The Catholic Missionary Movement of the 19th Century

The first great period of missionary expansion took place in the 16th and 17th centuries, when Xavier, Ricci and others left the safety of Europe to take the gospel to the countless millions of non-Christians in Asia.

But after the years of the Enlightenment, missionary zeal had just about played out. For the most part, it was necessary to begin all over again.

The great spiritual revival of the Catholic church during the 19th century found an important outlet in missionary zeal and thus a whole new era in missions began.

The great spiritual revival of the nineteenth century was the founding of a truly universal church, in which peoples of all races and nations had a part.

On the other hand, however, it is necessary to point out the European framework of the missionaries that also left its stamp on the life of the church.”

Reason 2. The growth of Imperialism

European nations were growing in power by colonizing distant lands and subjugating the native peoples to foreign rule.

The Europeans saw this ruling of an overseas empire as a necessary path to becoming a significant world power.

Especially helpful in this agenda was the technological advances in military weaponry that occurred in the latter part of the century.

Facing a strong colonizer whose military strength was growing and who fielded increasingly overwhelming weaponry, the nationals soon fell under European control.

The colonizers tended to feel that God had placed the benefits of western civilization and Christian faith in the hands of white people – both Europeans and North Americans – in order to share with the rest of the world.

That responsibility became known as the “white man’s burden,” and it involved taking to the rest of the world the benefits of industrialization, capitalism, democracy and Christianity. Thus with the arrival of white European rulers came the missionaries.

Reason 3. The Industrial Revolution

The main reason behind the great colonial expansion in the 19th century, though, was the industrial revolution.

The centralization and mechanization of the means of production meant vastly increased productivity, which in turn meant more goods and services to find a market for.

This was abundantly apparent in the case of Britain, who built the huge empire on which the sun never sat.

Greater capital and wider markets were necessary.

Along with that increase in colonization, then, came more and more missionaries, especially during the last quarter of the century.

Some highlights from activities in mission lands

In China, the revival of missionary effort was channeled into missionary schools, which were the backbone of missionary work in most missions lands.

By them it was possible to transform the younger generation and, if the parents were willing, to have the children baptized.

In 1890, China had 5,000 missionary schools teaching 100,000 children, and 500,000 Catholics, including 369 priests.

JAPAN

Japan had been closed to foreigners since the early 1600s. But in 1853, Commodore Perry sailed into Edo (Tokyo) Bay.

A year later a treaty was signed with the Shogun, and just a year after that Catholic missionaries from Paris arrived.

Fr. (later bishop) Petitjean was dumbfounded to meet a small band of Japanese Christian believers in Nagasaki.

They had secretly held on to the essentials of the Christian faith for over two centuries of persecution and hiding, without priests and totally isolated from the outside world.

It is estimated that there were ten thousand of these hidden Christians in Japan.

INDIA

Pope Gregory XVI (1831-46) considered India one of the most promising missions fields.

In 1871, there were fewer than 800,000 Catholics in all of India. But massive school-building initiatives were taken up, such that by 1900, India had 12 University colleges, 128 High Schools and 1247 ordinary schools.

These were instrumental in increasing the number of Catholics to 1,200,000 by 1891.

AFRICA

In the continent of Africa, Christian missionary action had virtually stopped during the Enlightenment.

But then a Protestant missionary named David Livingstone (died 1873) arrived south of the Sahara, in the very heart of Africa, in 1849.

He demonstrated that a white man could actually live there.

Interest in evangelizing Africa south of the Sahara soared, both among Protestants and Catholics.

Such evangelistic momentum was built up that even now the faith is growing in the continent of Africa, particularly in these nations:

Kenya
Malawi
Rwanda
Tanzania
Uganda
Zaire
Zambia
Angola
Nigeria

PART 2. MISSIONARY ORDERS THAT PLAYED A SIGNIFICANT ROLE IN THIS ACTIVITY

Now I want to address the question of which missionary orders played a significant role in this activity.

The list is quite impressive and far too comprehensive for a short article like this, so I will enumerate here just a few of the major players.

The Protestant missions movement caught fresh impetus from the endeavors of William Carey, who was named “the father of Modern Missions.”

Thanks to him, in 1792 the Particular Baptist Society for Propagating the Gospel amongst the Heathen was formed. It was later given the simpler title of the Baptist Foreign Missionary Society.

Three years later, the London Missionary Society was formed. It was a cooperative venture between some Methodists, some Presbyterians and some Congregationalists.

In 1804, the first task-specific society was formed: the British and Foreign Bible Society. All these ventures received widespread popular support for their funding.

Back in the Catholic world, the old congregations – Jesuits, Lazarists, Redemptorists, Franciscans – showed amazing vigor, and the institutes born in the 19th century followed in their footsteps.

In 1805, the Congregation of the Sacred Hearts of Jesus and Mary (also known as the Picpus Fathers) was founded. It provided the first complete group of missionaries in Oceana.

In 1807, the Sisters of Joseph of Cluny began continuous work in Africa and Asia.

