The Missions—Yesterday and Tomorrow

Extract

‘L’Eglise, c’est Jésus-Christ, mais Jésus-Christ répandu el communiqué.’ Bossuet’s words were quoted by Père Clérissac to reinforce his argument that the purpose of the Redemption embraces mankind as a whole before it affects the individual. This dynamic aspect of the life of the Church springs to mind as the new pontificate opens fresh vistas so soon after our reading of the several attempts to assess the achievements of the previous one. In spiritual as well as temporal affairs the stage would seem to be set for a new epoch. The two troubled decades which followed the Armistice of 1918 appear to be leading to a more realistic because less treaty-bound polity, while the conclusion of the pontificate which spanned that anxious period, and alone among reigns survived it with enhanced prestige, has left the new Pope a simpler if no less heavy task.

Before attempting to trace one aspect of this in the special field of the missions abroad, it will perhaps not be out of place to dwell upon the paradoxical fact that more profound progress has been made within it during the past seventeen years than in as many preceding centuries. Today the Church is indeed universal, there is a Chinese, Indian, and African Catholicity as distinct as the English or the American; and this remarkable achievement, because it has taken place while the Church has been subject to considerable difficulties in lands older in the faith, has passed almost unnoticed, even in well-informed circles. But the fact remains that no Pope has been mourned by so numerous or so varied a Church as was Pius XI, rightly surnamed the Pope of the Missions.