-2­ very different nature. However, it owed much to the pioneer work of the great Jesuit missionary, Alexandre de Rhodes, who worked with marked success in Cochi.n­ China and then in Tonkin from 1624 until his expulsion in 1665. By 1640 he had gathered a Christian community of 30,000, had recruited catechists, and had estab­ lished a school for their training. Rhodes held the same opinion as Valignano, the Jesuit administrator in the Far East during the preceeding century. He believed that the recruiting and training of an adequate native clergy was essential to the permanent planting of the Church in any area. He would make Indo-China a testing ground for demonstrating the soundness of this strategy. After his expulsion Rhodes visited Rome to persuade the Sacred Congregation for the Propagation of the Faitb to approve his scheme. This is the papal organ for the coordination and supervision 01 Roman Catholic missionary activity. Having received encouragement, he went on to France and sought adherents. Fran~ois Pallu and Pierre Lambert de la Motte, were among those won to Rhodes' views and upon his recommendation they were appointed Vicars Apostolic for Tonkin and Cochin. The Propaganda had found it necessary to break the stranglehold of the Portuguese Padroado on missions in the Far East in order to meet the urgent demands of evangelism in that vast area. The establishment of ordinary dioceses under bish­ ops within the usual hierarchical structure had been suspended, because such bishops under the old arrangement were SUbject to the Paqroado and the Archbishop of Goa. Now Vicars and Prefects Apostolic in episcopal orders, but not having independent diocesan status, were appointed as personal representatives of the Pope over new ecclestical areas. The Portuguese contested this practice, and the resulting con­ fusion did not help the progress of missions. , Pallu became the chief founder of the Societe des l1issions Etrangeres de Paris J or the Paris Foreign Missions Society, in 1658 and the 11ission Semi nary for Secular Priests in 1663. The monastic orders, which had been so zealous in missionary activity, had been slow to recruit a native clergy. Pallu and his brethren, follow­ ing Valignano and Rhodes, believed that a native ministry was essential for the per­ petuation of the Church and the propagation of the faith. They also held that mO­ nastic orders, directed and controlled from Europe and admitting few natives, could not provide the ministry nor the strategy required in the Far East. Their ideal was the creation of an adequate body of secular clergy, that is, normal parish Pr i est s and other clergy, / under the jurisdiction of native bishops, and not in monas­ tic orders. The Societe was created as the instrument for training and sending out as missionaries secular priests who would be devoted to the realization of this ideal. Its program expanded slowly, but from the beginning Indo-China was one of its major areas of concern. Portuguese and Spanish political ambitions and rivalry in the region troubled the cause of missions, and it was through French Roman Catholic missionaries that French influence was first introduced into the political situation. Eventually French power came to dominate the area to the exclusion of other European interests, finally in the nineteenth century reducing the states to colonial status, even though they were mostly protectorates in theory. French rule first gav; political unity to the region. The beginning was made when Bishop Pigneaux de Behaine at the end of the eighteenth century secured French intervention to restore an exiled monarch,Gialong, to the throne of Cochin-China. In return France received a terri­ torial concession and the missionaries profited by royal favor. Despite a controversy over rites, less catastrophic than that in China, and repeated persecutions and expulsion of foreign missionaries, the Church in general -3­ prospered, due in large measure to the loyalty and devotion of the native clergy. The Christian community grew steadily and by 1800 numbered 250,000 in Tonkin, 50,000 in Cochin-China, and was present with varying strength in the other states. Sources for the Early Period The outline of the history of the Roman Catholic mission in Indo-China from the beginning down to the present period is set forth in Catholic Mission History by Joseph Schmidlin (translated by Matthias Braun; Techny, Illinois, Mission Press, Society of the Divine Word, 1933); and it can be followed still more readily in A History of the Expansion of Christianity by Kenneth Scott Latourette, Vols. III,-VI and VII tN.y., Harper, 1939-1945). The story of the mission, placed more fully in the matrix of the general history of Indo-China, is given considerable attention in French Indo-China by Virginia Thompson. Stress is placed on the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and upon the role of the mission in political and