An Age of Mission

Catholic maritime powers in western Europe opened up new trade routes to Africa and India, as well as the newly discovered Americas in the 1490s and early 1500, leading to Catholicism gaining a presence in these regions through the work of Portuguese and Spanish missionaries. This missionary work was coordi- nated at national level – for example, through French missionaries and the Parisian mission society, Société des Missions Etrangères de Paris (French: “Paris Society for Foreign Mis- sions”), which played an important role in missionary work in Indo-China.

It was not until the seventeenth century that a central ecclesiastical authority, the Roman Congregatio de propaganda fide (Latin: “Congregation for the Spreading of the Faith”), was established by Pope Gregory XV in 1622. In 1627, Pope Urban VIII established a training college for missionaries at Rome. This represented a new approach to missionary work which both strengthened its religious character, and also encouraged the scientific and linguistic education of missionaries, preparing the way for the creation of an indigenous clergy in the Americas, Africa, and Asia.

So why did these developments take place? One important reason was a growing realiza- tion that the expansion of Christianity needed to be coordinated centrally by religious authorities, rather than be allowed to be shaped by national churches with their own agendas. Concerns were rising in senior church circles that certain Catholic nations seemed more interested in promoting their own economic interests overseas than in spreading the Catholic faith. Yet there was another reason of no small importance: the realization that Protestantism was expanding its missionary endeavors, posing a significant threat to the global dominance of Catholicism.