ABSTRACT
The year after reaching the Central Bengal Mission in 1855, Fr. Antonio Marietti began operating in Jessore. He belonged to a recently founded (1850) Italian missionary institution sponsored by the Bishops of Lombardy as a result of a particularly active local clergy that was eager to restore missionary ideals. The first missionaries prepared themselves in a political climate of unrest and turmoil, where ideals of independence and liberation played an important role: some had participated actively against the Austrian presence in Milan. 10 The direct preparation for the mission field was carried out in the community life of St. Calocero Seminary through ‘prayer, study and priestly ministry’. 11 The models followed by the missionaries were the martyrs of the Missionaires Etrangères de Paris (MEP), well-known through the Italian edition of MEP bulletins. 12 Italian Romanticism, with its strong accent on nationalism, served as the basis for their ‘heroic vocation’. 13 These first missionaries brought with them to the field a ‘rather romantic concept of their Mission as a land of uncivilised, barbarous men … The Indians were “idolatri, infedeli e selvaggi” for whose conversion their institute had been established’. 14 This position was, however, destined to change and cede to a more open, understanding and sympathetic attitude, to the point of renouncing conversion as a precondition to ‘salvation’. 15
