Malabar Rites - Origins

Origins

The question of Malabar Rites originated in the method followed by the Jesuit mission, since the beginning of the seventeenth century, in evangelizing those countries. The prominent feature of that method was a condescending accommodation to the manners and customs of the people to be converted. Enemies of the Jesuits claim that, in Madura, Mysore and the Karnatic, the Jesuits either accepted for themselves or permitted to their neophytes such practices as they knew to be idolatrous or superstitious. Other reject the claim as unjust and absurd. They say that the claim is tantamount to asserting that these men, whose intelligence at least was never questioned, were so stupid as to jeopardize their own salvation in order to save others, and to endure infinite hardships in order to establish among the Hindus a corrupt and sham Christianity.

The popes, while disapproving of some usages hitherto considered inoffensive or tolerable by the missionaries, never charged them having knowingly adulterated the purity of religion. On one of them, who had observed the "Malabar Rites" for seventeen years previous to his martyrdom, the Church has conferred the honour of beatification. The process for the beatification of Father John de Britto was going on at Rome during the hottest period of the controversy over the famous "Rites"; and the adversaries of the Jesuits asserted beatification to be impossible, because it would amount to approving the "superstitions and idolatries" maintained by the missioners of Madura. Yet the cause progressed, and Benedict XIV, on 2 July 1741, declared "that the rites in question had not been used, as among the Gentiles, with religious significance, but merely as civil observances, and that therefore they were no obstacle to bringing forward the process". There is no reason to view the "Malabar Rites", as practised generally in the said missions, in any other light. Hence the good faith of the missionaries in tolerating the native customs should not be contested; on the other hand, they, no doubt, erred in carrying this toleration too far. But the bare enumeration of the Decrees by which the question was decided shows how perplexing it was and how difficult the solution.