Mission : Deculturation before Inculturation?

The people in the Third World can learn from Scripture the nature of an ideal Church, but their own Churches were given birth by "mother Churches" that sent missionaries to them. I am not referring to the Syrian Church in South India, which was an exception. The European missionaries were sponsored by colonial governments or were at least protected by their power and shared their prestige. Thus, for instance, Franciscan and Dominican missionaries accompanied the Portuguese and Spanish royal fleets right from the beginning. When the Society of Jesus was just founded and King John III of Portugal came to hear of its Counter-Reformation zeal, he thought of it as best suited for the colonial designs of the Portuguese. He was not wrong in his expectations. There is abundant documentary evidence to show how the missionaries, particularly the Jesuits in India and the Dominicans in the Philippines, justified the colonial enterprise and defended it against native opposition and resistance. Their early writings express convictions that Portugal and Spain were created by God for the express purpose of spreading the Roman Catholic faith around the world. Rizal may have been exaggerating a little when he wrote in his Noli me Tangere: "The Government itself sees nothing, hears nothing and decides nothing except what the parish priest or the head of a religious Order makes it see, hear and decide".(5)

In Portuguese India the situation was not different. The great missionary of the Indies, St. Francis Xavier, was convinced that it was hard to establish Christianity among the orientals (Negroes) and harder to preserve it, except in coastal regions where the Portuguese control and Portuguese gunboats held sway.(6)

Even when the natives were admitted to the ranks of lower clergy, the white Religious Orders kept control of the "frontier" where the loyalty of the native clergy was not trusted. The Religious Orders in the forefront of the missions justified their reluctance to hand over responsibility to the native clergy by describing every Religious House as a fort and every white Religious as a captain in the service of the Crown.(7) It was not different anywhere in the colonies. A viceroy of Mexico once observed: "In each friar in the Philippines, the king has the equivalent of a captain-general and an entire army"(8) The missionaries were far cheaper and more effective than large and costly garrisons would have been.

With the advent of imperialism and the breaking of the Chinese melon and the partition of Africa in the 19th century, missionary societies, predominantly Protestant, mushroomed all over the colonies. The Treaty of Berlin provided for free movement of missionary societies across territorial boundaries irrespective of the colonial powers which ruled the territories in question. In practice, however, each colonial power tended to accord preferential treatment to missionary societies originating in its own metropolitan country.

Christian missionaries were sent specifically to "civilize" the natives of the colonies and to act as the links between the rulers and the ruled. They were to provide literacy and other skills to the people who were later to become interpreters, clerks, teachers, evangelists, and artisans in the service of the colonial administrations. The converts became extension officers in the process of Europeanization. The degree of conversion to Christianity was defined in terms of the extent to which the convert had absorbed and adopted the culture of the resident missionary. This acculturation was meant to help in the long run to create tastes in the native population for goods that the imperialists had to offer. It was a process in which the western missionaries cooperated enthusiastically till the political process of de-colonization put an end to it. The newly emerged independent nations saw in their political independence the necessary pre-condition for socio-economic and cultural advancement. In reality, the end of colonialism and its physical restrictions on the world-market was a requirement for the emergence of Financial Capitalism in the United States of America in the early decades of this century.

Third World countries are now politically independent, but also fully exposed to the neo-colonial exploitation of Western capitalism. The situation of dependence continues to enable the West to protect its agencies (multinational corporations) in the dependent regions and the Churches have not been very free from its manipulative capacity. Problems confront the churches of the world "periphery" on two fronts. They must struggle for their indigenous character and at the same time and in opposition to their "mother" churches, seek to create an understanding of the needs of their poverty-stricken masses, exploited by a system which, located at the "centre", benefits those same "mother" churches which supposedly aid the "periphery" with their "alms", which amount to only an insignificant fraction of what has been extracted from the "periphery" in the form of profits in an unjust international system.(9)

While the mission of the Church is to witness to the Gospel, we have seen briefly the destruction that this mission wrought in the Third World in collaboration with the Western powers. Though the destructive contribution of the missions to the Third World will never be sufficiently emphasized, one needs to see also the direct and indirect positive aspects that could be classified as "saving" features. It is to be noted, for example, that in most cases the conversions were made among the oppressed sections of the native society. Their conversion and collaboration with the external elements to challenge the predominance of the elite held out a concealed threat and acted as a catalytic agent for promoting reform during the centuries.

In India, for instance, the mass conversions acted as a shock-retreatment on the orthodox Hindu society. It has now learned that the revolutionary potential of low castes, outcastes and tribals cannot be underestimated. However, in the post-independent era the converted minorities are facing a crisis of cultural identity and this is due to the earlier process of acculturation which made them a cultural tragi-comedy, people who do not belong either to the Western culture or to the national Eastern culture. This is how many Christians in Hong Kong may find themselves, between the devil and the deep, unwanted by England and misfits for the Chinese dispensation. This is where the issue of inculturation becomes urgent. Translated bibles and translated rituals cannot provide satisfactory results. Christianity will still remain an implant, and never be a graft living on the sap of the native culture.

Church institutions which have been imported from the West and are deemed as vital for the universality of the Church and its unity, need to be subjected to acceptance or rejection by the native cultural world-view and its values wherever these do not conflict with genuine Gospel values. Unfortunately, in countries where the Western capitalist system does not have full sway, the presumed necessity of many juridical and other expressions of authority and discipline is no longer considered essential.

Generally it is the financial dependence of the Third World Churches needed to maintain institutional luxuries that keeps the clerical bourgeoisie linked with the West to safeguard personal privileges. As a result of its self-sufficiency with funds from abroad, the hierarchy does not need to depend on local resources. This enables it to live well without full integration in the concerns of the people. Within the hierarchy, moreover, those who depend more on foreign resources are also likely to act as watchdogs of foreign interests and to seek external intervention in matters which could and should be sorted out in the country.

It is in this context that an extra-territorial juridical centre does not appear to be a help towards the successful inculturation of local churches. The reluctance of Rome to acknowledge a greater autonomy on the part of the national episcopal conferences is one cause for serious concern and suspicion. Does Rome really serve the local churches, or wish them to grow out of their centuries of domination, including religious domination, and begin to live at a level of equality and genuine communion with all churches under the spiritual leadership, rather than the juridico-political domination of the Pope? Or is Rome only peddling documents on "Local Churches" to keep them humoured? Is it possible that an episcopal conference like that of India, with about 122 bishops, is incompetent to decide most of the matters pertaining to their national church? As a result we have an old church in India which has not really grown up. The process of deculturation may have to continue before Christians in Asia and elsewhere can truly be at home in their own countries and experience the Incarnation.

4.Wallerstein, I 37 ff.

5.Rizal, Noli me Tangere (Trans. Leon Ma. Guerrero, Hong Kong, 1986) 157.

6.Valignano, Historia del Principio y Progresso de la Compania de Jesus en las Indias Orientals (ed. J. Wicki, Rome, 1944) 70.

7.Teotonio R. de Souza, "The Portuguese in Asia and their Church Patronage", in : Western Colonialism in Asia and Christianity (ed. M. D. David, Bombay, 1988) 11-29.

8.C.R. Boxer, The Church Militant and Iberian Expansion (Baltimore, 1978) 75.

9.E. Dussel, "Some Hypotheses", in : Towards a History of the Church in the Third World (ed. Lukas Vischer, Bern, 1985) 110-130.