The Development of Polish Missionary Actions in North Africa in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries

Abstract

The paper shows the work of Polish missionaries in North Africa in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Over the last two centuries representatives of various orders would arrive there. The largest number consisted of Jesuits, Salezjans, and Franciscans. Also Polish female religious were very active in the missionary movement.

There were few attempts at sending Polish missionaries to the African continent from the sixteenth century onwards, but their stay was short and aimed at learning the socio-cultural conditions there. As late as the 1849s, Fr. Maximilian Ryłło set off on a missionary expedition to North-East Africa, where in Sudanese Khartoum a missionary vicariate for Middle Africa was to be established. Its goal was to convert African people to Catholicism. This attempt failed and Fr. Ryłło died.

At the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, representatives of Polish order arrived in North-West Africa to be trained as novices, or to learn about pastoral work on mission. In the inter-war period Polish Franciscan sisters joined French orders, and during the war the Polish religious and the lay people were with gen. Władysław Anders.

After the end of the Second World War the Polish religious due to the legal regulations and the regime could not participate in the missionary life of North Africa until the 1970s. The religious people who were there had arrived in Africa in the previous period and continued their missionary work.

The situation changed in further decades, during which period people from Polish male and female orders were sent to North Africa. It is for the first time that Polish religious arrived in Libya, and then in Mauritania. In North-West Africa religious posts were strongly developed on the basis of Polish scientific-technical specialists who arrived there for some time. Unfortunately, together with the progressive Arabization of this part of Africa Polish specialists, male and female missionaries began to leave this region. It is particularly difficult for the Catholic Church to work in this territory, owing to the dominant Islam in this region.

At present the largest number of male and female religious people are still in Libya. There are a few religious in the other North-African countries. In the case of Morocco, it is also a priest who comes from the representative of Canadian Polonia.