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The Student Missionary League (Italian: Lega missionaria studenti, LMS) is a Roman Catholic youth-training organisation set up by the Jesuits of the Istituto Massimiliano Massimo in 1927.
The LMS is a member of MAGIS, the official Jesuit NGO, and since 2010 it is the missionary section of the Italian CLC involved in the training for volunteers.
The LMS methodology is based on "action - prayer - study", a synthesis of its missionary vocation, Catholic nature, and the propensity to analyse the global and local social context.
The LMS has been mainly involved with missionary and volunteering work-camps in Romania, Bosnia, Peru, Cuba and Kenya, where it has developed long-term projects such as family-houses, family and children centres, and schools. In Italy, it has been involved with local emergencies such as the 2009 L'Aquila earthquake and the asylum-seekers in Ragusa.
Francis Xavier, SJ, venerated as Saint Francis Xavier, was born in Navarre, Spain. He was a Catholic missionary and saint who co-founded the Society of Jesus and, as a representative of the Portuguese Empire, led the first Christian mission to Japan.
The Society of Jesus, also known as the Jesuit Order or the Jesuits, is a religious order of clerics regular of pontifical right for men in the Catholic Church headquartered in Rome. It was founded in 1540 by Ignatius of Loyola and six companions, with the approval of Pope Paul III. The society is engaged in evangelization and apostolic ministry in 112 nations. Jesuits work in education, research, and cultural pursuits. Jesuits also conduct retreats, minister in hospitals and parishes, sponsor direct social and humanitarian ministries, and promote ecumenical dialogue.
David Livingstone was a Scottish physician, Congregationalist, pioneer Christian missionary with the London Missionary Society, and an explorer in Africa. Livingstone was married to Mary Moffat Livingstone, from the prominent 18th-century Moffat missionary family. Livingstone came to have a mythic status that operated on a number of interconnected levels: Protestant missionary martyr, working-class "rags-to-riches" inspirational story, scientific investigator and explorer, imperial reformer, anti-slavery crusader, and advocate of British commercial and colonial expansion. As a result, Livingstone became one of the most popular British heroes of the late 19th-century Victorian era.
This timeline of Christian missions chronicles the global expansion of Christianity through a listing of the most significant missionary outreach events.
The Chinese Rites controversy was a dispute among Catholic missionaries over the religiosity of Confucianism and Chinese rituals during the 17th and 18th centuries. The debate discussed whether Chinese ritual practices of ancestor veneration and other formal rites qualified as religious, and thus incompatible with Catholic belief. The Jesuits argued that these Chinese rites were secular rituals that were compatible with Christianity, within certain limits, and should thus be tolerated. The Dominicans and Franciscans, however, disagreed and reported the issue to Rome.
The Canadian Martyrs, also known as the North American Martyrs, were eight Jesuit missionaries from Sainte-Marie among the Hurons. They were ritually tortured and killed on various dates in the mid-17th century in Canada, in what is now southern Ontario, and in upstate New York, during the warfare between the Iroquioan tribes the Mohawk and the Huron. They have subsequently been canonized and venerated as martyrs by the Catholic Church.
The Oregon missionaries were pioneers who settled in the Oregon Country of North America starting in the 1830s dedicated to bringing Christianity to local Native Americans. There had been missionary efforts prior to this, such as those sponsored by the Northwest Company with missionaries from the Church of England starting in 1819. The Foreign Mission movement was already 15 years underway by 1820, but it was difficult to find missionaries willing to go to Oregon, as many wanted to go to the east, to India or China. It was not until the 1830s, when a schoolmaster from Connecticut, Hall Jackson Kelley, created his "American Society for the Settlement of the Oregon Country," that more interest and support for Oregon missionaries grew. Around the same time, four Nez Perce arrived in St. Louis in the fall of 1831, with accounts differencing as to if these travelers were asking for "the book of life", an idea used by Protestant missionaries, or if they asked for "Blackrobes", meaning Jesuits, thus Catholic missionaries. Either way this inspired Christian missionaries to travel to the Oregon Territory. Oregon missionaries played a political role, as well as a religious one, as their missions established US political power in an area in which the Hudson's Bay Company, operating under the British government, maintained a political interest in the Oregon country. Such missionaries had an influential impact on the early settlement of the region, establishing institutions that became the foundation of United States settlement of the Pacific Northwest.
