PROSPECTS FOR THE MISSIONS

Two Threats: Totalitarian And Liberal
Missionaries Cannot Be Political Servants
By Michael de la Bedoyere 1
EVER has Mission Sunday been observed in more gloomy conditions. Humanly speaking, the future of the Missions could scarcely be darker, for they are gravely threatened morally and materially.
In the first place vast missionary territories are involved in war, and war. while it may in some respects stimulate religious faith in countries where Christianity is fully established, must inevitably gravely limit the work of apostolate in lands where the faith is still being planted. Next. the material means of maintaining the Missions, i.e.. the actual number of workers available and the money wherewith to support them and their work, are decreasing despite the growth of a native clergy. Lastly. the moral and political doctrines preached and practised in countries attempting world domination must destroy or at least deform the growth of true religion wherever their power reaches, while post-war changes are likely to prove detrimental to the Missions.
We need not here underline the grave religious effects of this state of affairs, for these are obvious to every Catholic, but we shall say a word about their disquieting effects upon the cause of civilisation itself.
A MAGNIFICENT RECORD TT is rare to find even the worst enemies of the Church attacking 1 her missionary enterprises. Whatever they may say about her power and influence in Europe or America, they will either keep silent about her apostolic work in pagan lands or admit the courage of her foreign missionaries and the beneficial effects of their heroic work of charity. The chief argument used against missionary activity is that natives should be left alone and allowed to worship their own gods in their own way. We reply by quoting : "Go ye and teach all nations," and by pointing out that either the Christian religion is true or it is not; if it is true then it is as important for the African native to know the truth about God, man and the universe as it is for him to know how to get his food and avoid the dangers in his path. But such arguments are largely unnecessary. Natives in any case are not left alone, but on the contrary controlled by civilised people for the purpose of enriching civilised countries. And as compared with the kind of exploitation of natives by foreign Powers, businesses and individuals, the work of the Catholic missionary is indeed a labour of mercy and love. Catholic missionary work, as the record shows, has throughout been one of enlightenment, true civilising, defence of the native against his exploiter and deepest love of man for his less fortunate brother in Christ. In numberless instances the life of the missionary has been one long act of heroic self-sacrifice, in which the left hand never sees what the right hand does.
ATTEMPT TO UTILISE MISSIONARIES CIVEN the success of the missionaries and the love and confidence
they inspire even among those who are not yet converted, it is not surprising to find that those who would exploit less civilised lands for material gain or pride or power should be constantly trying to make the priest the servant of his country or of whatever vested interest may happen to predominate. This can be done in one of three ways. The first and most conspicuously successful is to identify Christianity with the national ideas of the country controlling or seeking to control that particular land. The second is so to impregnate the future missionary with love for his country that he will inevitably become its ambassador when he works in the mission field. The third is so to confine and limit and oversee the work of the missionaries as to make it well-nigh impossible for them to be other than officials of their country.
The first method has been traditional in the history of Christianity, wherein Church and State, religion and civilisation developed together so that with foreign conquest there naturally went the spreading of the Gospel. sometimes with a greater or less degree of imposition on the conquered races. Most of the countries which to-day we call civilised were evangelised by these methods. Nor is it a wrong method so long as the civilising power is truly Christian and so long as religion is not imposed by force. These conditions were largely fulfilled in the great era of Spanish and Portuguese imperialism. Under contemporary conditions, however, the method is rarely defensible, since the modern State in whose name Christianity may spread is a secularist institution using religion as a mere convenience. Only in two or three countries like Spain, Portugal and Ireland could any sort of claim to Christian institutions be made, and certainly Italy, whose missionary enterprises in certain regions are said to be very closely associated with nationalism. could make no such claim. Moreover. the division of Christianity into a large number of competing nationalisms vitiates the whole idea of spreading the gospel in the name of any one country.
The second method is not so conscious, arising as it does from the spread of exaggerated nationalism in every land. None the less it forms the basis of a constant temptation to individual missionaries and to political authorities in missionary lands. Cardinal Hinsley has given an instance of how it tends to affect French missions. " In Lhome," he has written, " the little toddlers marched in procession stammering out the chorus: nous sommes soldats '."
THE TOTALITARIAN THREAT BUT the greatest danger for the future lies in the threat of a wide application of the third method, i.e., the forcible control of missionary territories by totalitarian Powers.
