Word of the Day: Congregation for the Evangelization of Peoples

CONGREGATION FOR THE EVANGELIZATION OF PEOPLES. Originally created by Popes Pius V and Gregory XIII as a commission of cardinals, it was formally re-established in 1622 by Pope Gregory XV as the Congregation for the Propagation of the Faith. This name is still used, but the new title was given in 1967, when it was reconstituted by Pope Paul VI. Its scope of activity is the whole span of missionary work throughout the Church, and the care of the whole Christian life of the faithful and the ministry of the clergy in mission territories.

Founded in 1622 by Pope Gregory XV with the bull Inscrutabili Divinae, the body was charged with fostering the spread of Catholicism and with the regulation of Catholic ecclesiastical affairs in non-Catholic countries. The intrinsic importance of its duties and the extraordinary extent of its authority and of the territory under its jurisdiction caused the Cardinal Prefect of Propaganda to be known as the "red pope".

When the body was created, the administration of colonial territories was increasingly controlled by the Dutch and English, both intent on spreading protestantism. Rome perceived the very real threat of protestantism spreading in the wake of commercial empire. By 1648, with the end of the Thirty Years' War, the official Catholic-protestant balance in Europe appeared settled, but vast regions of Asia, Africa, and the Americas remained both undeveloped and contested.

There had already been a less formally instituted committee of cardinals concerned with propaganda fide since the time of Pope Gregory XIII (1572–1585). They were especially charged with promoting the union with Rome of the long-established eastern Christian communities: Slavs, Greeks, Syrians, Egyptians, and Abyssinians. This was the traditional direction for the evangelization efforts of the Catholic Church. Catechisms were printed in many languages and seminarians sent to places as far as Malabar. The most concrete result was the union with Rome of the Ruthenian Catholic communion, most concentrated in modern-day Ukraine and Belarus; the union was formalized at Brest in 1596.

The death of Pope Gregory XV the following year did not interrupt the organization, because Cardinal Barberini, one of the original thirteen members of the congregation, became the next pope as Urban VIII (1623–1644). Under Urban VIII, a central seminary, the Collegium Urbanum, was established to train missionaries. The Congregation also operated a polyglot printing press in Rome, printing catechisms in many languages. Their procurators were especially active in China from 1705, moving between Macau and Canton before finally settling in Hong Kong in 1842.

In strongly protestant areas, the Congregation's activities were considered subversive: the first missionary to be killed was in Grisons, Switzerland, in April 1622, before the papal bull authorizing its creation had been disseminated. In Ireland after Catholic emancipation (1829) while the established church was still the protestant Church of Ireland, the Irish Catholic church came under the control of the Congregation in 1833, and soon reformed itself with a devotional revolution under Cardinal Cullen.

The Holy See removed the United States from the jurisdiction of Propaganda Fide as mission territory in 1908, along with England, the Netherlands, Luxemburg, and Canada.

These "Cardinals in General Congregation" met weekly, keeping their records in Latin until 1657, then in Italian. The minutes are available in microfilm (filling 84 reels) at large libraries. In the course of their work, the Propaganda fide missionaries accumulated the objects now in the Vatican Museum's Ethnological Missionary Museum.