The Spiritan congregation, which was first founded in France in 1703 before merging with François Libermann’s congregation of the Holy Heart of Mary in 1848, has deployed hundreds of Catholic missionaries around the globe from the mid nineteenth century to the present day. Though initially dominated by Frenchmen, the congregation branched out quickly and drew clergy from many nationalities into its fold, including contingents of anglophones from Ireland, Canada, and the United States. In recent years, many Spiritans hail from areas of Africa that the congregation first evangelized over one hundred years ago. Current Superior General Alain Mayama, elected by his peers in 2021, is a Tanzanian who is the first African to serve in the role. The history of the congregation thus reflects the seismic shift in Catholicism over the last century from a faith exported by Europeans in colonial settings to a more truly universal creed that is flourishing among people in the global South. Indeed, flows of clergy have completely reversed in the space of two generations. Whereas Europeans had once fanned out to spread the gospel around the world, now clergy from Africa and Asia flow to Europe to fill empty pulpits.
The Spiritans are particularly known for evangelizing Africa, though they had a truly global reach. Their archives, which feature troves of missionary correspondence, diaries from mission posts, administrative documents and reports, as well as thousands of photographs, provide a wealth of information for historians of Catholicism, colonialism, and decolonization. Within the French imperial sphere, the Spiritans worked in Senegal, Guinea, Cameroun, Congo-Brazzaville, Gabon, and Madagascar, among others, but they were also very active in anglophone Africa, especially Kenya, Tanzania and Nigeria, as well as lusophone Angola and Guinea-Bissau. Beyond Africa, they have a long history in French possessions in the Indian Ocean and the Caribbean, as well as a meaningful presence in Haiti, Brazil, the US (where they founded Duquesne University in the 19th century) and Canada. Their rich archives thus have much to offer researchers interested in Catholicism in any of these locales.
This photograph dates from the 1950s and shows members of the Association of Catholic African Students in France on a spiritual retreat with their chaplain, Spiritan Father Joseph Michel (back left). Many of these students were on scholarships to high schools and universities in France with the expectation that they would return to form the educated elite of their home territories. Michel, who had been assigned to his post by the archconservative Spiritan Archbishop of Dakar and papal delegate to French African Marcel Lefebvre, was supposed to keep the students on the straight and narrow in the metropole. To Lefebvre’s horror, the students’ critiques of French colonial rule and of the Eurocentrism of the Catholic Church rubbed off on Michel, who delivered a talk on the Catholic “Duty to Decolonize” in Paris in 1954, setting off an uproar in the francophone Catholic press.
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