and urged Ignatius to send men who were not necessarily learned but who were physically strong.
Castes
Indian society was divided into castes, social groups determined by birth and rigidly defined, from which there could be no escape except, they believed, through reincarnation. The highest caste were the Brahmins, men who were supposed to be both learned and deeply spiritual and who, if they did not actually rule Indian society, at least set its tone. At the other extreme was the caste of those who were literally “Untouchable”, people whose conduct in a previous life had supposedly merited their being reborn as hewers of wood and drawers of water.
Xavier’s rapid evangelization of India brought with it the question of whether the faith could be inculturated in the caste system. The Europeans also took for granted that mankind was arranged in a social hierarchy and that those in the lower orders had to show deference to those above, but Christianity taught that all social groups were equal in the sight of God, while in India the castes were rigid manifestations of the inflexible divine will.
Most of Xavier’s converts seem to have been from the Untouchables, which meant that the Church might attract large numbers of people but could never hope to convert Indian society as a whole. By converting to Christianity, Untouchables overcame their shameful and exploited status, but few Brahmins became Christians, if only because to do so would be to lose all social status, by associating with Untouchables.
Indonesia
Praying at the tomb of St. Thomas, Xavier felt inspired to go to the Molucca Islands (modern Indonesia), where the Portuguese had an outpost and there were already a few Christians. He spent two years there, with more limited success than in India. Feeling strongly the devil’s presence, he performed a number of exorcisms after spending the night in prayer. Islam was a strong presence in the Moluccas, and Xavier found what other Christians had discovered before him—Muslims were especially resistant to conversion, due perhaps to their strict monotheism, which caused them immediately to rebuff all talk of a trinitarian God; the fact that the Qur’an contained its own account of Jesus; and the fact that apostasy from Islam was punishable by death.
“Rice Christians”
Returning to India as the superior of the Jesuit mission (he summarily dismissed from the Society a Jesuit who had failed to go on a dangerous assignment), Xavier found that some converts continued to worship idols secretly and some were even drawn back completely into paganism. Other missionaries questioned whether Xavier’s converts had been properly instructed and raised the issue of what would later be called “rice Christians”—those who accepted baptism because of the material benefits it offered. The phenomenon posed a serious dilemma for missionaries, in that they had obligations in charity to help poor pagans but such charity might seem like enticement.
Inculturation
St. Paul’s College, heavily supported, like other missionary projects in India, by the king of Portugal, was set up at Goa to train native priests, teaching them Latin so that they could study theology and celebrate the liturgy. Xavier, however, wanted less emphasis on philosophy and theology and more on practical experience. (In one of his few conscious efforts at inculturation, he urged that the penitential season of Lent be transferred to the summer, since otherwise there would be no fish available.)
Problems
Despite the bad example of some Europeans, the missions continued to attract a large number of converts, mainly from the lower castes, and native Indians entered the Jesuit order in such numbers that the Indian province of the Society, encompassing all of East Asia, was soon larger than all the others combined. But in the 1570s, an official Jesuit visitor, the Italian Alessandro Valignano (d. 1606), arrived for an inspection and found conditions deplorable: poverty, injustice, lawlessness, and waning zeal on the part of the missionaries. Some Indian Jesuit houses had slaves, since certain kinds of labor were thought to be degrading for free men, although the slaves were supposed to be eventually freed.
De Nobili
More than half a century after Xavier’s death, the Italian Jesuit Roberto de Nobili (d. 1656), also working in India, raised ideas about inculturation that differed radically from Xavier’s own. De Nobili feared that, so long as most converts came from the lower caste, Catholicism would never be fully accepted in India and that in order to convert the whole society it was necessary to convert the Brahmins.
Natural Theology
De Nobili knew more about Hinduism than any of his contemporaries, because he made the arduous effort to learn the Sanskrit and Tamil languages in which the Hindu sacred books were written. Like all Jesuits of his era, he was a Thomist, and the Thomistic emphasis on natural theology—the truths knowable by the mind even before it receives divine revelation—underlay his efforts. De Nobili attempted to bring his audience as far as possible toward Christianity by reasoning, in the Thomistic manner, from visible effects to their causes (the Creator), proving the attributes necessary to such a Creator (all-knowing, all-powerful, eternal), and establishing that ultimately the truths of God, because they are infinite, are beyond human understanding and requires divine revelation.
But there were serious differences between Catholics and Hindus that could not be compromised: monotheism, Christ as the only Son of God and Savior, the practice of suttee, and belief in reincarnation. De Nobili argued that those unacceptable beliefs were the irrational degeneration of truths that had once been known but had been lost. The term Veda, referring to Hindu sacred texts, derived, he thought, from this original revelation given to the Indians by God. Indian laws, of which the Brahmins were in a sense the custodians and interpreters, were often wise and just, based on the knowledge of good and evil that God had implanted in the human heart. Thus no radical change in the laws was necessary.
De Nobili’s Approach
Tacitly rejecting Xavier’s methods, de Nobili urged the missionaries to dispel pagan darkness gradually and not to make frontal assaults on Indian beliefs and practices. Certain things, such as habits of dress and diet, seemed cultural only, and he repeatedly cited the ways in which the early Christians had adapted the Gospel to Greco-Roman culture.
Most important was the missionaries’ acceptance of the caste system, particularly their respect for the Brahmins. De Nobili urged that the missionaries themselves live as Brahmins, adopting the customs and attitudes appropriate to their learning or their high birth. To be despised as a follower of Christ was one thing, he argued, but to be despised as a person of low social class was another. Implicitly, he seemed to consign the apostolate of the Untouchables to the lower-class Franciscans.
The core of de Nobili’s argument was that the Brahmins were not a religious group at all but merely a highly respected class of learned men, so that they could be baptized yet retain all the habits of their class. In great detail, he analyzed their dress, diet, and other things in order to demonstrate that these had social significance only, not religious. In addition, he argued, their significance would change if the Brahmins converted.
Condemnation
De Nobili received the endorsement of some of the Catholic hierarchy in India and of Robert Bellarmine. But his work was condemned by Pope Urban VIII in a decision that was soon reversed. Overall, de Nobili seems to have made few intellectual converts, and he complained that often those with whom he debated seemed merely confused. He was a pioneer in the theology of inculturation, but he seems to have underestimated the difficulty of separating the religious and social threads of an ancient and tightly woven culture.
Indian Mughals
The Christian presence in India was almost entirely confined to the South. Much of northern India was ruled by the Mughals, several of whose khans were only nominally Muslim and not only allowed Jesuits into their territories but permitted them to challenge Muslim and Hindu sages in public debates. Some even privately expressed interest in the Catholic faith. But the last of these, Shāh Jahān (d. 1666), famous as the builder of the Taj Mahal, finally committed himself to Islam and outlawed Christianity.
Japan
Xavier was tantalized by stories told by travelers from distant Japan—that the Japanese were a curious people who yearned to know the truth and even had their own monasteries. In 1549, he achieved his dream of going there, arriving on a merchant ship and for the first time leaving the security of a transplanted European settlement, venturing, with little support, into largely unknown territory.
