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Handout #255 |
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Instructions from Cardinal Lavigerie to the White Fathers of Equatorial Africa (1879) |
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Without denying that missionary preaching
sometimes led to a deculturation of which those engaged in it were not
aware, it is worth nothing that the missionaries were often very reluctant
to Europeanize the people they evangelized.
When a priest voluntarily leaves for equatorial Africa, he must resign himself in advance to enduring the evils which are inseparable from mission and not make all his letters supplements to the lamentations of Jeremiah. The first condition of succeeding the transformation of Africa is to train the Africans we choose in conditions which, materially speaking, leave them truly African. So far that has not generally been done, and I have to say that in Algeria we have fallen into the common error. That has led me to touch on this point. Young black men, even those whom one wants to make teachers and catechists, must be left in a state which allows them an African life at their expense, and if possible, a state which honors them, which gives them influence and is accepted by all without question. This is so that they can give powerful help to the missionaries without working for them ...In speaking of the material education of our young Blacks I said that it had to be African. By contrast, their religious education must be essentially apostolic. There are two ways of making men like us. The first is to make them like us externally. That is the human way, that to the philanthropic civilizers, of those who say (as was said at the Brussels conference) that to change the Africans it is enough to teach them the arts and crafts of Europe. It is to believe that when they are housed, clothed and fed as we are, they will have changed their nature. But they will only have changed their dress. Their hearts will be just as savage, and perhaps even more so, for they will also have been corrupted, and what they have learned of our luxury and our softness will have contributed to that corruption. The divine way is quite different. St. Paul defines it by saying: I make myself everything to all men to win all to Jesus Christ (I Cor. 9.22). The apostolate addresses itself to the soul; it is the soul which changes, knowing that the rest will come in addition ... It makes itself a Barbar with the Barbars as it is Greek with the Greeks. That is what the Apostles did, and we cannot see that any of them sought first to change the material habits of the peoples. They sought to change their hearts, and once their hearts had been changed, they renewed the world. Cardinal Lavigerie, Ecrits d'Afrique. |
