Save the pagan babies

When posters like these were originally published in the 1920s and earlier, they weren't considered scandalous or even insensitive. They were considered an expression of sincere compassion. Catholics and all Christians used to take seriously the Great Commission of Christ, to "go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you." (Mt 28:19-20)

Today, of course, a lot of this is water under the bridge. My own parents were missionaries in China, where I was born, as many of you know. I was raised in Japan, where they spent the balance of their careers in mission work after leaving Communist China in the early 1950s. However, since coming to the United States for part of my college education in the 1970s, I can remember a sea change in attitudes towards missions. First, I can remember a change among some of the missionaries themselves whom I met both "in the field," as they used to say, and "on furlough" back in the States. Many of them, from various Protestant denominations, had begun devoting themselves increasingly to such objectives as English teaching in Japan. At first, these objectives were sometimes couched in terms of rationales of "outreach" and of establishing "contacts" for purposes of evangelism. Very quickly, among many of the younger groups of missionaries, however, all pretense of evangelism was dropped as English teaching seemed, more-and-more problematically to become nearly an end-in-itself. One-by-one, some of the smaller denominations, seeing no justification for sustaining their expensive "mission" programs in Japan (where the Dollar-Yen exchange rate skyrocketed from 365 Yen/Dollar in the early 1960s to nearly 100 Yen/Dollar in the mid-1970s), folded their operations and went home. Apart from Fundamentalists and conservative Evangelicals, any Protestant "mission" groups that remain are closer to being cultural good will ambassadors than anything remotely "missionary" in any traditional Christian sense.

Second, I can remember the attitude of many of my secularized peers during my college years (in the U.S., Europe, and Japan), when they learned that my parents were missionaries. Some of them, when they had gotten over their curiosity and fascination with the novelty of myself as an untimely born specimen of medieval quaintness, expressed distinct disdain for the religious "imperialism" represented by my family's religion -- that is, by Christianity generally. What were "we Westerners" doing over there (in those refined and sophisticated civilizations of China and Japan) telling those people how to live? That was the gist of the sentiment, even if it was rarely expressed quite so bluntly as that. The whole posture of "missions" -- with its labor of "evangelism" and (that more ideologically charged word) "proselytism" -- is seen as an European/white/male-dominant ethnocentric embarrassment.

But there was for me always another side to this story. I was not yet a Catholic then, but I knew about the stories of St. Francis Xavier coming to Japan in 1549, a good century before Protestant missions began and several centuries before the heyday of the great Protestant missionaries like Hudson Taylor (1832-1905) of the China Inland Mission (now renamed Overseas Missionary Fellowship). The stories of the Japanese novelist, Shusaku Endo, like Chinmoku 「沈黙」('Silence'), are full of spiritual struggles of faith and betrayal involving this earlier generation of Catholic missionaries and their Japanese converts and the persecutions following the edict of Toyotomi Hideyoshi expelling Christian missionaries from Japan in 1587. I had read about the Japanese martyrs -- the 26 Christians who were crucified in Nagasaki, including 6 Franciscan missionaries, and, among the 20 native Japanese Christians, a child of 13 and another of 12 years. The stories about these martyrs, usually listed as 'Paul Miki and his Companions', is as moving as any.

From my childhood and first twenty years on the "mission field" of Japan with my parents, two marks have left their impressions indelibly upon the firmament of my memories. These are, first, the love and sacrifice of missionaries, notwithstanding and surpassing all their many all-too-human character flaws; and, second, the profound gratitude of their converts, notwithstanding all the extraneous cultural baggage that may have accompanied the gift of the Gospel as its packaging. Both speak volumes about the gratitude of the human heart for the gift of salvation, freedom from guilt and despair, and promise of eternal joy and life offerd by the way of the cross and Jesus Christ. At the end of the day, when I think about how my mother (who is no longer with us) might have answered my cynical peers in college who asked what she was doing over in China and Japan telling them how to live, I think she might have called to mind the lines of an old Protestant hymn, "to tell the old, old story of Jesus and His love." The third stanza ends with the words:

I love to tell the story,
for some have never heard
the message of salvation
from God's own holy Word.

This is hardly the vision of a Western imperialist intruding upon an Asian garden party to tell its participants how they ought to live. To put the matter rather more bluntly and in a more common idiom: it's a matter of one beggar telling another beggar where to find bread.