The White Fathers by Glenn D. Kittler

For eight years, I worked at a protestant seminary, and there were frequently piles of books being given away: sometimes by the spouse of someone who had died, sometimes the library was giving away discards, and sometimes they were donated by someone who was just cleaning off their shelves.  Being one of the very few Catholics around, I was able to pick up a lot of Catholic books that no one else was interested in. The White Fathers had belonged to one of the professors at the seminary professors. The date 72-73 is written on the title page, so I assume that is when he read it. It is full of underlining and notes (frequently illegible), which made reading the book even more interesting.

This book was not on the shelf of books that I am reading, although it would have ended up there eventually. It was on a shelf that is next to the chair where I sit when I pray in the morning. I usually do a bit of spiritual reading, or reading about the saints every morning, so when I finished the last book I was reading, I pulled this one off the shelf, and had been reading about ten pages a day--until it got so interesting that I just kept reading.

When Bishop Charles Martial Allemand-Lavigerie was appointed Bishop of Algiers in 1867, he already had a heart for the missions. He had previously been the chairman of L'Oeuvre d'Orient  which was organized to erect Christian schools in the Middle East. Although Bishop Lavigerie was almost always opposed by the French government, who wanted him only to minister to the French in Algiers, he had a vision for Africa, and he worked tirelessly for the vision all his life.

The fact that Lavigerie was not allowed to evangelize the Arabs did not slow him down at all. He knew that the Arabs would not be open to evangelization until they lost their deep suspicion of Christians. He decided to organize an order of missionary priests who would live as Arabs--would be Arabs as much as possible without violating their Catholic faith. They would dress, and eat like Arabs, and of course, be proficient in Arabic, and eventually many African languages. Most important to Lavigerie was that they be men of prayer. Their first work would be to provide medical assistance to the Arabs, and then education for children, and agricultural help.

The White Fathers in their habit which consists of a white, traditional Arab gondoura
or robe, and a red fez.

It took a long time for the bishop to find men for the Missionaries of Africa, or White Fathers as they came to be known because of their white habits. Many men did not persevere through the noviate, and even this first three recruits, one of whom had become superior of the order, never made it into active ministry. Time and again, Lavigerie thought that the end had come, but something always came through, and in time they established many missions in Northern Africa.

The next goal of the missionaries was to send caravans to set up a series of missions through the Sahara, and eventually to reach Central Africa. The three priests in the first caravan were murdered, but more caravans followed. Eventually, they reached Uganda, and their work there and the tragedies that followed make up a large part of the book. If you are not familiar with Charles Lwanga and the Martyrs of Uganda, you can read a bit more about them on my other blog, in a post written by my friend Paul.

Kittler also writes about the life of one former student of the White Fathers' schools, and two of the priests of the order. The first gives an idea of the quality of education the students in the schools received; and the second shows the kind of work the priests were doing, and also the very different types of men who belong to the order.

Bishop, eventually Cardinal Archbishop Lavigerie's vision can be seen in this passage:

It was . . . Lavigerie's idea that his missionaries should always remember that they were in Africa for the sake of the African. He was stern in his instructions not to Europeanize the African, believing that in time the African could decide for himself what there might be in Europe he wished to make his own. 

This practice of not trying to change the culture of the Africans was very contrary to what most governments, and in truth most missionaries of the time considered appropriate. Lavigerie was also very constant in asserting the missionaries they were working toward the day when Africans could assume leadership of their own countries.

Glenn D. Kittler's obituary in the New York Times says that he had at one time studied for the priesthood, and that he was a contributing editor of Guideposts (an inspirational Christian magazine founded by Norman Vincent Peale). One gathers from this that he isn't exactly impartial toward his subject (which is true), and that the book is not written in an academic manner (which is also true). The professor who formerly owned the book complained more than once about a lack of documentation. There was a real problem with dates in the book--years, not months and days--that might have been as much attributable to bad copyreading as to any error on Kittler's part. Given that, it is still a very readable narrative of the beginning of an order which is still at work in Africa today. In fact Kittler's obituary stated "Mr. Kittler wrote ''The White Fathers'' in 1957. The New York Times called it ''a magnificently comprehensive historical introduction to the last hundred years of Christian Africa.''

You can hear a bit about the current ministry of the Missionaries of Africa here:

AMDG