Maritain Theology Forum: Paul Kollman, CSC, "Challenges in Interpreting Freedom Amidst Missionary Evangelization"

Missionaries are noted for their mobility, often traveling far to bring their message. Less noted is that the establishment of missions also nearly always changes the mobility of those evangelized, whose responses to missionary evangelization themselves often entailed new movement, and, at times, limitations on movement. This paper will compare patterns of mobility among different participants in Catholic missionary evangelization in eastern Africa in the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-centuries. These were decades of social turmoil for the region, which underwent exploration and eventual colonial encroachment, along with missionary evangelization. It will show how practices and discourses linked to freedom and enslavement, redemption and restriction, operated among three different Catholic missionary groups that evangelized in what is today Tanzania, then German East Africa.

The three groups—the Spiritans, White Fathers, and Benedictines—arrived in the region at different times and in varied circumstances, brought to their evangelizing practices distinctive predispositions, and operated as missionaries with unique partners as well as in varying settings among diverse people-groups. Their experiences in German East Africa thus differed greatly. Comparing those experiences and outcomes invites insights into ways that missionaries operated as managers of mobility, their own and that of others, reflecting the complex interplay of human decision and constraining conditions in missionary evangelization. This paper will examine these cases together, considering insights for mobility and intercultural studies afforded by this comparative exercise.