ABSTRACT
The significant violence that defined the establishment and propagation of the turn of the century mission encounter in south-eastern Congo was largely the result of the state-like pretensions of the Catholic missionaries involved. As the chapter shows, Cardinal Lavigerie, who founded the White Fathers, envisaged a ‘Christian Kingdom’ in Central Africa that necessitated the dispossession of pre-existing potentates as well as the enforcement of strict disciplinary codes within it. While the Spiritans, another set of Catholic missionaries who worked in this region, were less committed to the foundation of a state, they nonetheless often acted as sovereign authorities even outside their network of out-stations. Given that the enforcement of particular laws and customs drove Catholic projects in Congo, there was little that was inherently ‘Catholic’ about the violence there in the nineteenth century. As such, the turn of the twentieth century mission encounter in south-eastern Congo provides further evidence of Karen Armstrong’s assertion that religious violence has been intertwined with the affairs of state even if, in this case, the particular Catholic sovereignties in question were never recognized by the community of nations.
