Dissertation Fellow 2000-01
Nicholas Creary (History)
Michigan State University
Domesticating a Foreign Import:
Inculturating the Catholic Church
in Southern Africa at Jesuit Missions, 1879-1980
In 1890, two Jesuit missionaries served as chaplains to the British
South Africa Company's troops that invaded and conquered Zimbabwe.
Eighty-seven years later, the Rhodesian settler state had Catholic
missionaries—including Jesuits—exiled and murdered for
supporting African nationalists. Within the broader context of African
religious development, this study examines African efforts to adapt,
or inculturate, the Catholic church to their vernacular cultures
at Jesuit missions in Zimbabwe from the beginning of the modern
Jesuit missions in 1879 until political independence in 1980, focusing
on changes in religious beliefs and practices over time, specifically
rituals associated with marriage, death, and the invocation of spirits.
African Catholics significantly influenced Church personnel and
policy throughout the colonial period. In the 1920's a faction of
Jesuits supported African Catholics in trying to have the Shona
word for God (Mwari) used in the liturgy, and translations of catechisms
and prayer books (which occurred in the Vatican II era). Similarly,
although the European hierarchy and clergy spent most of the colonial
period condemning African practices of honoring the dead, when the
bishops approved inculturated forms of worship after Vatican II,
they gave their imprimatur to long-standing underground African
practices. These debates reflect the influence of African initiatives
on European missionaries. Despite such influence, however, the Jesuits
narrowly circumscribed the bounds of inculturation discourse for
much of the colonial period. Thus, African efforts to inculturate
the Church necessarily resulted in a contestation of the limits
set by the Jesuits, and any inculturation of the Church by Africans
occurred in spite of Jesuit opposition and was later championed
by other religious orders in the Church. Unlike Jesuits in Latin
America and East Asia, their confreres in Southern Africa not only
did not take the lead in inculturating the Church, but in many instances
worked against it. This was due primarily to the Jesuits' inculturation
of themselves into the dominant White Rhodesian culture and their
failure to break with its racist and paternalistic mind-set.
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