Bishop Henry Verjus, the missionary.

To give you some idea of how much this pioneer missionary from our Family was in line with what we are saying about "mission" today, I give here some passages from an article by Fr. Lucio De Stefano, MSC, the promoter who is presenting Bishop Verjus' case for beatification to the Holy See:

Do not attempt, for any reason, to convince these peoples to change their own rituals, their own traditions, or their own customs, except when these are obviously contrary to religion and morals. Nothing would be more absurd than to transpose France, Spain, Italy or another European country to China. Do not introduce your countries to them, but rather bring them the faith, that faith that does not reject nor cause harm to the rites or traditions of any people but which wishes to conserve and safeguard them, when there is nothing detestable about them.

(Taken from a 1659 instruction to missionaries from the Congregation of the Propaganda Fide)

This study has as its point of departure a cause of beatification and canonization now in process before the appropriate Roman congregation, a process which normally leads to the addition of a new name to the list of those considered holy by the Catholic Church. This paper, however, does not refer to the holiness of a new candidate for beatification. It is meant to illustrate the circumstances and manner in which, in 1885, with the work of a young European missionary, the Christian faith arrived and spread among the native population of what was then called British New Guinea, in Oceania. The facts and story of this undertaking, as our title for this article would indicate, help us to underscore an attempt to inculturate the faith among a people who were still pagan, an attempt that succeeded perfectly.

The cause in question is that of the priest and bishop Enrico Verjus,[1] who landed on July 1, 1885, on Yule Island, which today is part of the independent nation of Papua New Guinea. It was there that he established the first mission station of the Catholic Church and in the seven years that followed, from that first outpost, in spite of reoccurring sickness and material deprivations that pushed him to the limit, he succeeded in spreading the Christian faith in a region that was still closed to Western civilization among a population considered hostile to whites.

From a sociological point of view, this paper 's importance is to be found in the fact that it shows how, at a time when the question of inculturation of the faith was not an important or debated question in the Church as it is today, the good faith, personal uprightness and pastoral zeal of a young missionary were able to render so extraordinarily fruitful his ministry to a people who had never heard speak of Christian faith before.

We do not mean by this that the young Verjus was completely ignorant of the socio-cultural problems connected with his missionary work among the indigenous people of Oceania since it is quite probable that he was familiar with the appropriate guidelines and directives that had been set up by the Church more than two centuries earlier at the time of the colonial expansion of the European nations and the contemporary development of Catholic missions in Africa, Asia and the Americas. He must have read the instruction that the Propaganda Fide had addressed to missionaries in 1659 in which was given what can be considered a real and trite norm, ante litteram, given by us in epigram.[2] The more important pontifical documents on the problem of the inculturation of the faith in non-Christian cultures are all from the period following the death of Henry Verjus.[3] He could not have imagined, in the Nineteenth Century, the doctrinal and pastoral developments which the Church, in order to offset the widespread secularization of modern society, has come to in our time with the gigantic work of rethinking and adapting of the Second Vatican Council (October 11, 1962 - December 7, 1965). In fact, in its last council the Church rethought in great depth the criteria, the methods and the forms of its own evangelizing effort in today's world. This has resulted in documents of great importance in reference to the whole question of the relationship between faith and culture.[4]

However, even without knowing the great riches of the modern teaching of the Church, Enrico Verjus anticipated its realization in his own missionary apostolate in a way which, given the circumstances of time and place, can only surprise us. And the surprise is even greater if one considers that his youthful age, his severe and rigid spiritual formation and the very short duration of his missionary activity would normally have excluded such exemplary success as he did have. Remember that at the time of his arrival in Oceania, Henry Verjus had just turned 25 and that he had but seven years left to live. Some later biographical data will make this fact even more surprising.