The Daimyos
Despite many efforts, Xavier was unable to obtain an audience with the almost mythical emperor, whose power—perhaps unknown to Xavier—was actually quite weak and who was dominated by officials called shoguns. But some daimyos (feudal lords) were friendly to the stranger, in part because they wanted to open trade relations with the Spanish and Portuguese.
Xavier discovered that in Japan begging was shameful and his shabby and humble appearance, which had made him credible to the Indians, had the opposite effect on the Japanese, who thought there could be little wisdom in someone who was so obviously a failure. Following the Ignatian principle of detachment—making use of worldly things without desiring them—he obtained good clothes from a European ship and found that he was now listened to more respectfully. From European merchants, Xavier also obtained such things as clocks, eyeglasses, telescopes, and muskets, gifts that impressed the daimyos and helped gain him a reputation for wisdom.
Feudal Politics
From the beginning, the bonzes (Buddhist monks) were Xavier’s chief enemy. These spiritual leaders of Japanese society quite correctly saw him as a formidable rival and intrigued against him at the courts of the daimyos, without whose at least passive tolerance the missionaries could make no headway. Despite his normal asceticism, Xavier ate meat and fish as a sign that it was permitted, since the bonzes abstained.
Xavier made heroic journeys on foot to visit as much of the island as he could. At first, conversions were very few, although in time, there were opportunities for mass baptisms of the simplest people, so long as they abandoned their idols. As in India, he ordered the destruction of pagan temples wherever the daimyos permitted. There was often political rivalry between daimyos and local Buddhist monasteries, which were deeply involved in the feudal politics of Japan, so that the daimyos, especially those who valued trade with the Europeans, did not automatically side with the monks.
Theological Debates
Xavier encountered Buddhism and to a lesser extent Shintoism—an ancient Japanese religion centered around the veneration of ancestors—without having a name for them. Both religions were complex and in their highest expressions very sophisticated. He sometimes engaged in formal debates with bonzes and, whereas in India he had valued missionaries’ physical stamina over their intellectual achievements, he now urged his superiors in Rome to send learned men.
He confirmed that some Japanese were indeed curious, requiring answers to difficult questions—how was the universe created, was there a difference between men and animals, was there personal immortality? When asked why God had waited so long to send the Gospel to Japan, thereby condemning earlier generations to Hell, Xavier replied evasively, pointing out that the pagans had at least a rudimentary knowledge of the moral law but not stating explicitly whether their ancestors were damned.
Catechesis
He developed a simple catechism, translated into Japanese and organized around the story of salvation, beginning with Adam and Eve and culminating with Christ. In accord with Ignatian principles, Xavier sought to use whatever in Japanese culture might help to promote the Gospel, making use of some pagan terms, such as those for angels and demons. With virtually no knowledge of the Japanese language, Xavier at first relied on an Indian interpreter who had previously visited Japan. But when some of his hearers either laughed or walked away in confusion, Xavier discovered that the word the interpreter was mistakenly using for God actually meant “the big lie”.
This raised the question to what extent Catholic doctrine, formulated in Hebrew and Greek terms, could be transplanted to other cultures. To avoid confusion, Xavier henceforth simply used the Latin word Deus and stopped using the Buddhist term for “the Highest Power” lest it merely confirm the pagans in what they already believed. As in the early centuries of the Church, the crucifix, the proudest symbol of Christianity, was a stumbling block to the Japanese, who—encouraged by the bonzes—saw it as merely a shameful punishment imposed on criminals.
Sexual Morality
Xavier claimed that Japanese parents were naïve in sending their sons to be educated by the bonzes, who had great prestige but were pedophiles. In debate, the bonzes denied that there was any moral fault involved, and Xavier replied that the distinction between male and female was fundamental to creation.
Developments in the Japanese Missions
India served as the training ground for Jesuits sent to Japan, where there were about thirty thousand Catholics in 1570 and 150,000 a decade later. The interests of the missionaries and the European merchants coincided, as the possibility of trade was held out to the various daimyos in order to obtain permission to proselytize. The daimyo Oda Nobunaga of Osaka (d. 1582) was particularly friendly, actually persecuting Buddhists and saying that he would convert to Catholicism if he were allowed to keep his many mistresses.
Native Japanese were at first admitted to the Society of Jesus, but the policy was soon reversed, as the superior of the Japanese mission, the Portuguese Francisco Cabral (d. 1609), came to regard the natives as treacherous, perhaps due mainly to the fact that the missions were at the mercy of shifting political winds. To Cabral, the Japanese were an inferior people who would have to remain semi-permanently under European spiritual tutelage and would have to adapt European ways in order to live as Catholics.
The official visitor Valignano arrived in 1579, and he and Cabral soon came to embody opposing philosophies of mission. Based on his reports to Rome, Valignano’s philosophy was eventually accepted, and he became perhaps the first modern man to formulate clearly the policy that would, at least in principle, govern all subsequent Catholic missionary activity: that native cultures were to be respected insofar as they did not impede the faith. (Pope Gregory the Great had enunciated a similar principle, which went as far back as St. Paul’s treatment of Gentile converts.)
Inculturation
Valignano wrote a kind of guide to inculturation, following the Ignatian exercise of weighing the factors both in favor and against continuing the Japanese mission. The negatives, which were admittedly serious, were the facts that conversions were slow and dependent on unpredictable political and economic factors and that converts were often tepid and easily slid back into paganism. On the other side were the facts that the mission was the only access the people of Japan had to the Gospel and that dubious converts of one generation might produce fervent souls in the next. Valignano was highly conscious that resources—both in men and in money—were being stretched thin, but he urged that the missionaries continue to seek converts instead of concentrating on the care of the flock they already had.
Native vocations were slow in coming, partly because of the difficulty of learning Latin. As in India, most of the Jesuit vocations were from the higher classes. Valignano mitigated the practice of having converts destroy pagan temples, and he allowed the observance of traditional Japanese feasts, provided they were stripped of their religious rituals.
Some converts had already proved their faith by enduring persecution, while those who lapsed did so under pressure from their lords and often because they rarely saw a priest and those they did see did not know the Japanese language. As the Apostles had done, it was sufficient for the time being to get the pagans merely to abstain from idols and from fornication, Valignano thought.
Respect for the Japanese
He saw that the mission was impeded by the perceived arrogance of some Europeans (Cabral inflicted “blows and harsh words” on the converts) and insisted that European missionaries learn Japanese. Contrary to Cabral, he expressed admiration for the natives’ stoical endurance of hardship and their courtesy, although admitting they could also be inscrutable and cruel. (Valignano had some contempt for Indians and blacks, but he called the Japanese “white people”.) Perhaps, he predicted somewhat daringly, there might in time even be a Japanese bishop.
Liturgy
The Japanese loved show and ceremony, Valignano found, so that as soon as possible it was desirable to build substantial churches, not, however, in the Japanese style, because that would constitute emulation of the pagans. Although Ignatius had enjoined his men to celebrate the liturgy simply, Valignano thought that in Japan it should be celebrated with as much solemnity as possible.
