Mission anniversaries
Rev Brian Lucas, National Director of Catholic Mission charts the history of the Congregation de Propaganda Fide on its 400th anniversary. [s2If current_user_can(access_s2member_level2)]
The year 2022 is the 400th anniversary of the foundation of the Congregation de Propaganda Fide, known today as the Congregation for the Evangelization of Peoples. It is the 200th anniversary of the foundation of the Society for the Propagation of the Faith by Pauline Jaricot in Lyon, France. Pauline Jaricot’s beatification is scheduled for 22 May 2022 in Lyon. It is the 100th anniversary of the formalisation of the Pontifical Mission Societies (PMS) in Rome by Pope Pius XI.
Propaganda Fide is usually associated with new world missionary territories and Western European colonial expansion. But it had an important role in reversing the consequences of the Protestant Reformation. The entry for Gregory XV in The Oxford Dictionary of Popes notes that he was the first Jesuit trained pope who “strove not only to continue the inner renewal of the church but to regain ground it had lost.”
Propaganda Fide had a twofold agenda. One motivation was to strengthen Rome’s hand in the formulation of missionary policy in the huge colonial territories of Spain and Portugal.
Also at stake was the religious character of the missions which had become too closely identified with secular political and commercial interests and European colonialism.
This connection between mission and colonial expansion frequently has plagued missionary work. Officially it was laid to rest in the 1919 Apostolic Letter of Benedict XV, Maximum Illud — On the Propagation of the Faith Throughout the World. Benedict XV wrote that he was “deeply saddened by some recent accounts of missionary life, accounts that displayed more zeal for the profit of some particular nation than for the growth of the kingdom of God (20).”
Missionary initiatives, especially by some evangelical churches, still today can have links to the political and economic interests of the countries of origin.
The modern role of the Congregation was defined by the Second Vatican Council in its Decree on the Missionary Activity of the Church (ad Gentes).
It specified (29): For all missions and for the whole of missionary activity there should be only one competent office, namely that of the “Propagation of the Faith,” which should direct and coordinate, throughout the world, both missionary work itself and missionary cooperation.
Pauline Marie Jaricot
The first of the four Pontifical Mission Societies, The Society for the Propagation of the Faith was formally founded in Lyon (France) in 1822. The venerable Pauline Marie Jaricot is credited with its creation, but the precise origins of the new institution and Pauline’s involvement are ambiguous and the story complex.
Pauline Marie Jaricot was born on 22 July 1799 into a family of rich Lyon silk merchants. After hearing a Lenten homily against worldly vanities, the
then 17-year-old experienced a radical conversion, abandoning the worldliness of her previous life, and began to visit and take care of the poor.
In 1820, Pauline received a letter from her brother Phileas, a student at the Seminary of St. Sulpice, in which he explained the needs of the members
of the Paris Foreign Missions Society. Pauline gathered the workers in her father’s factory into groups of ten to donate a sou (a penny/cent) to support the foreign missions. Each participant would then recruit another “ten”. The “tens” become “hundreds” and eventually gathered momentum beyond Lyon.
In 1822, Father Angelo Inglesi, Vicar-General of New Orleans, was sent to Lyon by Bishop Louis Dubourg to visit his benefactors and reanimate their zeal for supporting the Louisiana mission. Father Inglesi called a meeting of the friends of the missions that was attended by “the twelve” – two ecclesiastics and ten laymen who were members of a pious association known as La Congrégation. On 3 May 1822, they established themselves as a provisional council and adopted the name Society for the Propagation of the Faith.
Pauline Jaricot brought her own collection groups into the generalized Society which adopted her fundraising method. The system of collecting and distributing funds was thus institutionalised. On 15 March 1823 Pius VII authorised it and it had already spread widely throughout France, then Europe, then by 1826 throughout the whole world.
Joseph P Ryan, in his review of Katherine Burton’s work, Difficult Star: The Life of Pauline Jaricot concludes: Pauline Jaricot was one of the many extraordinary lay persons whose sanctity and zeal did so much for France and the world during the nineteenth century. Mrs. Burton portrays the hopes, aspirations, efforts, and sorrows of ‘a poor old woman who thought she could save the world.’
Another popular biographer Mary Windeatt concludes, with some hyperbole, that “this is a wonderful story of how a spoiled rich girl came to be one of the greatest lay apostles in the entire history of the church”.
Fr Edmund Campion has described the Society for the Propagation of the Faith as “the first formal Catholic organisation in Australian history”. It provided funds for the early missionary activity in Australia especially in Western Australia.
Today, through Catholic Mission, Australia is (per capita) one of the leading supporters of those churches we might describe as “missionary” but are perhaps better understood to be those that are young, fragile, persecuted, are a social minority, or lack local resources for the work of evangelisation.
Details of the projects and work of Catholic Mission can be found on its website www.catholicmission.org.au [/s2If]