Later, Fr. De Stephano speaks of Fr. Verjus' ministry on Thursday Island:

Verjus intended his stay on Thursday Island to be very brief. It was only to last the length of time necessary to gather up all that was materially indispensable for getting settled on New Guinea. But the stay lasted about four months due to the difficulty of finding a ship. Verjus took advantage of this setback to get closer to the native population of the island, as well as the numerous Filipinos (mostly from Manila) who had settled there attracted by the prospect of farm work, fishing and diving for pearls which could be found in the coral reefs of the Strait of Torres. Making use of what he remembered of Spanish and of his rudimentary knowledge of the English he had begun to learn during the voyage, Verjus became interested in the Filipinos. He organized for them an evening Way of the Cross every Friday, a Sunday Mass at 10:00 a.m. and other moments of preaching. Besides the Filipino immigrants, Verjus was concerned about the aboriginal people who populated the numerous small islands scattered about the strait. What most struck the young missionary was the miserable condition of the Filipinos and the aborigines and the inhuman way they were taken advantage of by those who employed them, without any guarantee or legal protection whatsoever.[5]

Verjus' interest in the Filipinos and the aborigines of Thursday had two positive effects. On one hand, it produced an awakening of religious faith in many family circles where people, living in a Protestant milieu and in conditions that kept them painfully on the margin of society, no longer practiced their own religion. On the other hand, the contact with people who were so direly deprived proved to be very instructive for the missionary himself who took from that contact a deeper sensitivity for the sufferings of others and a greater understanding of social and racial injustice which was so prevalent on Thursday Island.

In this regard, one can not avoid underlining a point of great significance. The expressions with which Verjus describes the sad conditions of the Filipinos and the aborigines afford us a new and surprising image of him as religious and priest. Preoccupied as he had been up to that time with his own spiritual life, he was basically ignorant of the real conditions of life of many people. Finding himself in a new and painful environment, which he had never known before and whose very existence he may not even have suspected, he realistically faces the evil of the social reality that surrounds him and reacts with anger and compassion in relation to the evils and suffering he sees. The anger is for the men who make other men suffer. The compassion is for the victims of injustice.

To understand this point better it is good to recall that the missionary who is expressing himself in this manner is not yet 25 years old. If one excludes a few brief experiences of priestly ministry in Rome before he left for the missions, one could conclude that Verjus had first begun to understand the world at Marseille when he took the boat that would take him from Europe to Oceania. But the discernment that he makes of the reality that he finds himself in is already that of the apostle who sees the causes of evil and who will face them with the remedies proposed by the Gospel.

And this is not all. While he was ministering to the Filipinos on Thursday Island, Verjus could not have imagined that just three years later, from that group of lost souls who were the object of his priestly concern, would come the, first lay catechist of New Guinea. Emanuel Natera, born in Manila in 1866, went from Thursday Island to Yule Island in New Guinea in 1888. He would work beside Verjus as a lay catechist for about four years. From his family there came many zealous catechists in the years to come.

I leave it to you to draw conclusions for our mission today.

To listen to Fr Mark McDonald read an extract of this paper, with his own comments, click here.

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[1] The Positio super vita, virtutibus et fania sanctitatis Servi Dei Henrici Baptistae Stanislai Verjus, Toll. 1-11, Romae 2000 can be consulted at the library of the Instituto Luigi Stwzo, Via delle Coppelle 35, 00186 Roma.

[2] In the original Latin the text reads as follows: [...] "Nullum studium ponite nullaque ratione suadete illis populis ut ritus suos, consuetudines et mores mutent, modo non sint apertissime religioni et bonis moribus contraria. Quid enim absurdius quam Galliam, Hispaniam, aut Itzliam aut aliam Europae pariem in Sinas invehere? Non haec sed fidem importate, quae nullius gentis ritus et consuetudines, modo prava non sint, aut respuit aut ledit, inuno vero sarta tecta esse vult" [...] (cf. Instructio Congregationis de Propaganda Fide ad Vicarios ap. Societatis Mission. ad exteros, 1659, in Collectanea Congregationis de Propaganda Fide seu Decreta lnstructiones Rescripta pro Apostolicis Missionibus, Vol. I, ann. 1622-1866, Romae, 1907, pp. 42-43).

[3] Among the more authoritative of these documents one should note the following encyclicals: Maxinturn Illud (1919) and Rerum Ecclesiae (1926) of Pius XI, Summi Pontificatus (1939) and Evangelii Praecones (1951) of Pius XII. In form of a very brief synthesis, these encyclicals make the following recommendations to missionaries: a) to learn the local languages; b) to form indigenous priests and catechists; c) to make use of modern sciences such as ethnography, history, geography and medicine; d) to respect the ways, customs, traditions and local institutions since these are values which should be preserved and cultivated when they are not in opposition to the Gospel.