Japanese Customs
On the practical level, Jesuit seminarians were to be allowed their native diet (they found some European eating habits disgusting) and their accustomed posture (half-crouching, half-sitting) when eating or studying. Table utensils were not be used, since they were not the Japanese custom and, contrary to Xavier’s practice, meat was not to be eaten where it offended the Japanese. Jesuits could wear sandals, and their cassocks might resemble kimonos.
Valignano compiled a kind of etiquette book for Jesuits who might miss the subtleties of Japanese culture. A man of social standing should not carry his own umbrella, should not travel alone, and might ride a horse or walk but could not ride a lowly kind of animal like a donkey. Complex procedures governed hospitality and relations with persons of various social classes, and appropriate gifts were to be given. Men could wear their hats in church, since, in contrast to European custom, not to do so was considered a sign of disrespect.
Pagan Morality
Respecting customs was one thing, but differences in morality were more problematic. Childhood marriages were common in Japan, and therefore divorces were as well, and Valignano wondered if such marriages were valid in the eyes of the Church. Also problematic was the practice of suicide, which was not only permissible in Japanese culture but virtually obligatory, in order to escape dishonor. (Valignano wondered how to reconcile this pervasive concept of honor with Christian humility.) Slavery was to be tolerated, but Jesuits should make efforts to help runaways.
Canon law forbade ordaining a man who had committed a homicide, but impulsive killings were common among the Japanese, whom Valignano said resorted to the sword more quickly than to harsh words or blows. He thus recommended that the rule should be invoked only against those who committed the deed after conversion.
Franciscans
At first, the pope had given the Japanese mission entirely to the Jesuits, but Franciscans began arriving in increasing numbers, and the mission was weakened by differences between the two orders that erupted into quarrels. Jesuits were said to eat better food and to wear better clothes than the Franciscans, something that was not a matter of personal preference but a pragmatic judgment as to what the Japanese expected. The Franciscans continued to beg, which in Japan led to loss of social status. Jesuits nursed the sick, but touching lepers and the very poor was hateful to many of the very cleanly Japanese, so that the care of such people was mostly left to the Franciscans, an ironic application of an Ignatian principle, in that most Jesuits probably felt an obligation to help the poor but were required to make a pragmatic judgment as to whether that would aid their mission.
The Silk Trade
The Far East missions were heavily subsidized by the Spanish and Portuguese governments, and the missionaries sometimes chafed under the restrictions that could impose. In order to liberate themselves at least in part, the Jesuits became directly involved in the lucrative silk trade that flourished all over the East, serving as middlemen for international transactions. Although the pope at one point ordered the Jesuits to cease their involvement in the trade, it continued, drawing the Jesuits into political intrigues and making them vulnerable to the charge of being agents of foreign governments. Valignano thought this involvement was imprudent, just as he was suspicious of the missionaries’ close dependence on friendly daimyos.
Competition
After 1600, English and Netherlandish merchants also began to visit Japanese ports, and some tried to undermine the Jesuits in order to undermine the Spanish and Portuguese traders. The situation varied greatly from one province to another, but in all cases, the Jesuits were dependent on the unpredictable attitudes of the daimyos.
Persecution
The daimyo Toyotomi Hideyoshi (d. 1598), who succeeded Nobunaga, almost immediately turned against the Christians. The largest concentration was in the port city of Nagasaki, and in 1597, in a preview of things soon to come, he ordered the crucifixion of twenty-six Christians, including six Franciscans, accused of being foreign spies. After Hideyoshi’s death, the persecution temporarily abated. However, in 1614 the shogun Tokugawa Ieyasu (d. 1616) ordered the expulsion of all the missionaries. Many left, although some continued to minister in secret.
The persecution continued after Ieyasu’s death and spread throughout Japan. An organized propaganda war accused the Christians of undermining the imperial state and the authority of the daimyos; their monotheism was said to be insulting to the many gods. Eventually, there were five thousand Catholic martyrs, of whom only seventy were Europeans. They were subjected to inhuman tortures, the worst of which was to be hung upside down over pits of excrement, slowly dying of asphyxiation. Many apostatized, including one Spanish Jesuit who was rumored to have himself become a persecutor, although his full story is unknown.2
Unfortunately, martyrdom did not seem to have the same effect in Japan as elsewhere. Christianity was founded on the idea of the holiness of martyrdom, but Japanese culture found martyrdom almost incomprehensible. Christians were supposed to follow the law of God, which might conflict with that of the state, and hence regarded martyrdom as the seal of their faith. Japanese culture, however, recognized no transcendent moral law. The civil law embodied the highest moral principles, including obedience, and those who were put to death were seen as mere criminals.
Foreigners Expelled
The Tokugawa dynasty, founded by Ieyasu, ordered the expulsion of all foreigners from the empire, including Spanish and Portuguese merchants. A trade pact was then made with the Protestant Netherlanders, who were not allowed on the mainland of Japan and could neither proselytize nor practice their religion—even Bibles were banned. In an episode almost unparalleled in history, Japan made the radical decision to obliterate all the foreign influences it had absorbed over the previous fifty years and to return to its ancestral ways. The door was shut to all foreigners and would remain so for over two centuries.
China
The Lure
After three years in Japan, Xavier, now the superior of all the Jesuit missions in the East, returned to Goa, not with the intention of staying but in the hope of being able to venture into the vast, mysterious empire of China, possibly to find the court of the legendary Prester John (see Chapter Seven above, p. 202). Except for the island of Macao, the Chinese Empire had long been so rigidly closed to outsiders that shipwrecked Portuguese sailors had been imprisoned and tortured after taking refuge there.
Although Xavier managed to obtain the official title of papal nuncio to China, the Portuguese government at Goa would not permit him to travel there. Characteristically, he took matters into his own hands, arranging in 1552 for a ship to put him ashore on an island off the Chinese coast, from whence a smuggler would take him to the mainland. While waiting for the smuggler, this greatest missionary in the history of Christianity after St. Paul, took sick and died, alone.
Missionaries Admitted
Missionaries were not allowed into China until a generation after Xavier’s death, once again mainly because of the lure of trade with the West. After the suppression of Christianity in Japan, many young Jesuits in Europe asked to be assigned to China, partly in the hope of martyrdom. Those who were sent were highly trained in theology, philosophy, and the sciences and undertook a new kind of mission strategy, the kind that de Nobili would advocate later—approaching the Chinese at the highest intellectual level, converting the whole culture by first converting its head. The Italian Michele Ruggieri (d. 1607), who arrived around 1580, made serious efforts to learn the Chinese language and compiled a catechism but found that the Chinese balked at the idea that God could have become man and especially at the idea that He had died on the Cross.
Ricci
The key figure in the Chinese apostolate was the Italian Matteo Ricci (d. 1610), who had been a novice in Italy under Valignano and who arrived in China in 1583. He eventually settled in the imperial city of Beijing, although, as in Japan, he never gained access to the semi-mythical emperor. Like Xavier, Ricci exemplified Ignatius’ realization that a Jesuit might have to live for many years away from any community.