Aloysius de Gonzaga, SJ was an Italian aristocrat who became a member of the Society of Jesus. While still a student at the Roman College, he died as a result of caring for the victims of a serious epidemic. He was beatified in 1605 and canonized in 1726.
A Christian mission is an organized effort to carry on evangelism or other activities, such as educational or hospital work, in the name of the Christian faith. Missions involve sending individuals and groups across boundaries, most commonly geographical boundaries. Sometimes individuals are sent and are called missionaries, and historically may have been based in mission stations. When groups are sent, they are often called mission teams and they undertake mission trips. There are a few different kinds of mission trips: short-term, long-term, relational and those that simply help people in need. Some people choose to dedicate their whole lives to mission.
The Japanese term Kirishitan, from Portuguese cristão, meaning "Christian", referred to Catholic Christians in Japanese and is used in Japanese texts as a historiographic term for Catholics in Japan in the 16th and 17th centuries.
The Catholic Church in Japan is part of the worldwide Catholic Church, under the spiritual leadership of the pope in Rome. As of 2021, there were approximately 431,100 Catholics in Japan, 6,200 of whom are clerics, religious and seminarians. Japan has 15 dioceses, including three metropolitan archdioceses, with 34 bishops, 1,235 priests, and 40 deacons spread out across 957 churches.
The Jesuit Volunteer Corps (JVC) is an organization of lay volunteers who volunteer one year or more to community service with poor communities. JVC works in inner city neighborhoods and rural communities in about 36 different cities throughout the U.S. JVC works with the homeless, abused women and children, immigrants and refugees, the mentally ill, people with HIV/AIDS and other illnesses, the elderly, children, and on behalf of other marginalized groups. Jesuit Volunteers (JVs) in the international program that places volunteers in other countries.
Missionary work of the Catholic Church has often been undertaken outside the geographically defined parishes and dioceses by religious orders who have people and material resources to spare, and some of which specialized in missions. Eventually, parishes and dioceses would be organized worldwide, often after an intermediate phase as an apostolic prefecture or apostolic vicariate. Catholic mission has predominantly been carried out by the Latin Church in practice.
Christian missionaries arrived in Japan with Francis Xavier and the Jesuits in the 1540s and briefly flourished, with over 100,000 converts, including many daimyōs in Kyushu. It soon met resistance from the highest office holders of Japan. Emperor Ōgimachi issued edicts to ban Catholicism in 1565 and 1568, but to little effect. Beginning in 1587, with imperial regent Toyotomi Hideyoshi's ban on Jesuit missionaries, Christianity was repressed as a threat to national unity. After the Tokugawa shogunate banned Christianity in 1620 it ceased to exist publicly. Many Catholics went underground, becoming hidden Christians, while others died. Only after the Meiji Restoration was Christianity re-established in Japan.
Christianity is the largest religion practiced in Zimbabwe, accounted for more than 84% of the population. The arrival of Christianity dates back to the 16th century by Portuguese missionaries such as Fr. Gonsalo Da Silveira of the Roman Catholic Church. Christianity is embraced by the majority of the population. It is estimated 85 percent of Zimbabweans claim to be Christians, with approximately 62 percent regularly attending church services. Christian faith plays a very important role in the organization of Zimbabwean society.
St Anselm's Church in Southall is a Roman Catholic parish church served by the Society of Jesus in the London Borough of Ealing within the administration of the Archdiocese of Westminster. It is situated on The Green, a main thoroughfare into Southall. The parish was home to the De Nobili Dialogue Centre; a Jesuit building for inter-religious dialogue. It is also the only Catholic church in Southall and the parish has more than fifty nationalities represented in the congregation.
Christianity in Madagascar is practiced by 85.3% of Madagascar's population according to the Pew Research Center in 2020. However, other surveys put the figure at 58%. Malagasy Christianity is generally practised in syncretic form with traditional religious practices.
The Comboni Missionaries of the Heart of Jesus, also known as the Comboni Missionaries of the Sacred Heart, or the Verona Fathers, and originally called the Sons of the Sacred Heart of Jesus, is a Catholic clerical male religious congregation of pontifical right.
The Bettiah Christians, also known as Betiawi Christians, are the northern Indian subcontinent's oldest Christian community, which emerged in the 18th century. The origins of the Bettiah Christian community lie in Champaran in what is now the Indian state of Bihar, in which the king of the Bettiah Raj, Maharaja Dhurup Singh, invited Roman Catholic missionaries of the Order of Friars Minor Capuchin to establish the Bettiah Christian Mission there.