Handout #257

The need to appoint a local clergy

Maximum illud The 1914-1918 war disturbed the missions. European missionaries had to leave those missions which did not have an indigenous clergy. Moreover the missionaries sometimes demonstrated an exaggerated nationalism contrary to the message of the gospel.

There is a point to which leaders of missions have the duty particularly to devote their attention, and that is the recruitment and training of an indigenous clergy. This stress by the popes could not prevent a regrettable situation. There are places where Catholicism was introduced some centuries ago and where there is only an indigenous clergy of an inferior kind. There is also more than one people which, though enlightened by the gospel at an early stage, able to raise itself up from barbarism to civilization and to find in its midst remarkable men in all the spheres of the arts and the sciences, has not succeeded over several centuries of beneficent action from the gospel and the church in producing bishops to govern it nor priests whose status made a mark on their fellow-citizens. We must recognize that there is something defective or wrong in the education given so far to mission clergy.

We are deeply pained to have seen in recent years the appearance of journals the editors of which show less eagerness for the interests of the kingdom of God than for those of their own nation. What amazes us is that there is no anxiety that such an attitude may deter the hearts of the infidels from religion. Since he is not the missionary of his country but the missionary of Christ, the Catholic missionary must behave himself in such a way that the first person he meets has no hesitation in seeing him as the minister of a religion which is not foreign in any nation because it embraces all men who 'worship God in Spirit and in truth " and because in it 'there is neither Greek nor Jew, circumcised or uncircumcised, barbarian or Scythian, bond or free, but all are one in Christ' (Col. 3. 11). 

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