Anti-Buddhism
Ricci wished to be seen by the Chinese as a wise man and, like his predecessors in Japan, brought them clocks, maps, and other intriguing Western inventions. At first, he wore the robes of a Buddhist monk, but as he came to understand the cultural scene, he changed into the robes of a Confucian scholar and became a severe critic of Buddhism. (De Nobili was also very anti-Buddhist, accepting the Hindu charge that Buddhists were atheists.)
Ricci realized that for the most part Buddhism was not respected by the class called the mandarins (a word actually coined by the Portuguese)—educated men who held important offices and who set the direction of Chinese culture—who saw it as a popular religion filled with superstitions. Ricci seems not to have understood that some Buddhist ideas had been adopted into Confucianism, and in particular he failed to grasp the Buddhist concept of “nothingness”—the obliteration of all particular identities in one great unity.
Confucianism
Most mandarins were Confucians, followers of the semi-legendary sage who had been more a philosopher than a theologian and whose emphasis on respect for one’s ancestors, tradition, law, social and political order, self-discipline, and personal integrity suited the needs of the great empire that the mandarins helped to govern.
Ricci probably attributed to Confucianism a greater coherence than it actually possessed, seeing it as a system remarkably congruent with Christianity and with the Greco-Roman Stoicism that had strongly influenced the Christian tradition. He therefore set out to convince the mandarins that they need not abandon the age-old wisdom of Confucius but instead could deepen that wisdom by embracing the wisdom of Christianity. Christianity could supply what Confucianism lacked—a comprehensive and coherent account of the entire universe, its origins, and ultimate goal.
Pure Confucianism, Ricci asserted, was a survivor from the remote ancient time which the Chinese regarded as a golden age, the equivalent of Paradise in the Jewish and Christian account. In time, however, corruption set in. Chinese ambassadors who heard of the wisdom of Christianity traveled west to find it but ended their journey in India, Ricci speculated, where they adopted Hinduism by mistake. Buddhism, an offshoot of Hinduism, contained numerous false myths and rituals and was the enemy of true wisdom.
Apologetics
Ricci published a comprehensive summary of his ideas just a few years before his death, in the form of a dialogue between a Christian and a Confucian in which the Christian answered all the pagan’s questions and converted him. Ricci set out to bring Confucianism and Christianity as close together as possible, but he followed the Ignatian principle of tailoring the message to the capacity of the hearers, probably judging that certain “hard sayings” would require years of preparation.
Ricci began with the creation of the universe, the necessity that one Lord should rule over everything, and the necessity that such a Being must be a person—an understanding beyond such vague Chinese phrases as “the Ultimate Being”. In particular, he explained the true meaning of the Confucian phrase the “Lord of Heaven”, which he said the Confucians had conceived because of the natural knowledge of Himself that God placed in all people but which needed to be clarified and deepened by the revealed wisdom of Christianity. (Later Jesuits, fearful that this Confucian term would merely encourage the Chinese to continue worshipping their ancestral deities, debated over the proper word, without fully resolving it.)
Refuting the idea of reincarnation, Ricci spent considerable effort proving the immortality of the soul and the reality of Heaven and Hell, without which goodness would not be rewarded and evil punished and which were therefore strong factors in human motivation. Confucians taught that human nature was essentially good and needed merely to be cultivated, whereas Ricci argued that the will could be perverted and needed guidance from on high.
Only toward the end of his treatise, did Ricci treat of Christianity, and specifically of Catholicism, in the concrete. He did not acknowledge the religious divisions of the West and made only brief reference to the papal office, but he expounded at length on the meaning and utility of celibacy, which he found to be a stumbling block to the Chinese. Nor did he speak of other difficult Catholic doctrines, such as the Real Presence. The idea of the Mass as a sacrifice would have seemed almost subversive to the Chinese, because the emperor alone was qualified to offer sacrifice. Almost Ricci’s only concession to Catholic practice was the injunction that to enter the kingdom of the Lord of Heaven it was necessary to undergo cleansing with water, which wiped away all past wrongs.
Initially, he referred to Jesus only to explain the meaning of the title “Jesuit”. But toward the end of the treatise, he revealed that at one point in history the world had fallen into such evil ways that, out of compassion, the Lord of Heaven had chosen a chaste woman to bear a son who taught the people before returning to Heaven. In keeping with the character of Christianity as a historical religion, Ricci dated the Incarnation quite precisely, from the reign of a particular Chinese emperor.
Perhaps not wishing to perplex his readers with the doctrine of the Trinity, Ricci did not distinguish Father and Son but explained that Jesus was Himself the Lord of Heaven, His divinity proven especially by His many miracles and by the fact that He was venerated as a holy man. Because of the earlier rejection of Ruggieri’s catechism by the Chinese, Ricci never recounted the narrative of the Passion, death, and Resurrection of Jesus, although at the time of his own death he was in the process of translating the Bible into Chinese.
Converts
Ricci was naturally opposed by Buddhist scholars and also by some Confucians who thought he was distorting the pure teaching. He did not aim at mass conversions and made only a few converts among the mandarins, converts to whom, presumably, he imparted the fullness of Catholic teaching and some of whom proved to be able and influential apologists for the Catholic faith. Paul Xu Guangqi (d. 1623) and Michael Xang Tingyen (d. 1627) were important imperial bureaucrats who were attracted to Christianity partly because of the antidotes, such as the daily examination of conscience, it provided to the corruption of the imperial court. No Jesuit achieved the dream of being allowed to evangelize the emperor, in part because a phalanx of eunuchs guarded access. However, even a few eunuchs were converted, as were some ladies of the court.
Ricci Honored
Although Ricci was sometimes harassed and threatened by hostile mobs, he was honored at his death by being allowed to be buried in the imperial city of Beijing, a privilege usually denied to foreigners. A few years after his death an archaeological discovery showed that Christianity (probably Nestorian) had existed in China many centuries before, something that gave the faith renewed prestige.
Growth
By 1600, there were other Jesuits in China and about twenty-five hundred converts. As in Japan, the emperor was weak (a fact perhaps not apparent to the missionaries), so that toleration of Christians depended primarily on local authorities, some of whom initiated persecutions from time to time. After Ricci’s death, the Jesuits expanded their activities beyond elite circles, and by the end of the seventeenth century there were two hundred thousand Christians in China, almost a hundred times the number at the beginning.
Franciscans and Dominicans began coming to China in the generation after Ricci’s death, as did the Paris Foreign Mission Society, which had been founded under the aegis of the Company of the Blessed Sacrament. As happened in India and Japan, a division once again developed between two different approaches to mission activity.
Franciscan Methods
In Ricci’s plan, the stakes were very high, in that the conversion of the mandarins would have led to the conversion of the entire Chinese empire. But the plan essentially failed. The Franciscans had much greater success than the Jesuits with direct appeals to the common people, using a strategy similar to that used to convert the barbarians of the Dark Ages: the promise of release from the power of demons and the prospect of eternal life, combined with concrete things like statues, rosaries, and public processions manifesting divine power. Some of the missionaries were regarded as miracle workers.