[4] The following council documents are among the more pertinent: the declaration Nostra Aetate (October 28, 1965) on non-Christian religions; the decree Ad Gentes (December 7, 1965) on the missionary activity of the Church; the constitution Gaudium et Spes (December 7, 1965) in which an entire chapter is devoted to the promotion of culture. After the celebration of the Council, two Synods of Bishops, in 1974 and 1976, treated the question of the evangelization of cultures. Again on the theme of the inculturation of the Gospel in the modern world there have been two Apostolic Exhortations of considerable importance: Evangelii Nuntiandi of Paul VI (December 8, 1975) and Catechesi Tradendae of John Paul II (October 16, 1979). More recently, because of the importance of this question, the International Theological Commission published a document entitled "Fede e Inculturazione" (October 8, 1988), in which all aspects concerning this question are considered in relation to evangelization not only of traditional missionary areas but also of modern societies. In the last document the process of the inculturation of the faith is described as "the action of the Church to have the message of Christ penetrate a determined socio-cultural environment, inviting it to believe according to all its own values, since these values are in harmony with the Gospel" n. 11. Following this rather complete document came the encyclical Redemptoris Missio of John Paul II (December 7, 1990).

[5] Here is a long passage from the letter that Verjus sent on April 22, 1885, to his confrere Fr. Jouet, superior of the community in Rome. He speaks of his apostolate to the Filipino immigrants of Thursday and of projects to assist the aborigines of the area who are called "pauvres noirs" or "pauvres sauvages" in the text: "En attendant que le bon Dieu nous vienne en aide, nous faisons tout ce que nous pouvons pour entamer serieusement ce district du detroit de Torres. Tons nos bons catholiques sont bien contents. Le vendredi soir comme le dimanche nos catholiques se réunissent pour le chemin de la croix. Je vous assure que vous seriez bien touche de voir tous ces pécheurs venir avec la plus grande simplicité baiser la Ste Croix, comme ils le feront le vendredi saint. Ces catholiques Manillois sont près de 1000 dans les diverses stations de pêche du detroit. Ils sont tout fiers d'avoir maintenant los padres avec eux. A chaque instant ils viennent a nous, nous consulter, nous dire leurs peines. C'est un vrai ministère et des que nous aurons une grosse barque qui puisse tenir contre la haute mer, nous les visiterons tour a tour dans leurs stations. Nous profiterons de ces petits voyages, de deux on trois jours, pour visiter et réunir aussi les noirs des diverses îles. Dès que nous le pourrons aussi, nous prendrons avec nous un de ces noirs pour apprendre la langue et nous ferons une petite cabane dans chaque île du détroit, qui servira de chapelle et de refuge an missionnaire. Si le bon Dieu nous fait la grâce de réaliser bientôt ces petits projets, ce district de Thursday, qui selon 1'intention du Père Navarre comprend toutes les îles du détroit de Torres, sera le premier ou 1'on procédera régulièrement pour 1'evangelisation des pauvres noirs. Vous ne sauriez croire dans quelle abjecte dégradation ces pauvres sauvages sont tenus ici! On les regarde comme des animaux. On les séquestre dans certaines îles, et quand ils consentent a venir travailler pour les blancs, on se croit tout permis a leur égard, même les injustices les plus criantes. On refuse quelquefois de les payer suivant les contrats passes avec eux. Comme ces contrats se font de vive voix, ces pauvres sauvages ne sachant pas écrire, il n'y a pas moyen de réclamer et ces bonnes gens sont obliges de courber la tête et de s'en retourner les mains vides. Vous jugez s'ils aiment les blancs en général et ils ne peuvent pas encore croire sérieusement a 1'affection désintéressée que nous leur portons. On se plaint ensuite de la crainte des noirs, ici et en Nouvelle-Guinée. Il est cependant incontestable que tous les sinistres, signales ici comme au Fly-River et à Cloudy-Bay, ne sont que des représailles. Il est vrai que souvent les innocents payent pour les méchants, mais il n'en est pas moins vrai que jamais le noir n'a attaque le blanc sans motifs de vengeance. C'est que nous disait tout dernièrement encore le capitaine de 1'Espiegle qui a mouille quelques jours dans notre port, en face de notre maison, en se rendant a Singapour" [...].