Roman Catholic Church in Kongo - Maturation of The Church

Maturation of The Church

Although Afonso is often credited with creating and establishing the church, it is probably his grandson and successor Diogo I Nkumbi a Mpudi who really placed the church on solid ground. Under Diogo, a lay organization of teachers first grew up to support and supplement the always meager number of ordained priests. Diogo also had the services of some of the earliest missionaries of the Jesuit Order, who worked in Kongo from 1548 to 1555. Diogo worked smoothly with the Jesuits when they first came, but as the Jesuits demanded more respect and worked at times against Diogo's political interests, he became disillusioned. Their mutually antagonistic correspondence with Portugal during this period has sometimes contributed to Diogo enjoying a reputation as a weak or uninterested Christian, though the events of his reign suggest that such a reputation was probably undeserved. Not only did Diogo arrange for the church to reach into the rural areas of the country, but he actively supported missionary work to the north (into the kingdom of Loango and south into Matamba, and he supported Jesuit work in Ndongo as well.

At the same time, as the church grew stronger, the King of Portugal decided to take greater control of it. He formalized his attempt to exercise control over Kongo's church by having the Pope place Kongo under the control of the newly created bishop of Sao Tome in 1534. Many years elapsed between the formal subordination of Kongo to Sao Tome and the first actual attempt of the bishop to exercise real control. When he did in the 1540, Diogo refused to allow the bishop to dismiss his personal confessor, Manuel Afonso. After another failed attempt in 1596, the Portuguese decided to destroy the Kongo church. In 1624 the bishop, moved, permanently,to Luanda and stopped ordaining new Kongo clergy.

Diogo and the kings that followed established a strong laiety, into whose hands the job of education typically fell, while the small numbers of ordained clergy only performed the sacraments. This pattern, so visible in later Kongo history, was probably already present in the late 16th century. The lay ministers were typically designated as teachers (mestres, literally masters, in Portuguese), were drawn from the nobility of Kongo, paid salaries by the state, and engaged both in teaching literacy, religious education, and often also secretarial duties. The personal papers of one such layman, António Manuel (who later became Kongo's ambassador to Rome) reveal the workings of this position. When given charge of the church of the Trinity in Soyo, he was paid a portion of the fees that were paid for his services, including fees charged in burials. When he was made mestre of the province of Mpemba, he was paid a salary of 6 lefukus of nzimbu shells a month, and also performed duties as a secretary.

We have very little information about the numbers or lives of these mestres though they were very important in the day to day life of the church. Their activities explain how the ordinary Kongolese managed to retain their version of Christianity even in the absence of ordained clergy. The certainly worked closely with the secular clergy of the country, and are often mentioned by the missionaries of the regular orders (primarily Jesuit and Capuchin) who visited and worked in Kongo in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.