Native Vocations
While the early Jesuits learned the language of the mandarins, other missionaries had to cope with innumerable local dialects; despite the best efforts, verbal communication between priests and people was often poor. A request to the Holy See to allow the liturgy to be translated into Chinese was never answered. But the Latin language was a major barrier to a native priesthood, and the Holy See ruled that Chinese priests could recite the liturgy without understanding the specific words, so long as they understood their general meaning.
With few natives being ordained, expansion of the Church into rural areas often left converts with inadequate pastoral guidance. Trained catechists often served as the leaders of local communities, with occasional visits by a priest to administer the sacraments.
The canonical category of “consecrated virgin” was the means by which women shared in this lay leadership, performing works of charity, instructing the faithful, and administering baptism in those frequent situations where newborn infants were in imminent danger of death. (It was a delicate situation, in that suspicious pagans sometimes claimed that baptism actually killed babies.) Candida Xu (d. 1680) was a Catholic who converted her pagan husband, and after his death, she followed the ancient calling of the holy widow who devoted her life to works of charity and support of the Church. Another ancient pattern that reappeared was that of young women rejecting the husbands chosen for them by their families, in order to live a life of religious dedication. Since the authority of the family was very strong in China, this was sometimes a major point of conflict with the culture.
In 1659, the Holy See established three vicariates in China, each governed by a European bishop but with the intention that they develop a native clergy Gregory Luo Wenzao (d. 1691), a Franciscan, was the first native Chinese priest and bishop, although his promotion was opposed by some European missionaries.
Schall
Some Jesuits remained active among the mandarins and even got access to the imperial court. In particular, the German Adam Schall (d. 1666), one of the “wise men from the West”, gained enormous prestige by accurately predicting an eclipse. He was put in charge of the imperial astronomical office, which was important because the stability of the emperor’s reign was thought to depend on a perfect harmony between the earth and the cosmos. Schall made a number of converts. Other Jesuits also served as court astronomers, and the German Jesuit Athanasius Kircher (d. 1680), although he did not visit China, compiled the first Chinese dictionary and a Coptic dictionary as well.
When the Manchu Dynasty conquered China in 1644, Schall and other Jesuits were for a time imprisoned. Schall managed to establish good relations with the new rulers, who reprieved him after he had had been sentenced to death on false charges of being a spy and restored him to his position as director of imperial astronomy. (He was denounced even by some of his fellow Jesuits for being too involved with the new regime.)
Throughout the later seventeenth century, the Church in China was divided by what came to be called the “Chinese rites controversy”, a disagreement that brought into high relief the ambiguities of inculturation. The principal dispute centered on whether Catholics might participate in certain traditional rituals, some having to do with their own ancestors, others with the figure of Confucius.
The Jesuits tolerated the rituals, on the grounds that they were merely a way of honoring people who deserved honor, while the Franciscans and Dominicans insisted that both the ancestors and Confucius were being treated as gods. (Confucius was called by the Chinese word that the missionaries used for “saint”, thus making the precise meaning of that word crucial.) The issue involved basic elements of Chinese culture: funeral rites in a society in which honoring one’s ancestors was a fundamental obligation, public ceremonies expressing submission to the emperor, and appropriate honor to the philosopher who was considered the wisest of men.
“The Chinese Rites”
The issue was several times appealed to Rome, with varying results. In 1704, the Holy Office ruled against the Jesuits, a decision that was debated by theologians in Europe and that continued in effect despite occasional minor concessions.
The emperor K’ang-hsi (1661-1722) wrote to the Pope that the disputed rituals were civic in nature, not religious, and he was incensed at what he considered an act of contempt for Chinese customs, while the Jesuits complained that their ministry was severely compromised. A bishop who undertook to enforce the decree was subjected by K’ang-hsi to an inquisition that showed his ignorance of Confucian thought, after which he was expelled. A papal legate sent to uphold the decree died under house arrest by the Portuguese at Macao, acting at the instigation of the Chinese government.
The episode was a major watershed in the history of Chinese Christianity, and in retrospect it appears that both sides in the dispute were in a sense correct. Sophisticated Chinese, such as those ministered to by the Jesuits, might have seen the disputed rituals as largely symbolic, whereas for simple people both their own ancestors and Confucius himself were gods.
Half the missionaries left China after 1704, but, subject to intermittent persecution, the Church survived. A final papal decree in 1742 required that all missionaries take an oath not to tolerate the disputed rituals.
Tibet
Missionaries had entered Tibet in the sixteenth century, but without lasting effect. Later, the Italian Jesuit Ippolito Desideri (d. 1733) penetrated the almost inaccessible mountain land, where he immersed himself in the culture and tried unsuccessfully for six years to convert the Buddhists. (He denounced the Dalai Lama as a “monstrous idol”.)
Philippines
The Spanish brought Catholicism to the Philippine Islands—named for the Spanish king—in the mid-sixteenth century. The Church flourished there from the beginning, with Manila serving in a sense as the ecclesiastical center of the entire Far East, the base from which missionaries often set out for other lands.
But the church of the Philippines resembled the church of Latin America more than that of the Far East, since Spain ruled the islands outright rather than depending on trading concessions. Something like the feudal system of landholding was set up, and an intense native piety developed that, as in Latin America, incorporated many pagan elements.
Missionary Expansion
Developments in Missions
Propaganda Fidei
The Holy See regarded missionary activity as of the highest importance, and the office of Propaganda Fidei (“spreading the faith”)3 was established in 1622 to oversee missionary activity all over the world. The European powers claimed control over the Church in the colonial lands, so that the king of Portugal, for example, insisted on the right of approving bishops in India. To counteract this, Propaganda created the new office of “vicar apostolic”—a bishop who had jurisdiction over a mission territory directly under the Holy See but did not hold title to a diocese.
The Nineteenth Century
Toward the end of the eighteenth century, the missions suffered a severe decline everywhere, because of the suppression of the Jesuits in 1773 and the disruptions of the French Revolution and Napoleonic period. A dramatic missionary revival was part of the general religious revival after 1815. In the first half of the nineteenth century, almost fifty new missionary communities were founded in Europe.
Native Clergy
Gregory XVI, although he had been a cloistered Camaldolese monk, had also been prefect of Propaganda, and he had a strong interest in the missions, as did all the popes who followed him. In the twentieth century, Benedict XV strongly reiterated the policies the Holy See had favored almost since the beginning of modern missionary activity: the recruitment of native clergy and urging the missionaries to identify with the native people more than with their own countries. Pius XI appointed a lower-caste Indian bishop, personally consecrated the first native Chinese bishops, and appointed the first native Japanese bishop. In order to coordinate missionary activity, he centralized the apostolate, including the dispersal of funds, under the Propaganda.
Monasteries
The missionary presence was not only on the level of the active apostolate. Contemplative monasteries and convents were founded in a number of mission countries, their purpose not to make converts directly but to pray for conversions and to serve as examples of the spiritual power of the faith.
