Des nations a evangeliser: Genese de la mission catholique pour l'Extreme-Orient (review)

Christ's Great Commission to His followers, "Go and teach all nations," is one of the Christian's fundamental responsibilities. This seemingly simple charge turns out to generate more problems for missionaries than might appear at first glance. Roland Jacques approaches the implementation of this commission from the perspective of medieval canon law, focusing on Christian relations with the non-Christian societies of the Far East, especially Vietnam, from the thirteenth to the seventeenth century.

The canon law spells out the institutional structure of the Church. Like any legal system, it reflects the immediate concerns of those who created it and may not respond effectively to new situations without major revisions. In the case of the canon law, relations with non-Christians received scant attention in the Corpus Iuris Canonici. Both the Decretum and the Decretales mention non-Christians but usually in the context of Jews and Muslims living within Christian society. The underlying assumption of the medieval law was that it existed within a Christian society where the secular and the spiritual authorities co-operated in the work of the Church. Non-Christians living within that society had to be accorded limited toleration and could not be compelled to become Christians. The canonists had little to say about non-Christians living outside of Christendom, except for some observations about the crusades and about peaceful trade with Muslims. They had nothing to say about the conversion of Muslims or other non-believers.

In the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries there was a flurry of interest in negotiating with various non-Christian rulers in Asia and in spreading the Gospel there. Several dioceses were eventually erected in China, but by the early fifteenth century, these Christian communities had disappeared.

Only in the fifteenth century did the notion of preaching the Gospel in lands beyond Europe take hold again. It was not clerics, however, who led the way but Portuguese merchants and adventurers who sought a water route that would provide direct access to the markets of Asia. The Church participated in this by granting the Portuguese a monopoly of trade with the lands they found in return for supporting the work of missionaries. This was the padroado, a concept that became the basis for the support of missionaries elsewhere. This approach linked Christianization with imperial conquest to the ultimate detriment of the missionary effort.

When the Portuguese reached Asia in 1497 and encountered the rich and sophisticated cities of the East, it became clear that conversion of these peoples to Christianity would be difficult. The missionaries would not be operating within a Christian society or with the open support of rulers. They would exist on the fringes of society rather as European merchants did. Jacques illustrates the difficulties they faced in terms of canon law by discussing the missionary efforts that began in Vietnam in the mid-seventeenth century. There were two fundamental problems: the problem of translating Christian concepts into the local language and the opposition of the Confucian-trained elite that ruled Vietnam. The elite saw Christianity as subversive of the social order and therefore a threat to the good order of the state. For example, the status of women in a Christian community differed from the traditional Vietnamese practice, as did the canon law of marriage. The dilemma for the missionaries was how to create an ecclesiastical community that corresponded to the terms of canon law but that at the same time would be acceptable to the Vietnamese. Here obviously was a problem that the canonists had never considered in any detail. To what degree could church law be modified or adapted until the process of Christianizing a society was complete?

Approaching missionary work from the legal perspective provides some important insights into the problems attending worldwide conversion activities. The Church's mission was universal, but its institutional structure was clearly rooted in its centuries-old development in Europe...