In 1816, the Oblates of the Immaculate Virgin Mary became the first modern apostles to Canada.

In 1822, Marie-Pauline Jaricot (1799 – 1862) founded the Propagation de la Foi, also known as the Association for the Spreading of the Faith.

Based in Lyon, she collected money to help fund missionaries. Coupled with Msgr. Forbin-Janson’s OEuvre de la Sainte Enfance, they contributed much to the revival of the missions.

A similar movement was the OEuvre de Sainte Pierre l’Apotre. Begun by Jeanne Begard in 1884, it maintained Asian seminarians and built churches in Asia.

In 1836, the Marian Society (also know as the Marists) was given a huge territory in the South Seas.

In 1859, the Christian Brothers began their work in India.

The foundation of Giovanni Don Bosco (1815 – 1888) of the Oratory, and in 1859 of the Society of St. Francis de Sales (Salesians) were primarily directed to local needs. But an apostolic spirit soon carried members beyond the borders of Italy to all the continents.

In 1862, a number of Belgian secular priests formed the Belgian Missionaries of Scheut for work in the foreign missions.

In 1866, Msgr. Daniel Comboni formed the Mission Institute for Africa, for the purpose of staffing a Sudan mission established in 1846 and staffed largely by Australian secular priests.

Also in 1866, the future Cardinal Herbert Vaughan formed the English Society of St. Joseph, also known as the Missionaries of Mill Hill, focusing on a mission to African-Americans in the U.S. In 1892 their U.S. work became an autonomous organization based in the U.S.

In 1868, the far-seeing and energetic Cardinal Lavigerie (1825 – 1892) formed the Society of the White Fathers to serve the coastal areas of East and West Africa.

In 1873, a 33 year old Picpucian priest named Peter Damian boarded the Kilauea and sailed to the Hawaiian leper island of Molokai. Damian had volunteered to minister to the lepers there, and he did so for twelve years until he caught the disease himself. He died four years later.

By 1886, the Oratorians and the Oblates of Mary Immaculate had turned Sri Lanka into a regular hierarchy. By 1939, Catholics numbered one-tenth of the population there.

A few other orders of significance deserve mention here: the Fathers of the Holy Ghost, the Fathers of the Holy Cross, the Oblates of Mary Immaculate, the Marists, the Marianists and the Pallotines.

Thus it can be seen that there was an explosion of missions-minded people and orders who left Europe to bring the Good News of Jesus Christ to those who did not yet know him.

PART 3. HOW THE EUROPEAN BACKGROUND OF THE MISSIONARIES MAY HAVE BEEN EITHER A HELP OR A HINDRANCE IN THEIR WORK

In regard to the evangelizers, was their European background a help or a hindrance in their work?

This is a complex question. It can be best addressed by breaking it into three different factors:

The European mindset of pope Gregory XVI
The European mindset of the missioners themselves
The effects of colonialism

Factor 1. The European mindset of pope Gregory XVI

Gregory XVI’s encyclical Mirari Vos (1832) spoke expressly to the issues that threatened the temporal powers of the papacy.

It decried freedom of conscience, freedom of the press and the separation of church and State.

It seemed to suggest that in all places everywhere all these things are evil, even though entire non-European nations were founded on them.

This could not have had a good reception in democracies throughout the non-Italian world.

Another issue was Gregory’s increasing centralization of decision-making and control of missionary efforts.

This made for disappointments, and it shuffled missionary work almost exclusively to orders and congregations.

Factor 2. The European mindset of the missioners themselves

The European mindset of the missioners themselves proved to be both a blessing and a blindspot.

The blessings included the achiever attitude of the European world, the ready availability of vast finances and material wealth, their confidence in the Catholic faith, and their generous desire to share with the non-Christian the treasures they had discovered.

The blindspot included their inability to separate the essentials of the Christian faith from the unwanted baggage of a European lifestyle.

Factor 3. The effects of colonialism

The missionaries could be criticized for making Europeans out of the natives, and for imposing languages and alien cultural norms on them.

This led one author to comment that:

the racial and cultural arrogance that stood at the base of the entire enterprise could not but produce the anticultural reaction that marked the middle of the twentieth century.

The colonialist mindset seems the most difficult aspect of the European mindset.

European nations were taking over countries all over the world, so much so that

it might have seemed at that time that the whole planet would be partitioned among the conquering whites.

The relationship between colonialism and missions was very complex.

The missionaries found themselves, in the eyes of non-Christians, ranked with the conquerors, obeyed because they were stronger, feared and sometimes hated.

Mohandas K. Gandhi often spoke on that point. A doggerel of the Gujarati poet Narmad, which was in vogue when he was a schoolboy, makes it clear:

Behold the mighty Englishman
He rules the Indian small,
Because being a meat-eater
He is five cubits tall

This colonialist mindset was not as effective in East Asia, the land of teeming populations where more than half the world’s populations were crammed into less than one fourth of the land surface of the globe, a region of ancient, high civilizations that were more resistant to the impact of the Occident than were the more “primitive” cultures encountered elsewhere.

