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Vol. XVIII x No. 2

FEBRUARY 2006

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Mission in fiction

Missionaries are still untainted in the mind of the people of our age. Their sacrifice in leaving country and culture is recognized, the witness of their lives at the service of the poor upheld. From the heroes of the The Mission of Ronald Joffe (1986) to the silent victims in the recent Tears of the Sun, missionaries continue to make their appearance on the big screen and in books. Let′s have a look at five novels. And see how the missionary, as the main character, crosses the centuries and keeps his aura of meaningful drama and adventure.

Missionaries are still generally untainted in the mind of the people of our age who have, in general, become sophisticated and disenchanted. Their sacrifice in leaving the comfortable cocoon of their country and culture is recognized, the witness of their lives at the service of the poor upheld and their words have the ring of truth. Even their death is often dramatic, since it has been assessed that an average of one missionary is murdered every week somewhere around the world.

There is a fascination which surrounds the person of the missionaries and their enterprises that has sometimes captured the imagination of fiction writers and film-makers. From the heroes of the The Mission of Ronald Joffe (1986) to the silent victims in the recent Tears of the Sun, missionaries continue to make their appearance on the big screen and in books.

This is a presentation of five novels that have, as their main character, a missionary. Fiction can be telling more than reality if, for no other reason, it is selected and arranged in order to convey a certain message or to create strong emotions. A feeling can say much more than many explanations. At the origin of fiction, there is always a nutshell of reality that links fiction with the joys, ideals, pains and tragedies of the different generations.

Heroes in rough places

In The Keys of the Kingdom and in Death Comes for the Archbishop, it is the admiration for the person of the missionaries that prevails. The approach to evangelization and the crossing of cultural barriers is still fairly simple. Like in a black-and-white movie, it is the heroism of the missionary that stands out. The strange, unusual circumstances of their work only constitute a colorful backdrop to their bravery.

In this way, Willa Cather confesses her admiration for the French missionaries that evangelized the Far West of the United States. She writes: "One of the most intelligent and inspiring persons I found in my travels in the West was a Belgian priest, Fr. Haltermann, who lived with his sister in the parsonage behind a beautiful, old church at Santa Cruz, New Mexico, where he raised poultry and sheep and had a wonderful vegetable and flower garden. He was a florid, full-bearded farmer priest who drove about his eighteen Indian missions with a spring wagon and a pair of mules. He knew a great deal about the country and the Indians and their traditions."

Eventually, it was Archbishop Lamy, the first bishop of New Mexico, who inspired her and became the protagonist of her novel. She was intrigued and curious about how such a distinguished and well-bred man could withstand the daily life in a rough and crude frontier environment.

Cultural shock

Different is the point of arrival in the case of Black Robe and I Have Heard the Owl Call My Name. Also, Brian Moore draws his protagonist from the admiration for the gestures of the Jesuit missionaries to the Native Americans, the Red Skins.

But it is the nature of the people whom the missionary mingles with that comes to the fore. The missionary is aware of the emergence of these people. The yardstick is no longer the culture of the white man. He has come not only to teach but to learn. Sometimes there is culture shock, as in the case of Fr. Noel Chabanel, missionary to the Huron in 1640, one of the Canadian Martyrs. "He detested Indian life– the smoke, the vermin, the filthy food, the impossibility of privacy. He could not study by the smoky lodge fires, among the noisy crowds of men and squawks with their dogs and their restless, screeching children."

And yet, there is more than what meets the eye. Brian Moore writes: "In my search to write Black Robe, I moved to the Relations, the voluminous letters that the Jesuits sent back to their Superiors in France. In the Relations and in their deeply moving reports, I discovered an unknown and unpredictable world. These letters are the only real records of the early Indians of North America. They introduce us to a people that bear little resemblance to the "Red Indians" of folklore.

The Huron, Iroquois and Algonquin were a handsome, brave, incredibly cruel people, who at that early stage, were in no way dependent on the white man and, in fact, judged him to be their physical and mental inferior. They were warlike, and for reason of their religion, subjected their enemies to prolonged and unbearable tortures.

Brian Moore in Black Robe wants to present how the Indian belief in a world of night and in the power of dreams clashed with the Jesuits′ preaching of Christianity and paradise after death. Eventually, the details of the story narrated in his novel can be a commentary to the circumstances of the martyrdom of the Canadian Martyrs: Isaac Jogues and his seven companions who lost their lives from 1642 to 1649.

