The Workers Are Few; Reflections Upon Vocation to the Foreign Missions

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: Chapter II PRESENT CONDITION OF THE APOSTOLATE Let your faith be announced in the entire world. Bom. i. 18. Ljet us give a rapid glance at the splendid progress of the apostolate during the last century. Many things have brought it about, and we should note above all that the missions owe their development and increase, and indeed their very existence, to that noble work known the world over as The Propagation of the Faith.1 On account of the wars and misfortunes during the closing years of the eighteenth century, which brought such desolation to the Church, and because of the suppression of so many religious houses which had furnished the missions already existing with workers, the apostolate, at the beginning of the last century, far from thinking of new conquest, was scarcely able to hold the lands already occupied. How different is the condition of things to-day! If we make a comparison between the condition of the missions at the beginning of the nineteenth century and that of to-day, we are encouraged by the bright prospects for the future. Let us start with ASIA. In India during the year 1800, there were 475,000 Catholics, 2 archbishops, 2bishops, and 2 vicars apostolic. To-day there are 2,311,000 Catholics, 35 archbishops and bishops, 3 prefects apostolic, and 2,894 priests. After this comes Indo-China, which includes Burmah, Cambodia, Cochin China, Siam, Malacca, and Tonkin. In the year 1800 in all these regions there were not more than 319,000 Catholics. To-day in Indo-China we find 1,121,122 Catholics, 17 bishops, and 1,397 priests. 1 The Lyons (France) Society for the Propagation of the Faith, founded in 1822. China, with her 450,000,000 inhabitants, in 1800 had but 5 poor missions, and the Catholics there were reduced to 202,000. To-day in Chin...