Finances
Whereas earlier missions had been supported either by religious orders or by European governments, in the new missionary era the entire Church was made conscious of her responsibility. The French lay-woman Ven. Pauline Jaricot (d. 1862) founded the Society for the Propagation of the Faith to collect small amounts of money from a large number of people on a regular basis; other groups also began collecting funds.
The Whole World
The great missionary revival left almost no part of the globe untouched as, for the first time in history, missionaries were realistically able to obey Christ’s command to preach the Gospel to all nations. By 1875, there were six thousand missionaries throughout the world, a disproportionate number of whom were from France. In 1820, there were only 275 native priests in Asia and Africa, but by 1900 there were seven thousand, although there were still no native vicars apostolic or bishops.
Colonialism
Missionaries were considered part of their mother country’s “civilizing” process and to some extent necessarily depended on the protection of their governments, but the link between missionary activity and colonialism was tenuous. French missionaries, for example, did not wish to carry out the policies of anticlerical governments at home, and they sometimes clashed with colonial officials. For the first time, Catholic missionaries also found themselves in competition with Protestants, who had belatedly embraced the idea of the conversion of the world.
India
Except for the region around Goa, the Church’s presence in India was extremely weak at the beginning of the nineteenth century but then began to revive. The Portuguese government continued to exercise control over the hierarchy, leading the Holy See to set up several vicariates independent of the archbishopric of Goa. Strenuous efforts were made to recruit a native clergy, and catechisms and other necessary books were translated into the Tamil language. Native religious communities were established, and when one such order of sisters refused to teach girls of lower castes, a second community was founded expressly for that purpose. By 1870, there were a million Catholics in India, although the Church remained weak in the north.
On the whole, India has perhaps the most religious culture in the world, in which both Hinduism and Islam continue to exert significant influence. Christians are officially tolerated but are often harassed and subject to mob violence. There are abundant religious vocations.
Japan
After Western gunboats—unbidden—entered Japanese ports in the 1850s, some Japanese recognized that Western technological superiority was the key to power, even to survival, and in a dramatic reversal of the draconian policies of the previous 250 years, Japan suddenly opened itself to the outside world. In the next decade, a conspiracy of younger men effected the Meiji Restoration—named after an imperial title—by making use of the emperor’s semi-divine authority to begin adopting the material civilization of the West, even including its clothes and architecture.
Openness to the West, the new rulers reluctantly recognized, required freedom for Christian missionaries, who soon began entering Japan in significant numbers, although conversions remained rather sparse. A vicariate was created in 1876.
The Hidden Church
In one of the most remarkable episodes in the entire history of the Church, French missionaries discovered a small number of secret Catholics living around Nagasaki, a people who had been preserving their faith without priests for over two hundred years. The Meiji government first arrested these survivors but released them after appeals from the European powers. These secret Christians recognized the missionaries on the basis of oral traditions concerning the Virgin Mary and the birth of Jesus and the fact that Jesus lived for thirty-three years and died on the Cross. They had been baptizing their own children and knew the teaching that an act of perfect contrition would remove all sins without priestly absolution.
Education
Although the religion of only a very small minority, Catholicism played some role in Japanese life. In the early twentieth century, German Jesuits opened Sophia University in Tokyo, which became one of the most respected educational institutions in the country, although it did not engage in active proselytization.
Shintoism
In the twentieth century, the government opposed Buddhism and promoted patriotic Shintoism. As Japanese nationalism and militarism grew more intense in the period between the world wars, some Catholics had qualms of conscience about participating in ceremonies to honor the war dead, fearing that this involved a pagan religion. After investigation, Propaganda in 1939 allowed such participation, thereby, in effect, rescinding the decrees against the “Chinese rites” that had been issued in the eighteenth century.
World War II
On the eve of World War II, the hundred thousand Japanese Catholics were shepherded by native bishops. But all foreign missionaries were ordered to leave the country (not all complied).
The city of Nagasaki, the historic center of Japanese Catholicism, was one of the targets of the American atomic bomb. Takashi Nagai, a convert to Catholicism and a survivor of the blast, lived in the rubble of the ruined city, dying of radiation poisoning and advocating the healing of his people through the renunciation of militarism and reconciliation with the Allies. He came to be respected by both Catholic and non-Christian Japanese as a national hero.
A Secular Culture
After the war, Japan, perhaps because of American pressure, allowed greater religious freedom than any other non-Western country, and there was a wave of conversions to Catholicism. But Japan also took on the characteristics of a modern secular culture, pragmatic and materialistic in its outlook and seemingly uninterested in religion, so that the number of Catholics never went above half a million.
China
In China, the elite gradually lost interest in Western science, and hence in Western missionaries. There were intermittent persecutions, although missionaries continued to arrive. As they would soon do to Japan, the European powers after 1840 forced the imperial government of China to grant substantial concessions in return for trade, including “treaty ports” and other territories semi-independent of Chinese rule, where missionaries could work freely, under the armed protection of the European powers. By 1870, there were four hundred thousand Chinese Catholics.
The End of the Empire
By the end of the century, the old Empire was tottering, while the authority of Confucianism was weakened by the European incursions. Unlike in Japan, the movement for change owed much to missionary influence. But Christianity in China was thereby identified with the most blatant kind of European imperialism, and Christians were the inevitable targets of anti-foreign movements.
Hostility
Even works of charity could be grounds for hostility. Because of the ancient custom of leaving unwanted babies (mostly girls) to die of exposure, nuns took abandoned infants into their orphanages, but they were then sometimes accused of using the babies for body parts. The nuns also drew hostility for opposing the custom of painfully binding girls’ feet to achieve the smallness that was considered attractive.
Martyrs
There were a number of Christian martyrs, and on several occasions, British and French troops invaded the country to put down rebellions and to enforce freedom for missionary activity. With the support of the imperial government, over thirty thousand Catholics were killed in the Boxer Rebellion of 1900 (so-called because its organizers practiced the martial arts). The failure of the rebellion soon led to revolution and to the deposition of the last emperor in 1912, by which time Western secularism had made inroads among Chinese intellectuals.
Growth
In 1926, Pius XI consecrated six native Chinese bishops in Rome, the next year a Catholic university was opened in Beijing, and monasticism flourished. On the eve of World War II, there were over three million Catholics in China, including a number of native priests and religious. A remarkable story was that of the Chinese foreign minister Lu Tse-tiang (d. 1949), who married a Belgian lady, converted to Catholicism, became a Benedictine monk after his wife’s death, and was eventually elected abbot of a monastery in Belgium.
World War II
Catholic religious were conducting over nine thousand Chinese elementary schools at the beginning of World War II, but during the 1920s, civil wars erupted in China among various regional warlords. An organized nationalist movement under Chiang Kai-Shek (d. 1975) for the most part supported Christianity, and an organized insurgent communist movement under Mao Zedong (d. 1976) was antireligious. The Japanese conquests of China during the 1930s brought great hardships, in which some Catholics played heroic resistance roles.