Hitler himself has never even pretended that he regards the native as a fellow human being with inalienable rights. Any such view he condemns as hopeless decadence and the evil fruit of Christian sentimentality. His racist teaching has resulted in the most unspeak
able -cruelty towards his fellow whites and the exercise of a religious and moral despotism without precedent in history. Happily, he has not yet been able to lay his fingers on any black man. Though German spokesmen, seeing the obviousness of the deduction that Germany will treat native populations under her power even worse than European and German ones. have denied that racism would apply to colonies, we can at least be certain that the Christian religion and Christian moral teaching with its many " dangerous " doctrines will be very closely supervised and that missionary priests will fare even worse than priests at home. The situation may even become so intolerable as to make apostolic work well-nigh impossible and thus leave the way clear for the spread among natives of such neopaganism as suits Nazi power. Conditions are likely to be better in Italian or Spanish possessions. but even there religion will be strictly nationalised and carefully controlled to suit the political and economic ambitions of the mother country.
We already know from her behaviour in Poland and the Baltic States what to expect as far as religion is concerned from any extension of the Soviet power, and though Japan has been friendly and just to missionaries working in Japan itself, she is likely to find good excuses by claiming that missionaries in China are associated with European or American interests for severely hampering work in that vast and successful mission field.
BRITISH CONTRAST IN THE PAST TT is no mere propagandist claim to assert that the whole treatment of Christian missionaries in territories under British rule stands in striking contrast with all this. The whole world acknowledges the truth, and there are some who despise Britain for her weakness, as they would call it. As Dr. Goebbels once said : " If the British did not make much of their colonies, Germany would show them how to make more of them." The Church acknowledges with gratitude the equity of British rule, and we have the testimony of Cardinal Hinsley, as Apostolic Visitor to the African missions in British territory, that Britain alone has scrupulously adhered to the solemn undertaking of colonial Powers that " missionaries of every nationality should have perfect freedom and even favour in order that they might carry out their work of civilising the native African in any and every part of the Dark Continent." Or if we take the statement about the tights and duties of colonising Powers in the Code of International Ethics, produced by Continental Catholic theologians, we shall see that Britain has tried to adhere to it. It reads: " The colonising State will use its sovereign authority wisely and prudently in order to abolish practices contrary to the natural law, to purify customs and morals, to teach the habit of civilising work, to provoke the rational development of natural resources, to ensure the defence of the country and to administer justice."
There have been gross abuses in the past, and a secularist ideal in the future may spoil the record, but recent British rule has undoubtedly fallen within the precepts of Christianity not only in the protection it has given to apostolic work but also in the endeavours made to civilise the native peoples. All social endeavours are imperfect, and it would not be hard to criticise British rule in many respects, for example in the toleration of an unnecessarily low standard of native economic life and comfort by industrial exploiters, in a certain official patronage contrasting with the personal love and brotherliness of the missionary, in a lack of imagination which prevents the coloniser from seeing that civilization for the native may be a very different thing from civilization for the European, and so on; but even in these respects there has been constant progress through the constant apparatus for enquiry, examination, publicity, and through writers, Royal Commissioners, parliamentary debate and the like.
THE LIBERAL THREAT wHATEVER the issue of the war, we may expect to see vast changes in regard to colonies and missionary fields. These changes will affect not only the souls and bodies of millions of our brothers in Christ, but the whole balance of civilization. Should the totalitarian Powers win we may expect a political and probably an economic exploitation of native peoples—not to mention nonEuropean civilized races in China or in India—which will make the past seem like an era of enlightenment. One or two of these Powers may make a show of carrying the Cross of Christ before them. but the chief national use of that Cross will be to bind the conquered peoples even more closely to their new masters, whose political philosophy will determine in the long run their religious fate. If Bolshevism should triumph either directly through the Soviet or indirectly through Communists in war-weary countries and colonies, millions will be degraded to a level far below the worst that any native tribe has reached in the past.
The consequences of a victory on our side are not so clear. There will undoubtedly be strong pressure for radical changes in colonial administration, and we may hope that these changes will be in the interest of all peoples, colonial as well as European. But we must be on the watch for the propagation of liberal secularist ideals, not only anti-Christian in themselves but wholly theoretic, so that even if they were tolerable in the abstract they would cause disaster through being ignorantly imposed by men and women with no experience or understanding of peoples different from themselves. Already there are plenty of people at work under cover of the toleration accorded by Britain ruining with the greatest sincerity the mind of the native. This is bound to increase.
Thus whichever way we look we cannot but foresee difficult and dangerous times ahead, times during which much of the glorious work of the Christian Missions may be undone. It rests upon a comparatively few of us by prayer, work and vigilance to guard what., taken all in all, is perhaps the finest work of Christianity through' the last few centuries.