I’m researching Catholic families in seventeenth century England. Catholicism was outlawed and its practice could be punished with death—and from time to time there were indeed outbursts of violence against the small Catholic community. In spite of this oppression and suppression, Catholics still tried to share their faith and convert Protestants around them, even though such proselytizing could result in prosecution. Missionary efforts and attempts at conversion are key to Christian history. In many ways, Christian history over the last two thousand years is missions’ history. Sharing one’s faith, traveling or crossing cultural boundaries to do so, and perhaps dying in the process is in many ways the capstone of Christian maturity. While most practicing Christians may not have become missionaries, those who do represent the pinnacle of the spiritual disciplines.
And yet, at least over the last five hundred years, Christian missions and conversion have occurred primarily in the direction of wealthier and more powerful, more stereotypically “successful” groups toward those with less power or economic strength. As I was growing up, “mission” trips were usually organized as ways we could serve those less fortunate. Christianity seemed to be presented as part of what would make life better in this world, as alliance with those with access to professional and financial success. Even the conversion memoirs I heard or read about people choosing Christianity in the wealthier and more secular countries usually included learning about how the truths of the cross were compatible with scientific ideas, or being exposed to smart and successful people who were Christians and made it acceptable or palatable to the rational mind. The sociological direction was from those who had to those who didn’t. Others have written about this in more effective ways than I can, but I’m familiar enough with the trend or stereotype to be interested in when it goes the other way.
Catholics in England definitely had access to power. The church was run by lay people because the clergy were outlawed and so were dependent on those who could sponsor and hide them. This meant the gentry, and especially elite women, had outsized influence in English Catholicism. So conversion efforts were often initiated by elites who had the power to protect. Many Catholic gentry with manor lands specialized in recruiting and supporting Catholic tenants. Due to their small numbers (less than 5% of Englishmen and women were part of the Roman church), poor Catholics could have access to the influence and sponsorship of gentry in a more direct manner than many other English folks. English Protestants definitely thought that the only people who converted to Catholicism were those wanting access to the patronage of wealthy Catholics, both at home and abroad.
I am not going to contradict these stereotypes or take them on directly. However, in reading the autobiographies of seventeenth-century English nuns (as I try to find information about their childhood and family relationships), I found a fascinating trend. Women who joined convents had to travel to Europe to do so and the expense of joining an order and being able to get there required substantial financial resources. This meant that these women were disproportionately from the elite. They had social and economic power. But they frequently connected their conversion to Catholicism and the religious life to the witness and conversation of servants, usually maids, and poor homeless people they encountered.
This happens often enough in the records that I started noticing it. These spiritual memoirs are a form of literature and as such, they contain tropes—or patterns that are expected to show up. Mary Ward, who started a new order of un-cloistered women, traced her spiritual development to “a maid of great virtue (and in years) who looked to the chapel and such like businesses, with whom I loved to be.” Another nun who had been raised Protestant learned about Catholicism from a “begging woman” who invited her to join her in a local church as she explained the various monuments to the saints in the church and shared stories of miracles that the Virgin Mary had provided. Sister Anne Evans began to study with a lady who was serving in her aunt’s house when she was a teenager and was visiting there.
It seems that for these elite women, the source of their truth and understanding of how God worked might be more powerful if it came from the weak and disadvantaged. While these nuns themselves identified as a persecuted minority and therefore were of the oppressed in their minds, suffering for their faith, they recognized that there were those who had even less. It is as if the word of God coming from the most downtrodden was therefore more authoritative.
It made me wonder how often I am willing to see the authority of God in those who are actually the least of these. I go to scholars and authors and speakers for my information, even about matters of faith—I rarely cite the wisdom of my 89-year-old working class neighbor or the homeless man who attends my church. Reading these memoirs, which were set up to reflect the most pious of lives and to highlight virtues, I am struck by how often they looked for the Word of God to come from the vulnerable and the weak. I’m going to look out for the proselytizing of the powerless.
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