colonial affairs. It appears by her account to be more of a temporal power than a spiritual enterprise. The large number of Roman Catholics now in the land would seem, however, to indicate that the indigenous peoples have accepted Christianity and found it suitable to their situation to a far greater degree than the author would apparently recognize. The manuscript sources for the early period are to be found in the Archives of the Propaganda, the Archives of the Society of Jesus in Rome (much of the material being in the Victor Emmanuel Library), in the Archives of the Soci;te'des Missions­ Etrangeresat Paris, and in the Archives of the Padroado in Goa and at Lisbon. The Jesuits are in the process of editing their missionary documents in definitive form in a collection called Monumenta Missionum Societatis Iesu, being currently published in Rome. Eventually the documents relating to the Jesuit missions in Indo-China will be available in this series. The vast collection of documents on the history of missions under the Portuguese Padroado are being collected, edited, and published in Goa by Antonio da Silva Rego. Six volumes have been published between 1949 and 1951, covering the years 1500 to 1558. The title of the monumental work is Documentax~o para Histor{a das l~ssoes de Padroado Portugu~s do Oriente. The most important contemporary printed sources for the early missions can be located by reference to the indices in volumes 4, 5, and 6 of that mine of biblio­ graphical information about Roman Catholic missions, Bibliotheca Missionum, begun by Robert Streit and continued by Johannes Dindinger, published in Aachen by the Franziskus Xaverius Missionsverein Zentrale, 1928, 1929, and 1931. A good list will be found in the bibliographical section in Rome et les Missions dlIndochine au XVlle Siecle by Chappoulie, to which reference will be:ma~ - -- ----­ The works of Alexandre de Rhodes are most important among the early Jesuit sources. The Missionary Research Library has one of these books: Divers Voyages et Missions du P. Alexandre de Rhodes en la Chine, & autres Royaumes de l'Orient avec-­ son Retour-en Europe par la Perse &-rIArmenIe; Paris, Sebastian etlGabriel Cramoisy, 'i7C'"lU;;l3. -- - -- -- -- . The accounts of Bishops Frangois Pallu and Lambert de la Motte and their mis­ sionaries are similarly the most important sources for the beginnings of the missions of the Societe des Missions Etrangeres. The Missionary Research Library possesses two of these: Relation des Missions des Evesques Fran~ois ~ Royaumes de Siam, de la Cochinchine, de Camboye, & du Tonkin; Paris, Le Petit, Couterot, and Angot, 1674; and Relation des~ssions et-des Voyages des Evesques Vicaires Apostoliques, et de -4­ leurs Ecclesiastiques ~s Ann~es 1672, 1673, 1674, & 1675; Paris, Angot, 1680. The Library also has a copY-of the two Bishops' InStructIOnes for their missionaries and the seminarians of the Society at Paris and in their school in Siam. To these must then be added the four collections of documents edited by Abbe Adrien Launayand pub­ lished in Paris by the Societ~: / Documents Historiques Relatifs ~ la Soci~tt des Missions-Etrangeres, vol. I, n. d. Histoire de la Mission de CochinchIne (16$8-1823), Documents Historiques, 3 vols., 1920-192S:- - -- - Histoire de la Mission de Siam (1662-1811), Documents Historiques, vol. I (165 8­ 1717),1927. - -- ---- Lettres de Monseigneur Pallu, 2 vols., n.d. Extracts from early reports are available in En Chersonese d'Or. Recits jVj[ssionaires des XVn e and ;{VIne Si~cles, selected and edited by Henri Sy;Paris, Bloud et Gay, 1947-.­ Launay's three-volume Histoire General" / de la Societe" I/' des Missions-Etrangeres .... (Paris, Tequi, 1894) is a major secondary source-for that agency and its missions. An excellent account of the beginning otthe Roman Catholic Church in Indo-China is in progress. It is Aux Origines d'une Eglise: Rome et les Missions d'Indochine au XVIIe Siecle ~ Henri Chappoulie.- The first volume-only has thus far-appeared, en: titled, Clerge Portugais et Ev~ques Frangais dans les Royaumes ~'Annam et de Siam. (Paris, Bloud et Gay, 194JY This promises to be the definitive work on the early period of the missions when completed. Another book of much more limited value is Essai sur les Origines du Christianisme au Tonkin et dans les Autres Pays Annamites by Romanet du Cailland tparis, Challamel;-191S), basea-2hiefly on the report of Ordones de Cevallos. A sketch of the career of Pallu is given in Chapter VI of Six Great Missionaries of the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centures by David Jenks (London, Mowbray; Milwaukee, Morehouse, 1930)-.-Concerning~ the recruiting and training of the native clergy in which the Societe des Missions-Etrangeres pioneered, see De Ein­ heimische Klerus in den Heidenl~ndern by Anton Huonder (Freiburg, Herder, 190~and Der Einheimische Klerus in Geschichte und Gegenwart: Festschrift P.