The Catholic Church, religious orders and the making of politics in colonial Mozambique: The case of the diocese of Beira, 1940--1974

This study is about the making of Catholic politics in the diocese of Beira, Mozambique, between 1940 and 1974. It documents the relationship between religious congregations, the Catholic hierarchy, the colonial state and Africans. It tries to unpack two sets of relations in particular, namely the influence of religious orders on the Catholic hierarchy and its policies, and the influence of the same orders on Africans. The central question of the dissertation is: what relevance do religious orders have in determining the Church's orientations? The argument put forward is that religious congregations play an important, unrecognized and largely unstudied role in determining the Catholic Church's politics and change. This dissertation covers the period of colonialism and anti-colonialism. It starts by comparing the religious congregations working in Beira and seeing how the Bishop dealt with Catholic diversity. It then investigates how Africans accepted religious orders and converted to Catholicism (or not), and it examines how different religious congregations situated themselves between Africans and the colonial state. The thesis continues with an investigation of the position religious orders and the Bishop adopted in relation to the rise of African nationalism and the prospect of the independence of Mozambique. Finally, it compares the styles of leadership of the various prelates who worked in Beira, and it moves to Rome to see how religious orders influenced the Vatican in its policy in relation to Mozambique. A concomitant objective of this dissertation is to displace what is termed here the "political paradigm" in the literature of religion and politics in colonial Africa. To do so, the investigation tries not to look at whose side the Church was on, but to uncover what the Church has done in Beira in spite of (or thanks to) its politics.