Communism
After the war, the Church quickly revived. Half the clergy were Chinese, more missionaries began to arrive, and in 1946, Archbishop Thomas Tien of Peking (Beijing, d. 1967), a Divine Word father, became the first East Asian cardinal. But with the triumph of Mao’s communists in 1949, severe persecution began. Within a few years, some missionaries, such as the American Maryknoll Bishop James A. Walsh (d. 1981), were sent to prison for long terms, and all others were expelled. Many Catholics were killed; many more were imprisoned; and Tien and others went into exile.
While the practice of Christianity was never officially outlawed, the government sought to break its back. A favored tactic was to gather a village together and accuse its priest of numerous crimes, encouraging his parishioners to heap yet further condemnations on him. In the end, he was usually killed, along with those parishioners who failed to cooperate in his “trial”.
The “Patriotic Church”
In 1957, the communist government established a “Patriotic Church” made up of Catholics who professed loyalty to the state and allowed the state to approve their bishops, while members of the “Underground Church” refused such cooperation and remained subject to persecution. Several bishops cooperated in the establishment of the “Patriotic Church”, perhaps thinking that it would be a means of continuing to provide sacraments for the people. However, when those bishops began consecrating other bishops, who were appointed by the government without papal approval, schism resulted.
During the worst period of Mao’s terror, even the Patriotic Church was persecuted, although conditions began to improve after his death. By 2010, the government was to some extent cooperating with the Vatican in the appointment of bishops, although there were still serious tensions.
Korea
Catholicism came to Korea in a unique way, when in 1789 a Korean diplomat, Yi Sunghun, was converted by Catholic priests in China. He returned home and quickly made other converts who, based on their slight knowledge of the early Church, elected a bishop and several priests who began celebrating Mass even though they were not ordained.
When they discovered their error, they imported a Chinese priest, Bl. James Zhou Wenmu, to be their pastor. He was sheltered by a wealthy widow, Bl. Columba Kang Wen-suk (Kim), until she, Zhou Wen-mo, and Yi Sunghun were discovered and executed in 1801. Missionaries were sent from France, but persecution was severe, with eight thousand Catholics put to death in a single episode. A modest recovery occurred in the later nineteenth century, when France undertook to protect the Catholic missions in what eventually became a predominantly Protestant country. North Korea fell under brutal communist oppression after World War II, and persecution there was often savage. On a visit to Korea in 1984, Pope John Paul II canonized 103 out of an estimated ten thousand Korean martyrs, the first such ceremony ever held outside the Vatican.
Vietnam
The Indochina (the peninsula on which Vietnam, among other countries, is found) missions were in a relatively healthy state at the beginning of the nineteenth century, demonstrated by the fact that Catholics there remained faithful in the face of a ferocious persecution that lasted for fifty years after 1820. The French subsequently established hegemony in the region, and Catholics, although a small minority, played an important role in the society.
After the Second World War, having been freed from the Japanese, French Indochina erupted in rebellion against the mother country. When the French finally withdrew, the United States undertook to defeat the insurgents, many of whom were communists. At the time, there were almost three million Vietnamese Catholics, mainly in the South, ruled by the president Ngo Dinh Diem (d. 1963), a Catholic whom the rebels accused of being a Western puppet. The United States first connived at Diem’s murder, then abandoned the war altogether, which led to the inevitable triumph of the communist North and the severe persecution of Catholics, which continued intermittently into the next century.
The Philippines
The Philippines were lost to Spain in the Spanish-American War of 1898 and became an American protectorate. That in turn provoked a full-scale native rebellion, part of which involved the schismatic Philippine Independent church. There was a good deal of resentment toward the Franciscans because they owned great estates, and the American government acquiesced in the seizure and redistribution of those lands. For a time, the church in the Philippines was governed by bishops from the United States, but gradually a native hierarchy was established.
After World War II, the United States belatedly kept its promise of restoring Philippine independence and, as in Latin America, the Church often played a crucial role in politics. Cardinal Jaime Sin of Manila (d. 2005) rallied hundreds of thousands of people for prayers and peaceful demonstrations against the tyrranical regime of Ferdinand Marcos (1965-1986). Massive outpourings of people caused Marcos to flee the country and brought the pious Corazon Aquino to power (1986-1992). The Philippines, 80 percent of whose people are Catholics, remains by far the largest Catholic country in Asia, with a relatively high rate of church attendance (over half) and an abundance of religious vocations.
The Near East
While the majority of Catholics in the Near East were members of Uniate Rites, official protection by the French government allowed Latin-Rite missionaries to become active in the nineteenth century. (Napoleon III once intervened militarily in Lebanon after a massacre of Christians by Muslims.) Because the Muslims had shown themselves extremely resistant to conversion, missionaries in the Near East settled on the strategy of making their presence known through works of charity and education, so that over time the Christian spirit might penetrate the culture. Numerous hospitals and orphanages were established, and the Jesuits in particular founded several colleges. World War I brought an end to French protection, and after that, there was intermittent persecution of the Church, especially by Turkey.
North Africa
North Africa had been one of the great centers of the early Church, but the Christian presence, except in the northeast corner of the continent, was wiped out by the successive barbarian and Muslim invasions of the Dark Ages. Jesuits went to North Africa in the late sixteenth century and succeeded in converting a king of Abyssinia, but his successors repudiated his action, and the missionaries were all martyred. Beginning also in the sixteenth century, there was some Catholic presence in sub-Saharan Africa, because of trading posts, set up mainly by the Portuguese. But these were swept away during the chaotic period of 1773 to 1815.
Missionaries began to return to Africa with the colonial conquests of the nineteenth century. France conquered Algeria in 1830, but the anticlericalism of the liberal monarchies imposed restrictions on missionary activity in the colony. For diplomatic reasons, the government encouraged Islam even as it discouraged Catholicism.
Lavigerie
But then Archbishop Lavigerie of Algiers (see Chapter Eleven above, p. 368) defied Napoleon III and embarked on a vigorous program of practical charity and evangelization. Seeing Algeria as the gateway to the African interior, Lavigerie founded the White Sisters and the White Fathers, who first worked among the North Africans, speaking Arabic and wearing white robes and red African-style hats. They had minimal success, although the Church remained an important presence through her charitable and educational institutions. The Holy Ghost Fathers were founded by Jakob Liebermann (d. 1852), a convert from Judaism, specifically to minister to oppressed blacks in Africa and the Caribbean. To further this ministry, they encouraged native vocations.
Foucauld
St. Charles de Foucauld (d. 1916) was a French soldier who lived a dissolute life but underwent conversion and entered the Trappists in North Africa. Recognizing the missionaries’ lack of success, he attempted to bear witness to the Gospel by living as a hermit on the edge of the desert and ministering to the poor. He was regarded by the Muslim Berber tribesmen as a holy man but made no converts. Later, he moved his hermitage even farther into the interior of the continent. However, with the First World War raging in Europe, he was murdered by tribesmen who accused him of being a French spy. The Little Brothers and Sisters of the Sacred Heart were founded later in accord with a rule he had drawn up in expectation of attracting companions.
Africa
Missionaries gradually ventured southward into African regions previously little known to Europeans, to some extent dependent on the authority of the Portuguese, French, and Belgians who laid claim to those territories. Africa presented its own obstacles and opportunities for evangelization. Traditional African culture was deeply religious, in that the reality of the supernatural was taken very seriously but often in the form of belief in sorcerers and devils, who were thought to be very powerful and in need of placating.
