The Expansion of Christianity

Starting from a small group of disciples gathered in Jerusalem, Christianity spread in twenty centuries to the ends of the earth, and it is today the most widely shared faith in the world. This expansion rests on a command received from Christ and on the conviction that the salvation offered in him is addressed to all men. From age to age, apostles, monks, and missionaries carried the Gospel ever farther, to peoples who had not received it, often at the cost of their lives.

The order of mission

Before leaving his disciples, the risen Christ entrusts them with a task that goes beyond Israel: to carry his word to all peoples. “Go therefore, teach all the nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.” Matthew 28:19. To this sending is joined a promise that will sustain the mission to the end: “And behold, I am with you all days, even to the end of the world.” Matthew 28:20. At Pentecost, fifty days after Easter, the Holy Spirit descends on the apostles and drives them outward: that day, men come from all the East hear them proclaim Christ each in his own language. The Church is born turned toward the whole world: “you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem... and to the ends of the earth.” Acts 1:8.

The apostles dispersed

The first bearers of the Gospel were the Twelve and those who followed them. From Jerusalem, the faith first reached Judea and Samaria, then Antioch in Syria, where the disciples first received the name of Christians. From there set out Paul, the apostle of the nations, who travelled through Asia Minor and Greece in three great journeys, founding Churches from city to city and binding them by his letters; he finally carried the Gospel as far as Rome, the capital of the Empire, where he died with Peter under Nero. Others took more distant roads: tradition leads Thomas as far as India, where a community has claimed descent from him since the early centuries, and Mark to Alexandria, in Egypt. By the end of the first century, communities already existed in most of the great cities of the Empire and beyond its eastern borders.

The conquest of the Empire

For three centuries, without an army or public support, Christianity spread throughout the Roman world. It made use of what united the Empire: safe roads, a common language, Greek, cities where men mingled. It advanced from neighbor to neighbor, through family, neighborhood, and trade. What spread it most was the life of the Christians themselves. They welcomed the poor, ransomed slaves, cared for widows and orphans. When plague struck a city and everyone fled the sick, sometimes abandoning their own, the Christians stayed to nurse them, to feed those left to die, and to bury the dead, without regard to whether they were their own or pagans. This selfless charity astonished. The courage of the martyrs struck still more: the crowds who came to see them die expected cries and denials, and saw men and women face their torment in peace, sometimes praying for their executioners. Such strength surpassed human capacity; many witnesses left troubled, sought to know this faith, and ended by asking for it. At the beginning of the fourth century, despite the persecutions, Christians already formed a significant part of the population. In 313, by the Edict of Milan, the emperor Constantine granted everyone freedom of worship: he put an end to the persecutions and had the Christians’ places of prayer and confiscated goods restored to them. In 380, Theodosius made Christianity the religion of the Empire. The Roman world had become Christian.

The peoples of the West

The fall of the Western Roman Empire, in the fifth century, opened new peoples to the Gospel. The Germanic nations settling on the lands of the Empire were gradually won over. Many had first received an erroneous form of Christianity, Arianism, which denied that Christ was fully God; their return to the right faith was decisive. Clovis, king of the Franks, had himself baptized in the catholic faith by the bishop Remigius at Reims, around the year 500, and his people followed him: Gaul became a Christian land. The evangelization of the countryside, long pagan, was the work of bishops and monks, such as Martin of Tours. Ireland, which Rome had never conquered, received the faith from saint Patrick in the fifth century. A young Christian of Roman Britain, Patrick had been carried off by raiders and sold as a slave in Ireland, where he kept the flocks for six years. Having escaped, then ordained bishop, he returned of his own accord to evangelize the people who had held him in slavery; he travelled the island, baptized, and established priests everywhere. Ireland became a land of monasteries from which missionaries set out. One of them, the monk Columban, left his island toward the end of the sixth century with a few companions to revive the faith on the continent; he founded monasteries in Gaul, at Luxeuil, then in Italy, at Bobbio. In 597, pope Gregory the Great sent the monk Augustine to evangelize the Anglo-Saxons of England, still pagan. In the following century, another English monk, Boniface, became the apostle of Germania. Supported by the pope, he wished to show the pagans that their gods were powerless: he cut down an oak consecrated to the god Thor, and as no misfortune struck him, many let themselves be convinced and received baptism. He founded bishoprics and monasteries, organized the Church among the Franks and the Germans. In 754, having gone to carry the Gospel to the pagans of Frisia, in the north, he was attacked and killed with his companions by a band of armed men, refusing to defend himself.

