CHURCH AND AFRICAN TRADITION PART 4

Pope Benedict XV, in his Pontificate, had approved an extensive missionary policy for the preaching of the gospel. His encyclical letter, Maximum Illud, of November 30th, 1919, is considered "The Magna Carta of modern Catholic Missiology", as subsequent missionary documents of Popes have taken inspiration from it. But the expansive missionary policy of Benedict XV was however motivated by what Raymond Hickey considers "his pessimistic appraisal of the ultimate fate of non-Christian peoples". "A much more rigid interpretation of the axiom extra ecclesiam nulla salus was commonly taken at this time", (24)he says. Thus, Benedict XV, in Maximum Illud, speaks pessimistically of "the numberless heathen who are still sitting in the shadows of death. According to recent statistics their number accounts to a thousand million..."(25) He laments the "sad fate of this multitude of souls", to whom has to be extended the "benefits of divine redemption".(26) Addressing the bishops, "in whose hands are placed the salvation of the world", he speaks of a divine task...to light the torch of those sitting in the shadows of death, and open the gate of heaven to those who rush to their destruction".(27) And again, addressing religious superiors, and heads of religious congregations devoted to the missions, he requests that missionaries, after having "successfully accomplished their task and converted some nations from unhallowed superstition to Christian faith and have founded there a church with sufficient prospects, they should transfer them, as Christ's forlorn hope, to some other nation to snatch it from Satan's grasp..."(28) It is a sacred obligation for the faithful to support the mission among the "infidels", for no one stands in greater need of "our brotherly assistance than the gentile races which, in ignorance of God, are enslaved to blind and unbridled instincts and live under the awful servitude of the evil one".(29)

Pius XI's Rerum Ecclesiae makes similar statements: the apostolic preachers make "smooth the way to salvation for heathen nations", (30) that is, those still "deprived of the Christian religion",(31) and are "white for harvest"(32). It is his God-given duty that "as long as divine providence shall continue us in life, this duty of our apostolic office shall keep us always solicitous because after pondering on the fact that the pagans still number almost a billion, we have no peace in our spirit...".(33) There is no charity, he says, so great as "having them withdrawn from the darkness of superstition and instructed in the true faith of Christ".(34) He recommends that a prayer be said every day by Christians that the "divine mercy may descend upon so many unhappy beings and upon such populous pagan nations".(35) Thus, the missionary, ambassador of Christ, was to "bravely face all hardships and difficulties, as long as he can snatch a soul from the mouth of hell".

Besides the pessimism, in the papal documents it is also noticed a marked tendency to contrast a civilised and a superior Christian or Western culture, from where the missionaries came, with the "backward" and inferior cultures of non Western peoples to be evangelised. Evangelization itself had taken on the added dimension of cultural advancement and the civilisation of the so-called uncivilised peoples. Africans, no doubt, fell into this category. Hence the papal documents generally identify as "backward" those people who are as yet unopened to European civilisation. Mission therefore among African peoples, besides "snatching souls", and liberating the multitude of "unhappy beings" from "unbridled instincts" and "dark superstitions", had the added dimension of civilising the accursed descendants of Ham.(37) The very nature of mission was thought to be determined by this additional exigency of imparting "the light of the gospel and the benefits of Christian culture and civilisation to the peoples sitting in darkness and in the shadow of death".(38)

Hence we find the frequent use of such ethnocentric terms as "savages", "uncivilised", "barbarous peoples", alongside the more religious ones such as "heathens", "infidels", "pagans", and "pagan nations" in the two papal pronouncements, that is, and Benedict XV's Maximum Illud, and Pius XI's Rerum Ecclesiae. These encyclicals incidentally coincided with the hey-days of the intense European imperialist activity in Africa. They therefore reinforce the cultural dimension of Western Christian expansion with its tendency to look down on, or downgrade all non-western cultures as backward. "Pagan territories" were identified as those "vast territories which are still unopened to Christian civilisation...the immense number...still deprived of the fruits of redemption".(39) To be civilised was to be Christians. and vice versa. Pius XI exhorts bishops in Christian countries not to put any obstacles in the way of young men, ecclesiastic students or priests who wished to offer their lives in the service of "the heathens particularly those who are still savages and barbarians".(40)

Even when, concerning the equality among European and native missionaries, Pius XI stresses that "he errs grievously who considers such natives as of an inferior race, and of obtuse intelligence", he nonetheless concedes: "But if you find extreme slowness of mind in the case of men who live in the very heart of barbarous regions, this is due to the conditions of their lives, for, since the exigencies of their lives are limited, they are not compelled to make great use of their intelligence..."(41) It was common of the period to readily stigmatise Africans with intellectual morbidness.
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