Obstacles
The practice of polygamy was common in many places, and there was no tradition of celibacy. In addition to native cults, Islam also was strong in the African interior, where the White Fathers fought against both polygamy and the still-flourishing slave trade. A number of the earliest missionaries were massacred, even when protected by companies of papal guards whom Lavigerie recruited. In 1885-1887, the king of Buganda (modern Uganda) ordered the brutal execution of eighty Catholics, including some of his own young pages who refused to submit to sodomy. St. Charles Lwanga and his companions were dismembered and burned, the first martyrs of sub-Saharan Africa.
Growth
The faith in Africa spread with some rapidity, and the missionaries adopted a method previously used in the Chinese missions—training lay catechists to work in remote rural villages between visits by priests. The first native bishop was appointed in 1939, and the first cardinal, Laurean Rugambwa (d. 1997) of Bukeba (Tanzania), in 1961.
The End of Colonialism
The end of colonialism in Africa after World War II led in some places to a rejection of Christianity as an imperialist imposition, even though the Church generally opposed such practices as apartheid (segregation) in South Africa. The persecution of the Church by some of the new governments, as in the Congo, often had the effect of stimulating a revival of Catholicism. The most severe persecution has been in the Sudan, where for decades the Muslim government has in effect tried to exterminate Christianity.
Some of the newer African nations (Rwanda, Burundi) were split by bitter, even genocidal, civil wars between different tribal groups. Catholics, including clergy and religious, were inevitably drawn into those conflicts, often as victims or as ministers to the victims but sometimes as perpetrators of atrocities.
Oceania
In some ways the starkest challenge to mission activity in the nineteenth century was in the islands of Oceania, which were hitherto almost unknown to Europeans and which manifested a wide variety of cultures. A number of missionaries were summarily slaughtered, some eaten by cannibals, upon landing on an unfamiliar island.
Hawaii
When the first French missionaries landed in the Sandwich Islands (kingdom of Hawaii) they were forcibly expelled by men who were functioning both as traders and as Protestant missionaries. When the queen obtained the help of the French to allow the priests to return, there was an international incident which involved armed conflict between Catholics and Protestants.
Damien of Molokai
Few saints in the history of the Church have received, both in his own lifetime and later, the fame and admiration of St. Damien (Joseph) de Veuster (d. 1889). The Flemish priest of the order of the Sacred Hearts of Jesus and Mary volunteered to work among society’s ultimate outcasts, the lepers confined to the Hawaiian island of Molokai, knowing he would never be allowed to leave the island and would most likely die of the disease.
In the face of the vile smells and hideous bodily deformations caused by Hansen’s Disease, Damien was practically the only person of his time willing actually to touch lepers, whom he nursed in their squalid huts and eventually prepared for burial, even digging their graves. He farmed and with his own hands built chapels, hospitals, and houses. Through preaching, confession, the Mass, and eucharistic adoration, he attempted to instill courage and hope in people who were sunk in despair and who often compensated by orgies. Confined to the island, he made his own confession by shouting his sins to a priest on board a ship in the harbor.
His superiors considered Damien impetuous and foolhardy and were suspicious of the worldwide publicity he inspired. They were not the only ones: a Protestant minister in Hawaii wrote a defaming letter about Damien, which was subsequently published in a Sydney Presbyterian newspaper and then famously rebutted by the non-Catholic author Robert Louis Stevenson.
Mariane Cope
Eventually, reliable helpers began to arrive on Molokai, and after Damien’s death, one of these, the German-American nun St. Marianne Cope (d. 1918), helped turn the mission into a flourishing center of both physical and spiritual ministration.
Latin America
The great irony of Latin America is the fact that, while in theory it is the most thoroughly Catholic region of the globe, it has always been mission territory, due to the chronic shortage of native priests. During the 1950s, some dioceses in the United States began to send their priests there, because of the dearth of native clergy.
Economic Problems
Perhaps the root of a troubled history was the survival of a system that was in many ways still feudal, with great wealth in the hands of a relatively few large landowners and the majority of the people poor peasants. Economic modernization did not necessarily lead to improvement, as peasants who moved to the cities as laborers were forced to accept low wages and faced often chronic unemployment.
Historically, the Church in Latin America tended to support conservative governments that were tolerant of religion and allowed the Church influence in critical areas of society such as education. This policy, however, required virtually ignoring the social doctrines of the Church, until after Word War II, the bishops began cautiously to endorse economic and social change and found it increasingly necessary to criticize governments. Land reform became a fundamental issue, although seldom resolved.
Dictators
But there was only a weak tradition of liberal reform in Latin America, so that the path of change was seldom orderly and peaceful and often erupted into open violence between the forces of order and the forces of change. Typically, as with the quasi-fascist dictator Juan Perón of Argentina (d. 1974), a strong ruler came to power with the support of the military, only to be later deposed by the same military, with all democratic rights suspended.
Cuba
Cuba was one of the least religious of Latin American countries. The bishops attempted to remain neutral as pressure for change built up, and they were at first cautiously receptive to the movement of Fidel Castro, which took power in the revolution of 1959. Castro, however, soon proclaimed Cuba a communist state and began imposing severe restrictions on the Church that still remained in place half a century later.
Frei
In a unique episode in Latin American history, during the 1960s, the Christian Democratic Party in Chile, under Eduardo Frei (d. 1982), was able to effect social and economic change based to some extent on Catholic social principles, although the basic problem of land reform was not solved. But Frei’s demonstration that change was possible led to demands for still swifter and more radical change, and after he left office, a Marxist dictatorship took power, only to be overthrown by a right-wing dictatorship supported by the military.
Martyrs
The entrenched forces in Latin America were often ruthless, as were the unofficial “death squads” in Argentina that during the 1980s murdered hundreds of people suspected of opposing the government. In El Salvador, at different times, Archbishop Oscar Romero (d. 1980), six Jesuit teachers, and four nuns from the United States were murdered because of their opposition to the regime. On the other side, leftist guerillas espousing Marxist ideas also employed assassination and other terrorist methods.
Costa Rica
Costa Rica remained one of the most prosperous and stable Latin American countries and also one of a handful of countries in the world that continued to recognize Catholicism as its official religion.
Protestant Missions
After World War II, various Protestant groups began to make Latin America a center of missionary activity, on the grounds that the prevalent Catholicism did not represent the true Gospel. Over the ensuing decades, Protestants had modest success, because of the priest shortage and because popular Catholic piety was vulnerable to the charge of superstition.
Mission Growth
Altogether the number of Catholics in Asia grew from 12.5 million to 121 million between 1900 and 2010 and from 6.5 million to 128 million in Africa during the same period. Around 1965, the great modern era of missionary activity came to an abrupt end, partly because of the crisis that followed the Second Vatican Council, partly because some of the mission churches had become self-sustaining. Africa, the Philippines, and India in particular now began sending priests to Western countries, almost as reverse missionaries.