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The problem of the native clergy in the Portuguese and Spanish Empires from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 March 2016

C. R. Boxer
C. R. Boxer*
Affiliation:
Yale University
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Extract

A learned Jesuit historian of the Japan mission recently observed: ‘The aim of Christian missionary activity in every mission land is to establish the Church. The goal of the foreign missionary is primarily to prepare the ground and lay the foundation of the future Church. What he envisages, therefore, is the idea of a fully matured hierarchy of native-born bishops and priests capable of carrying on the work of the Church without foreign assistance.’

Identical sentiments have been voiced by other erudite Jesuit historians of Portuguese India and the Spanish Philippines; but their own well-documented works show very clearly that, however much this was a consummation devoutly to be wished, the road to its achievement was a long and an arduous one. Indeed, at times this objective was actively opposed by those very missionaries who should have been most anxious to attain it. Whatever the theory may have been, in practice the indigenous clergy were apt to be kept in a strictly subordinate condition to the European priests, particularly where these latter were members of the Regular clergy. How this discrimination arose, and the length of time for which it endured, is the theme of this paper.

Type
Research Article
Information
Studies in Church History , Volume 6: The Mission of the Church and the Propagation of the Faith , 1970 , pp. 85 - 105
Copyright
Copyright © Ecclesiastical History Society 1970

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References

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