These problems were addressed in the 20th century by Benedict XV, in his encyclical, Maximum Illud (1919).

Among the many issues he brought up was the development of a native clergy.

Thus I feel that the European mindset of the popes, the missionaries and the whole colonizing enterprise was both a blessing and a giant blindspot.

PART 4. WHETHER THE PAPACY PROVIDED ANY GUIDELINES FOR THIS WORK

The last question for me to explore in this investigation of the 19th century missionary explosion is this: did the papacy provide any guidelines for this work?

Because this era had a number of successive popes, each with various personalities, interests and strategies, I would like to explore this question on a pope-by-pope basis.

What I discovered is that the popes of this era displayed a variaggated level of concern for taking the gospel to foreign lands and for the millions of people who had not yet named Christ as Savior.

Although Pius XI was not of this era, a quote about him is remarkable:

He used to frequently say that the thought of there being on earth a thousand million souls who knew not Christ literally prevented him from sleep.

Pius VII (1800-1823) expanded the Asian missions. In fact, his restoring of the Jesuits was done to in order to rejuvenate the old Jesuit missions in China and Indochina.

Leo XII (1823-30) had involvement in foreign missions. He sent missions to the colonies, named bishops in Chile, Argentina and greater Colombia, and got the Propaganda Fides, also known as the Society for the Propagation of the Faith, going.

The great spiritual revival of the Catholic church during the 19th century found an important outlet in missionary zeal, and a whole new period of missions began.

Historians generally give pope Gregory XVI (1831-1846) the credit for invigorating this new epoch.

Gregory saw as his first task the acquainting of the Western church with the duties and tasks of spreading the faith. Before he was elected pope, Bartolomeo Cappellari had been the prefect of the Propaganda Fides.

During his papacy he centralized much church activity in the Holy See, especially missionary activity.

The long papacy of Pius IX (1846-1878) was focused on Italian issues, the retainage of the temporal power of the papacy and the combatting of both liberalism and modern society.

Seen from the missions point of view, his papacy was essentially a continuation of the reforms of Gregory XVI.

At Vatican I, the mission countries were represented, although their concerns were not dealt with due to the early termination of the council and in part because the council participants lacked preparation and knowledge.

Leo XIII (1878-1903) began opening up the Catholic realm to the modern world. He

believed that shutting up Catholics as though in a battlement castle was no way to bring back the Gospel to mankind.

His famous encyclical Rerum Novarum shows his desire to win back the downtrodden workers of Europe.

He can be seen as trying to strike a reconciliation with the world of his times. He took a keen interest in the missions. He presided over the committees overseeing the missionary ventures. He stressed the need for native clergy and native churches.

In the reign of Leo XIII the missionary movement started by Gregory XVI and Pius XI went from strength to strength.

In fact, it was said that “the missionary movement had no more spirited protector than he.”

Leo requested that the White Fathers, as well as the Holy Ghost Fathers enter black Africa.

His encyclical Ad extremes (1893) was on the clergy in the Indies.

Thus I have found that the successive popes of the century displayed a variaggated degree of committment to bringing the gospel of Jesus Christ to the millions who did not yet know him.

Gregory XVI stands out as exceptional in that regard, and Leo XIII is not far behind.

CONCLUSION

During the 19th century, the Catholic church was in a period of great revival. That revival funneled evangelical zeal into foreign missionary ventures.

The approaches taken were varied, but they usually were following the footsteps of the colonizers.

There were far too many orders and societies, both established and new, that were involved in missionary work for them to be listed in a short article like this.

The evangelizers were indeed limited in many ways, due to their European mindset, but they did not let that impede them from preaching the gospel to every person in the known world.

The papacy sometimes provided clear leadership and decision-making that fostered even more missionary zeal.

It was a great time to be a missionary in the Catholic church.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Bokkenkotter, Thomas. A Concise History of the Catholic Church. New York: Doubleday, 1990.

Daniel-Rops, H.. A Fight for God. New York: E.P. Dutton & Co. Inc., 1996.

Gandhi, Mohandas Karamchand. An Autobiography: The Story of My Experiments With Truth. Translated by Mahadev Desai. Boston: Beacon Press, 1993.

Gonzalez, Justo L.. The Story of Christianity, Vol. 2, The Reformation to the Present Day. San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1984.

Jedin, Hubert, ed.. The Church in the Modern World: An Abridgement of History of the Church Volumes 7 to 10. Translated by John Dulan. New York: Crossroad, 1993.

Larourette, Kenneth Scott. A History of Christianity, Vol. 2, Reformation to the Present. New York: Harper & Row, 1975.

NOTES

Note 1. A complete analysis of the missionary work of the 19th century Catholic Church would require an in-depth, detailed study of both of the following:

The particular missionary-sending regions and countries
The particular missionary-receiving regions and countries

That work is beyond the scope of this article.

Unless otherwise noted, all Bible quotations on this page are from the World English Bible and the World Messianic Edition. These translations have no copyright restrictions. They are in the Public Domain.