The North and the Slavs

In the ninth and tenth centuries, the faith reached the north and east of Europe. Two Greek brothers from Thessalonica were the apostles of the Slavs: Cyril, first called Constantine, and Methodius. To proclaim the Gospel to these peoples, they created an alphabet suited to their language and translated into it the Scriptures and the liturgy, so that each might pray and understand in his own tongue. Scandinavia was converted in the tenth and eleventh centuries. In Central Europe, the new kingdoms entered the faith through their sovereigns: when a prince received baptism, he made Christianity the religion of his kingdom and had his people adopt it. So Poland with duke Mieszko in 966, Hungary with king Stephen I around the year 1000. Farther east, the Rus’ of Kiev, around present-day Ukraine and Russia, received the faith in 988 under prince Vladimir, not from Rome, but from Constantinople, capital of the Eastern Empire, which had its own Christian tradition. In 1054, a conflict over the authority of the pope and over points of faith separated the two Churches, that of Rome, the Catholic Church, and that of Constantinople, the Orthodox Church. The peoples evangelized from Constantinople, including the Rus’, remained Orthodox, separated from Rome. By the end of the Middle Ages, all of Europe was Christian.

Beyond the oceans

At the end of the fifteenth century, the opening of new sea routes carried Christianity toward entire continents. With the navigators set out missionaries, Franciscans, Dominicans, then Jesuits. In America lived peoples who had never heard of Christ. The missionaries learned their languages, lived among them, instructed them and baptized them; within a few decades, millions of men became Christians. Religious also defended the Indians against the violence of the conquerors, such as the Dominican Bartolomé de Las Casas, who pleaded tirelessly for their dignity as men and children of God. In Mexico, the account of the apparitions of the Virgin at Guadalupe, in 1531, accompanied the conversion of millions of inhabitants. In Asia, Francis Xavier, a Jesuit and one of the first companions of Ignatius of Loyola, embarked for India. From Goa, he travelled the coasts, baptizing the poor and the children by the thousands, reached the Moluccas islands, in present-day Indonesia, then was the first to carry the Gospel to Japan, in 1549, whose language and manners he learned; he died in 1552 at the gates of China, which he had hoped to reach. A Japanese Church was born, before being crushed by a long persecution. In China, another Jesuit, Matteo Ricci, won the esteem of the learned by drawing close to their culture. Africa, where Christianity had ancient roots in Egypt and Ethiopia, was approached along its coasts. Within a few generations, the Church found itself present on lands whose very names antiquity had not known.

The missions of modern times

The nineteenth century saw the vastest missionary surge in history. Whole congregations devoted themselves to carrying the Gospel far from Europe, into Africa, Asia, the islands of the Pacific. In Africa, cardinal Lavigerie founded the White Fathers, a society of missionaries so named because of the white habit they wore in the manner of the country. Everywhere, schools, hospitals, and leper houses arose beside the churches. These missions also had their martyrs. In Uganda, young Christians in the king’s service refused to abandon their faith and to yield to his demands; Charles Lwanga and his companions, most of them adolescents, were burned alive in 1886. Korea and Vietnam likewise gave thousands of martyrs. In the twentieth century, in the evangelized countries, men of the country in turn became priests and bishops, and these Churches, at first led by foreign missionaries, were henceforth governed by pastors born on the spot. The center of gravity of Christianity shifted: most Christians now live outside Europe. While the faith weakened in a Europe taken by religious indifference, it grew rapidly in Africa and Latin America, carried by conversions and by young and numerous peoples.

A Church for all the nations

This unbroken expansion rests on the fact that the Church is by nature missionary. It calls itself catholic, from the Greek word rendered as “universal”, katholikos (καθολικός), because it is sent to all men, without distinction of people or condition. Its mainspring is a certainty received from God, who “wills that all men be saved and come to the knowledge of the truth.” 1 Timothy 2:4. What God offers to all, the Church cannot keep for a few. What drove so many men and women to leave everything for unknown lands is the very love of Christ: “For the charity of Christ presses us.” 2 Corinthians 5:14. The blood of the martyrs, the labor of the missionaries, and the prayer of the Church have carried the Gospel from Jerusalem to the ends of the earth, and this mission remains unfinished as long as one people has not heard it.