Cardinal Tagle assesses Pope’s upcoming trip to Asia, defends missionaries from charge of colonialism

August 28, 2024

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CWN Editor's Note: Cardinal Luis Antonio Tagle, the Pro-Prefect for the Section of First Evangelization of the Dicastery for Evangelization, described the Pope’s upcoming apostolic journey to four Asian nations as an “act of humility before the Lord who calls us” and an “act of obedience to the mission.”

“Asia is home to two-thirds of the world’s population,” Cardinal Tagle said in an interview. “The majority of these people are poor. And there are many baptisms among the poor. Pope Francis knows that there are many poor in those areas, and among the poor there is an attraction to the figure of Jesus and to the Gospel, even in the midst of war, persecution and conflict.”

During the interview, Cardinal Tagle criticized the contemporary trend of portraying missionaries as agents of colonialism:

Missionaries are a gift to the Church. They obey Christ who told his people to go to the ends of the Earth to proclaim the Gospel, promising that he would always be by their side. Occasionally national leaders of the nations have taken the missionaries to different places during colonization processes. But those missionaries travelled to evangelize, not to be manipulated and used by colonizers. Many priests, missionaries, non-ordained members, have acted contrary to the strategies of their own government, and have been martyred.

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