As noted, Propaganda Fide was established to oversee Catholic missions worldwide and developed a clear code of conduct for missionaries in 1659, with instructions explaining the need for both political and cultural neutrality. However, Catholic nations still attempted to play a role in the missions, and particularly in their zones of influence. When the French Government sent Captain Lavaud to annex the South Island of New Zealand for France, Lavaud received explicit instructions that the work of the French Catholic missionaries was to be encouraged. The missionaries would be able to impart notions of order and morality to Maori, and Maori acquisition of these values was considered to be in France’s national interest. Moreover, by their presence, the missionaries would give their converts a love and respect for things French.43 New Zealand was not an isolated example: Adrian Hastings notes that in the 1850s French colonial officials in Africa complained that the French Catholic missionaries, unlike the Protestants, did too little to civilise their charges. The officials reportedly broke the rosaries of the Holy Ghost Fathers’ converts, objecting that it was not by teaching people to pray and chant canticles that the people would be civilised.44
43 Tremewan, p. 62.
44 Paule Brasseur and Paul Coulon, Libermann 1802-1852: une pensée et une mystique missionnaires (Paris: Cerf, 1988), p.
France was not the only imperial power to see Christianity as a tool of civilisation. By 1836 Britain had given official approval to this ‘principle of missionary enterprise’, and a committee of the House of Commons was selected to consider the spread of civilisation among the native inhabitants of countries of British settlement. The evidence provided to the committee was released the following year, in a publication which stated that ‘true civilisation and Christianity are inseparable; the former has never been found but as a fruit of the latter.’45 There is one vital difference between this and the Catholic case, however: according to Niel Gunson, Britain’s conclusions simply reflected what had long been the practice of the LMS missionaries.46
Evidence from the field suggests that missionaries did not always follow the prescriptions or indeed wishes of their governments, and that lay boards in the case of the Protestants, and Propaganda Fide in the case of the more centralised Catholic system, exercised overall control over missionary policy. Moreover, evidence from individual missions makes it clear that it is especially important to study each mission within its historical context, though divergent trends between the Catholic and Protestant efforts are still distinguishable at a broader level.
Writing on the Pacific, Gunson notes that the Evangelical missionaries lamented the passive role of the Catholic priests. Whereas the Evangelicals attempted to reform native society, the Catholic priests appeared to be only interested in their own converts and did not apply pressure to them to conform to
45 John Beecham, Dandeson Coates and William Ellis, Christianity, the Means of Civilization: Shown in the Evidence Given Before a Committee of the House of Commons, on Aborigines (London: R.B. Seeley and W. Burnside, L. and G. Seeley, and T. Mason, 1837), p. 171, cited in Messengers of Grace, p. 269.
Western norms of behaviour. Evangelical missionaries regarded the Catholic emphasis on baptism, neglect of Bible teaching and policy of minimal interference as ‘sops to heathenism’.47 The Evangelicals instead sought to establish Western methods of agriculture and industry, constructed European-style housing, and focused on reforms such as educating native children and promoting literacy.48 In Gunson’s view, during the first two decades of missionary contact ‘civilisation’ was imposed rather drastically by Evangelical missionaries on the islanders. However, this approach soon gave way to more liberal attitudes. Like their Catholic counterparts, the Evangelicals began to give more importance to their religious duties despite the pressure from the advocates of civilisation in the metropole, and most were well aware of the dangers of ‘recreating the heathen in the image of themselves.’49
With regard to the African missionary experience, Hastings’ comparative analysis of the Protestant and Catholic approaches confirms many of the trends noted by Gunson for the Pacific. Interestingly, Hastings sees a trend among the Catholics of imitating the Protestant example as the nineteenth century progressed, with more conscious attempts to civilise taking shape (p. 266). However, in general the Catholic priests looked and behaved more recognisably like spiritual figures, with their cassocks and ascetic practices such as fasting, and much less like ‘an officious, moralising wing of European power’ (p. 267). Catholic leaders, following the line of Propaganda Fide, stressed that the duty of
47Messengers of Grace, p. 178. 48 Johnston, pp. 120-21. 49 Ibid., p. 278.
the missionary was not to impose a European mentality. One of the great missionary founders of Africa, Francis Libermann, for example, famously told the community of Dakar and Gabon in 1847, ‘Faites-vous nègres avec les nègres.’ Of course, such culturally-radical teaching was not always perfectly implemented, but it is important to remember that it was given.50 In the case of the White Fathers, Hastings believes that their commitment to an Africanisation of their work meant that they lived a good deal closer to village life than did most other missionaries (p. 565). He suggests that the reason that Protestant missionaries ‘got carried away rather easily by the “civilisation” model’ was that, beyond their great enthusiasm for world evangelism, they did not have a real missionary doctrine to fall back on as the Catholics did. However, as soon as they began to develop a doctrine, they started to recognise the danger of Europeanising and moved in a distinctly Catholic direction, that was more adaptationist (p. 290).