French Jesuits were the first missionaries to go to Canada and North America, after J. Cartier′s Travels opened Canada to white men in 1534. Their mission region extended from Nova Scotia to Maryland. These eight saints preached the Gospel to the Iroquois and Huron Indians and, after being tortured, they were martyred in the area of what is now Auriesville, New York. Ten years after the death of St. Isaac Jogues, Kateri Tekakwitha of the Algonquin tribe, the first North American Indian to be canonized, was born in the same village where he also later died.

Learning to respect

Less dramatic is the experience of Mark, the young pastor of I Heard the Owl Call My Name. It is a slow, reverent and delicate entering into the ways of life of the Indian tribe to which he is assigned. It is as if somebody were telling him: "Take off your shoes: the soil you are treading is sacred!" Sacred because before you came to preach the Gospel to these people, God had already arrived. His Spirit had already influenced their approach to life. So everybody tells Mark that he must learn, but it is a lesson of the heart. Most beautiful are the words that a bishop tells Mark about the Indian people′s feelings for their village: "The Indian knows his village and feels for his village as no white man can for his country, his town, or even for his own bit of land. His village is not the strip of land four miles long and three miles wide that is his as long as the sun rises and the moon sets. The myths are the village is the wind and the rain. The river is the village, and the black and white killer whales that herd the fish to the end of the inlet to gobble them up. The village is the salmon that comes up the river to spawn, the seal that follows the salmon and bites off his head. The village is the talking bird, the owl, that calls the name of the man who is going to die, and the silver-tipped grizzly that ambles into the village. The fifty-foot totem by the church is the village."

There is a kind of nostalgia for the old ways of the tribe, consecrated by a long tradition and threatened by the ways of the white people. There is bitterness and sadness when the youth of the tribe go to the cities and take to drinking and drugs; when they cease to respect the elders and lose their religion in the jungle of the metropolis. Mark is aware of this tragedy and shares the puzzlement of the elders in the same time that he tries to be close to the young and help them not to succumb to the allure of the city.

A martyr for justice

Eight years set apart the last book, The Confession of Joe Cullen, from the others. It is a late production of the great American leftist writer, Howard Fast, who is better known as the author of Spartacus, the major novel from which the blockbuster movie starring Kirk Douglas was derived.

Here, mission is an option for the poor, taking sides even to the point of understanding the armed revolution that struggles to change the structures of sin and egoism of the capitalist society. The fate of these revolutionary movements is not bright; there is very little hope for their victory since the collapse of communism in Russia. It is symptomatic that this novel was written exactly in 1989, the fateful year of the crumbling of the Berlin Wall.

The society of the "real" socialism has been a failure. With its going out there, goes out also the utopia, the dream of a socialist, just society. There is, in the book, a sense of despondency towards the condition of society, a bitterness that borders on cynicism. The only person that maintains some idealism is the priest who is murdered. That is why his person affects all the other characters of the novel. He is the catalyst of goodness and bravery in a world that is rotten to the core.

The circumstances of the missionary′s death are taken from the real story of Fr. James "Guadalupe" Carney, a North American Jesuit missionary in Nicaragua who crossed into Honduras to be the chaplain of the guerillas fighting against the contras. He came from a devout Catholic family, had served in the Second World War and, after the war, had joined the Jesuits, urged by his desire to be a missionary for the poor.

Within weeks, the guerilla band was tracked down and eliminated. Fr. Guadalupe was interrogated and tortured. On September 16, 1983, he was taken up in an army helicopter and hurled out, alive, to die on the mountainside below. His remains were never recovered.

In the manuscript he handed to his brother and sister Carney, he had written: "Since my novitiate, I have asked Christ for the grace to be able to imitate Him, even to martyrdom, to the giving of my life, to being killed for the cause of Christ. And I strongly believe that Christ will give me the grace to become a martyr for justice."

Fr. Lorenzo Carraro, Comboni Missionary

"THE KEYS OF THE KINGDOM"

The bestseller novel, The Keys of the Kingdom by Archibald Cronin (1942) is a cavalcade through a priest′s life that captures our imagination with its impact of tolerance, service, faith and godliness. Fr. Francis Chisholm is a priest who has spent the best part of his adult life as a missionary in China
He is now old and back in his Scottish native village. He has attracted the unwanted attention of his superiors for his somehow unusual ideas as when he stated: "Don′t think that heaven is in the sky. It is in the hollow of your hand. It is everywhere it doesn′t matter where"; or when he told a distinguished lady who had asked for spiritual direction: "You should eat less The gate of paradise is narrow!"

