The Crisis in the Missions

Extract

‘The Church in Mission’ is a collection of papers by various authors, mostly translated from the French, which have been published in recent years. There are eleven; and nine would have been enough. After an excellent introduction from Information Catholique we are given two papers on missionary theology which make weary reading. Presumably it is a prudent convention, before launching into any subject, to survey what has already been done, but in the field of theology this can be tedious, and the reader begins to wonder whether the Church is well served by writings which wrap up a few simple ideas in many yards of abstractions. In these sixty two pages we learn that whereas at one time the primary aim of the missions was said to be to plant the Church in pagan lands, which took precedence over the aim to save souls, -more recent thought has reached the conclusion that the first cannot be done without the second. There is an interior as well as an exterior Church, a res of which the visible Church is the sacrament. That the theologian is not redundant when dealing with living issues can be appreciated in the articles by P. A. Liégé, who writes realistically and economically on ‘The Theology of the Church and the Mission Pastoral’ ‘Religious Liberty’ and ‘Before the Catechuminate’. His third paper contains this important paragraph: