Maximum Illud: Challenges Then, Challenges for the Church Today

Maximum Illud: Challenges Then, Challenges for the Church Today
SVD Mission in Contexts: Creative Responses in a Wounded World
Stephen Bevans, SVD

We live today in an era of “World Catholicism,” or, as Karl Rahner called it in a celebrated article, an era of the “world church.”[1] A first glimpse of this new era, Rahner wrote, could be seen in the composition of the bishops participating in the Second Vatican Council (1962-65). At the First Vatican Council in 1870, he noted, there were no indigenous bishops from Africa or Asia present. A hundred years later at Vatican II, though, despite the fact that “not at all in proportion to the representation of the Western episcopate,” a representation of bishops from Asia, Africa, and Oceania “was there.”[2] Today, more than sixty years after the start of the council, the “center of gravity” of Catholicism itself has shifted to these areas of the world, along with Latin America, and Pope Francis—himself a Latin American—appointed a good number of bishops from these countries to the College of Cardinals. More than at any time in the church’s history, cardinals who elected Francis’s successor came from these majority world churches. The face of Catholicism in the last century—not only its leadership but the entire People of God—has undergone a shift that can only be called “epochal.”[3]

Why has this shift come about? One principal reason, argues historian Dale T. Irvin, is that the church’s missionary movement, especially that undertaken in the nineteenth century, was actually successful. This is indeed “the great truth of World Christianity.”[4] Why was it successful, however? Among Catholics it might well be argued that a principal reason for such success was the breakthrough in missionary thinking articulated in the document, the centennial of which we celebrated in 2019: The Apostolic Letter (Encyclical) Maximum Illud, published on November 30, 1919 by Pope Benedict XV.[5]

My reflections in this essay will focus on this groundbreaking document, and I will proceed in three parts. First, I will briefly reflect on reasons why Benedict was moved to write the Apostolic Letter—the challenges then. Second, I will even more briefly outline the main contents of the letter and sketch its reception within the church. Third, I will offer some reflections on several challenges that, should the encyclical be written today, might be addressed in the context of today’s church, described by Pope Francis as “a community of missionary disciples.”[6]

[1] See K. Rahner, “Towards a Fundamental Theological Interpretation of Vatican II,” Theological Studies 40 (1979), 716-27.

[2] Rahner, 718.

[3] See W. Bühlmann, The Coming of the Third Church: An Analysis of the Present and Future of the Church (Maryknoll: Orbis Books 1974), ix.

[4] D.T. Irvin, “What is World Christianity?” in World Christianity: Perspectives and Insights, ed. J.Y. Tan and A.Q. Tran (Maryknoll: Orbis Books 2016), 11.

[5] Maximum Illud is often referred to as a “mission encyclical,” the first of five issued from 1919 until the eve of the Second Vatican Council. The official name for the document is “Apostolic Letter” (see the title on the Vatican website). In his important article on the document, Andrzej Miotk opts to use the term “encyclical,” since it addresses the entire church. See the reference to the document and to Miotk’s article in the notes below.

[6] Pope Francis, Apostolic Exhortation Evangelii Gaudium (EG), http://w2.vatican.va/content/francesco/en/apost_exhortations/documents/papa-francesco_esortazione-ap_20131124_evangelii-gaudium.html, 24.