When Monsignor Sleeth, the bishop′s secretary, comes to the aged, limping and poor missionary, intending to reprimand him, he departs instead with humility and a new respect after he reads the good father′s journal; first of the tragic death of both his parents as a consequence of sectarian prejudices, then of an innocent, unrequited love in his youth, then of a life spent in unselfish devotion, self-punishing denials and unswerving fidelity to his mission that covers more than half a century. The action starts in Scotland, shifts to China and then back to the land of his birth.

There is a spell of prime-of-life accomplishments as Fr. Francis makes some headway in the far province of Chek Kow, even into saving the life of the wealthy local Mandarin′s son and heir by an emergency lancing of the boy′s blood-poisoned arm. Then comes civil war and his mission on the beautiful Hill of the Green Jade happens to fall in direct line of fire between the authoritative army and the Chinese bandits. The book was successfully brought to the screen by Joseph Mankiewicz in the black and white movie of the same title (1945), starring Gregory Peck as the missionary. The movie got five Oscar nominations.

"DEATH COMES FOR THE ARCHBISHOP"

There is something epic – and almost mythic – about the beautiful novel by Willa Cather, Death Comes for the Archbishop (1927). The story tells of two human lives, linked by missionary vocation and lived simply in the silence of the desert. In 1851, Father Jean Marie Latour comes as the Apostolic Vicar to New Mexico, accompanied by his vicar, Fr. Joseph Vaillant.

What they find is a vast territory of red hills and tortuous arroyos, American by law but Mexican and Indian in custom and belief. In the almost forty years that follow, Latour spreads his faith in the only way he knows – gently, although he must contend with unforgiving landscape, derelict and sometimes openly rebellious priests, and his own loneliness.

Bishop Jean Latour and his vicar, Father Joseph Vaillant, in the course of organizing a new diocese in the territory of New Mexico, struggle to establish pioneer missions in the area. Latour and Vaillant are lifelong friends and, while they share a certain homesickness for their own country, they are completely dedicated to their life′s work. Latour is an aristocrat and an intellectual, a man of endless charity but, at the same time, a private person. Vaillant is practical, vigorous, and cheerful. The novel follows their struggles: the Navajo and Hopi Indians are reluctant to be drawn to the faith; the Spanish clergy already in the territory opposes the missionaries, while the harsh climate and unrewarding land tax them to the uttermost.

But the missionaries are totally committed. Then help comes – chiefly from their devoted guide, Jacinto, and the frontiersman Kit Carson. Their success is completed by the establishment and consecration of the Cathedral of Sta. Fe. The two friends are separated when Father Joseph is made a bishop and sent to Colorado; but death is near and they die one after the other, within a short time; their work done.

Out of these events, Cather gives us an indelible vision of life unfolding in a place where time itself seems suspended. The narrative is based on the careers of two French missionaries, Jean-Baptiste Lamy and Joseph Machebeuf, who worked in the New Mexico territory in the middle of the 19th century.

The novel is considered a classic of American literature and continuously reprinted. With it, Willa Cather not only confirmed her character as a novelist noted for her portrayals of frontier life in the American plain but achieved a measure of universality in describing the heroism of the missionaries that transcends that particular time and place.

"BLACK ROBE"

Black Robe by Brian Moore (1985) is the powerful tale of a Jesuit missionary′s struggle with the fierce natives of an unforgiving land – and with the heavy burden of his own unforgiving conscience.

It is the gripping description of a journey by the protagonist in 17th century Canada, an untamed country claimed by French, traveled by the Jesuits but belonging to the natives. He goes on a mission to relieve a dying priest. With empathy and insight, the writer portrays Father Paul Laforgue′s ardent longing to be a martyr for Christ; the sexual torment of young Daniel Davost, Laforgue′s protégé who was seduced by a native girl; and the mixture of superstitious fear and hatred that they provoke in the native tribes.

The travelers are captured, beaten and tortured. The priest arrives at his destination only to find the confrere in charge dying and the local Indians decimated by a fever brought by the white men.

The tension that ensues when these two white men come in contact with the natives will test all their beliefs. The clash of cultures that the writer presents is indeed brutal but it is not futile.

