Catholic Missions and Colonial States

Most of the European missionary activity that laid the basis for Catholicism in contemporary Africa took place during the height of the colonial period between the 1880s and the late 1950s and early 1960s. Relationships between Catholic missions and colonial states in Africa were complex, often uneasy, and evolved over time, depending on whether the missions in a particular territory had arrived substantially before the secular power or vice versa, whether they were staffed by nationals of the reigning colonial power, and that power’s attitude towards the church. At ground level, however, local circumstances were usually most important in determining the relationships between missionaries and state authorities, and Africans thus played a key role in shaping them. After the Second World War, the Vatican began to try to distance the Church from colonial states (except in the Portuguese colonies) and plan for political decolonization. It took Vatican insistence on training African clergy, strenuous campaigning by African Catholic intellectuals and clergy at mid-century, and innovations by African believers on the ground to divorce the church from colonialism and lay the groundwork for the subsequent explosion of Catholicism in independent Africa.