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[German Version] Medellín was the venue for the second general assembly of the Latin American Bishops' Plenary Council (Consejo Episcopal Latinoamericano: CELAM). After the then CELAM president, Manuel Larrain, bishop of Talca (Chile), had suggested, at the end of the conference, to use the coming 39th Eucharistic World Congress in Bogotà as an opportunity to examine the situation in Latin America in the light of the council, there was a work-intensive process of preparation for…

[German Version] (MHM, Societas Missionariorum Sancti Joseph de Mill Hill). This missionary society, which includes both priests and laity, was founded in 1866 by Herbert A. Vaughan (1832–1903), bishop of Salford and later cardinal archbishop of Westminster. It was established in Mill Hill, north London. Here, under the patronage of Saint Joseph, missionaries were trained as evangelists, initially to work among African Americans in North America. This led in 1892 to the founding of an independent …

[German Version] (CELAM; Latin American Council of Bishops) is an organ of the Catholic Church established at the request of the bishops of Latin America and the Caribbean at their first general conference in Rio de Janeiro in 1955; it was approved by Pope Pius XII in the same year. After several extremely fruitful years occupied primarily with responding creatively to the decisions of Vatican II, the second general conference in Medellín in 1968 led to a …

[German Version] In 1896 the French priest Pierre-Marie Barral (1855–1929) founded the Bethlehem Institute at Immensee in Switzerland, an apostolic school to prepare clergy for missionary vocations. On May 30, 1921, Rome issued a decree erecting the Societas Missionum Exterarum de Betlehem in Helvetia (SMB); Pietro Bondolfi (1872–1943) became its first superior general. Its sole purpose was to support the missionary ministry of the church. The understanding of missions that emerged from Vatican II…

[German Version] I. Systematic Theology – II. Missiology I. Systematic Theology “Contextual theology” denotes that form of theological work, with a primarily inductive approach, for which the deliberate inclusion of the cultural and religious environment as the starting point and goal of theological reflection is constitutive. Unlike a local theology, i.e. a theology defined simply by its cultural setting, contextual theology takes its cultural determination self-reflexively into account, claiming particular relevance while at the same time maintaini…

[German Version] I. Concept – II. Distribution and Membership Statistics – III. Church History – IV. Missions in Catholicism I. Concept “Catholicism” is generally understood as encompassing the historically conditioned and therefore contingent configurations that have emerged when the basic dogmatic, ethical, and constitutional elements of Roman Catholic Christianity have taken root in concrete societies. More specifically, this can mean (a) theologically the realization in space and time of the Roman Catholic organizational structure, based t…

[German Version] I. Religious Studies – II. Christianity – III. Judaism – IV. Buddhism – V. Islam I. Religious Studies 1. Overview. Mission is not a fundamentally universal phenomenon in the history of religions; neither is every form in which religion is passed on eo ipso mission. “Primary,” tribal religions are not missionary religions. Their domain is coterminous with their society and its way of life; they are handed down from one generation to the next in the course of natural life. The question of truth does not arise. An indivi…