50 years ago in Canada, in Québec my country, most people were Catholic. The religious practice registered records which came close to 100%. Nowadays, it has gone down to less than 8%. More and more temples are closed or put on sale. In such circumstances, to talk about going abroad for mission work can appear as absurd, all the more that the Church is being challenged from all sides and that the mission, in some quarters, is seen more and more as an alienating paternalism or as some sort of avant-garde militancy of the cultural and economic imperialism of the West.

Yet, we keep on insisting. We do not quit. Modern criticism of the mission is enlightening, but is not the exclusive monopoly of the atheists and the

anti clericals. There are people of conscience in the Church and among the missionaries themselves. Like everywhere else, of course, dinosaurs are not lacking, but there are also enlightened and honest people.

Next to the good Sister who, faithful to the instructions of the civilizers, was washing with soap the mouth of the little Indians of the boarding house who were caught using their language, there were legions of priests, brothers, sisters who studied the language of those peoples, conserved it, composed dictionaries...Was it to enslave them? To assimilate them? Yes, in many cases, and no in many cases.

It is true that we were learning the indigenous languages so as to transmit our message, our values, our Gospel...and that rooting out the weeds in the field of the pagans, we have often root out the good grain, and that by sowing in it excellent values, we have also sowed, without being aware of it maybe, germs that were deadly for the indigenous cultures.

Still, in spite of all our shortcomings, our clumsiness and our errors, we have a great number of missionaries who, beyond the word, left a great testimony: they have loved those people, even to the extent of sacrificing their life for them. If, in the past, someone ate the heart of a missionary, it was not because he liked human flesh, but because he hoped to become as strong and as good as the missionary.

Of course there were good missionaries and there are still. What they are doing and what they continue to do has not price: they show the way, the way towards the Other. At times, they do it by walking in the footsteps of the explorers, the ethnologists, the merchants, the invaders, but at times also they do it much before the arrival of the latter and sometimes in spite of them.

Briefly, in the missionary endeavor, there is something good, something mediocre and something bad. Yet, all things considered, I believe that the good carries the day by far.

Eloy Roy

Translated from the French by Jacques Bourdages