Roman Catholic Missions

Abstract

INTRODUCTION To write the history of Roman Catholic missions in India in the eighteenth century is no easy task. The contemporaneous decline of Portuguese power and the disintegration of the Mughul empire, together with the endless regional and minor wars to which these gave rise, were exceedingly harmful to Christian work and, while making it difficult even to maintain what had been achieved, imposed almost insuperable obstacles in the way of penetrating new regions and of extending the work to areas where no Christian church of any kind had been established. There was, in the Roman Catholic church, no central directive power by which the various enterprises could be held together in any kind of unity. The efforts of the Propaganda to achieve this aim had been in large measure unsuccessful. Missionary work was still largely in the hands of the religious orders, which were jealous of their independence and suspicious of any attempt to control them. The picture, therefore, tends to be rather a kaleidoscope of disparate units than an orderly map of experiment and progress, each part making its contribution to the riches of the whole. To some extent this must be attributed to the difficulties of communication in a land where roads were few or non-existent and movement by water was limited to certain favoured areas. But it is also the fact that certain missions liked to have things remain just as they were.