A mission remains vulnerable if its sacramental and educational work depends indefinitely on a small body of foreign personnel. War, expulsion or a change of government can remove those personnel suddenly. More fundamentally, the Church is universal and cannot be treated as the religious possession of the nation from which the missionaries came.
Benedict XV’s Maximum illud of 1919 gives a particularly clear expression to these principles. Its importance lies in identifying missionary success with the establishment of a well-founded local church, rather than with the prestige of a foreign country. This criterion can illuminate earlier missions without pretending that every historical setting was identical.
Formation means more than assigning local people auxiliary tasks. It requires serious theological study, spiritual discipline and the capacity to assume genuine pastoral responsibility. Catechists, teachers, religious women and Christian families also sustain the life of a church and should not disappear behind the names of foreign founders. The histories of Kongo, the Philippines and other regions demonstrate the importance of local initiative.
The distinction between mission and empire is practical as well as theoretical. A church that can survive political independence and changes of regime has achieved something different from a colonial religious outpost. Catholic apologetics may therefore defend the goods brought by missionaries while criticising arrangements that perpetuated national privilege within ecclesiastical government. The same universal faith that motivates mission supplies the reason for such criticism.