Carlo Torriani

SWARGA DWAR

The conversion of a catholic missionary

presented by

Card. Simon Pimenta

PIME Publications, PIME Regional House, Eluru - 534 0-07, A.P., India

MISSION IS DIALOGUE NOT CONQUEST

Letter No. 53, March 1998

Dear Friends,

    In a single year (1998), under the government of Bharatiya Janata Party, Christians in India had to suffer more harassment and violence than in the previous fifty years since independence. In 1998 five hundred years had passed since the arrival in India of the Portuguese with Vasco de Gama. Nobody in India celebrated this anniversary.

    The Jesuit Fr. Rudolf C. Heredia, “purifying the memory”, wrote as follow: “The first step that we need to do as reaction to the recent atrocities against Christians in this country is to put in order our house. We must realise that we Indian Christians have not yet freed ourselves from the cultural alienation inherited from the colonial past. The aggressive missionary of the past can no more be our model today.”

    During my recent tour of conferences in Italy, I also stressed the need to show to the peoples that the missionary is not a colonialist. We are all convinced of it. But five hundred years of association between mission and colonialism has left in the collective subconscious of the people and image of missionary that persists. For five hundred years the missionaries came on the same ships of colonialists. When the colonial era was over, the frontiers had been closed also for the missionaries, particularly in Asia.

    We need to reinvent a new figure of missionary. It will not be easy. We must keep in mind that before the image changes in the mind of the majority at large, we, missionaries, will be still treated as part and parcel of colonial era.

The Catholic Church had officially involved itself with the colonialists when she entrusted the work of evangelisation to the Kings of Spain and Portugal, giving also the juridical form of padroado. The same thing happened to the Reformed Church of Nederlands and to the Anglican Church. These associations went so far as to justify the apartheid in South Africa.

    That is why in India the word “conversion”  has a negative political connotation. Here conversion to Christianity is perceived not as a spiritual change, but as a cultural and political change, like an alliance to the colonial powers, or, now, as an endurance to choose cultural western costoms.

    The Pope, on the anniversary of the discovery of America, asked pardon to the native tribes of America: “How can the Church (…. ) forget in this fifth centenary, the enormous suffering inflicted (…) during the conquest and colonisation?” (Message to the Indios,  Santo Domingo, 1992). The example of the Pope is an example that can give courage to the local Churches to insert themselves in the national culture.

    Conscious of this problem, I thought to come to India as a student, as one who come to learn.

    We Italian have the advantage of not having a colonial past (in spite of our small ambition to have a “place in the sun” in Libya and Ethiopia) and also we have the examples of Franciscan Italian missionaries who came to India, over land, till Thane and till Beijin before the colonial era. We have also the example of Roberto de’ Nobili who was one of the first to pose the problem of evangelisation without padroado.

    We must always remember that mission is dialogue and not conquest.

    The second important thing is to leave free the local Churches to live, think, speak, sing, and celebrate like the local people, with the local culture.

    When the Parsis took refuge in India in the Eight century, the local prince who receive them, requested them to dress like the local people and to speak the local language. They promised to mix like the sugar in the milk. Now they live in Mumbai and in Gujarat and they are considered Indians. This did not happen for the Christians.