In the novel′s closing scene, Laforgue who is despaired by his own worthiness to be a martyr, despite withstanding torture, abandonment by Davost and the murder of the priest he came to replace, agrees to baptize the native villagers who are being ravaged by the plague; not necessarily because he believes that their conversion is genuine or that it will save them, but simply because he loves them and because, finally, he believes that God loves them all.

Despite the brutality and destructiveness of these initial encounters between the Black Robes and the Indians, it is this ethos of Christian love that eventually won the day and brought civilization to Canada and its native population.
Black Robe became a successful film in 1991 under the direction of Bruce Beresford

"I HEARD THE OWL CALL MY NAME"

This novel by Margaret Craven (1973) expresses the insightful ways of people learning to live in respectful relations with each other and the land.
In this story, an Anglican priest goes to a Kwakiutl village on the British Columbia coast to serve the Tsawataineuk people. The circumstances of his going there are unusual: he is just ordained and he is discovered with cancer. The doctors give him less than two years to live. The bishop then says: "So short a time to learn so much? It leaves me no choice: I shall send him to my hardest parish: to Kingcome on patrol of the Indian villages."

The theme is not the usual one of a Christian imposing foreign beliefs on a native culture. The priest learns from the people of the village and becomes part of their life as much as and, perhaps more than, they adapt – selectively – to his religion.
Before the priest leaves for his parish, an old retired canon tells him that he must first learn from the people, not the other way around. "Don′t be sorry for yourself because you are going to so remote a parish. "Be sorry for the Indians. You know nothing and they must teach you."

One of the highlights of the story is the slow, difficult but loving progress of Fr. Mark Brian in getting to know the ways of boats and tides, as well as the ways of the simple people who await him with amused curiosity and empathy, especially of his guide, Jim.

Little by little, Mark enters into the duties of his new position and understands the cycle of fishing and the seasons in the life of the people. The new presbytery is built; the bishop comes for his pastoral visitation. A strong bond is established. Already the signs of the advanced sickness are apparent in Mark and then the twist in the story: a storm breaks out and Mark dies in the process of looking for a lost fisherman.

The book ends with the young vicar being given the solemn tribal burial. "Past the village, flowed the river, like time, like life itself, waiting for the swimmer salmon to come again on his way to the climax of his adventurous life, and to the end for which he had been made."

"THE CONFESSION OF JOE CULLEN"

In "The Confession of Joe Cullen" (1989), Howard Fast presents a Vietnam veteran who is at the same time an accomplished, instinctive pilot, faced by an irrepressible urge: to confess his part in the murder of a missionary priest in Nicaragua. He has been running arms for the contras there and then, carrying back heroine for the U.S. market. Some big shots of the government and the CIA are in it up to their neck. This troubles Joe Cullen only up to a point because the money is good! He is a lapsed Catholic and has witnessed worse horrors in Vietnam.

But when he sees Fr. Francis Luke O’Healy, whom he had met while the priest was held prisoner by the contras and had been so good to him, thrown out of the helicopter that Joe is flying, he can′t stand it any more and quits. Moreover, he must, at any cost, confess it to someone. He tries to tell it to Sylvia, a prostitute, but he is kicked out. He goes then to an old priest and, eventually, to the police.
A tape is made of his confession that is sent by the NY police officers, Freedman and Ramos, to the District Attorney but nothing is done. In the meantime, the bad men are after Joe Cullen, trying to stop the leak. They are ruthless: Sylvia is killed with an ice pick; Fr Immelman, the old priest, is suffocated with a pillow inside the church and, eventually, Joe Cullen is also gunned down.

Everything seems to be over, but the villains left a faint track and it is Freedman, the Jewish police officer, who discovers it and, enraged, manages to have the case opened again by the District Attorney. His anger is eloquent: "What does it mean to love one′s country? What do you love?. . . Mountains, rivers?. . . The only thing to love in any country is what people do and what they believe in. Through my father′s eyes (he was an immigrant) I saw a country I could love. Then I went to Vietnam and I came back to a country where law is a farce; where greed has become the national religion; where kids sell their lives for crack; where people in our government, paid with the taxpayers′ money, are flooding this country with cocaine and where priests who are trying to believe in something are murdered in Central America!"

The book ends with a showdown between Freedman and Monty, the arrogant boss of the drugs′ dealers. The part played by the missionary is relatively small in the economy of the novel but all the other characters are affected by him. He is the catalyst of their consciences. <WM

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