“Our Divine Ancestor Jesus Christ”: Performing Arts and Catholic Missiology in Bali

Abstract

The Society of the Divine Word (SVD) began the first Catholic mission to Bali in 1935. Several of the first missionaries sent were Dutch and American priests with training in ethnology and linguistics who employed their findings to missionize the Balinese. The resultant missiologies legitimized some aspects of local custom, notably recurring discourses of ancestral belonging that were commonly mapped onto Balinese music, dance, and theater. This article examines rare archival material—including the Bali Mass manuscript—to better understand the role of performing arts in the mutually informing history of Catholic- Hindu relations in Bali before and after Vatican II.