I am extremely grateful that the Catholic Academy in Bavaria makes it possible for us Missionary Benedictines to organise such an afternoon of study in this public and yet intimate setting.
Three factors prompted us to embark on this in-depth study of our history:
- The vehemence and explosive nature of post-colonial discourses, which of course concern our own interior and which we want and probably have to face up to
- Dealing with the origin of the cultural artefacts collected in our monasteries, especially in St. Ottilien, from non-European societies and the appropriate handling of this heritage
- And the weighty new publications on our missionary history, which no longer come only from our immediate environment - as in earlier decades - but are now also being produced in academic contexts
Missionary Benedictine historiography
The first review of the beginnings of the Missionary Benedictines was published just 10 years after the foundation, in 1894. In the following decades, smaller publications dealing with the foundation and development of the Congregation of St Ottilien were published from time to time, each produced in-house. The first larger monographs appeared from 1971 in four anthologies under the title Der Fünfarmige Leuchter (The Five-Branched Candlestick), which the editors called a "kaleidoscope".
Benedictine communities have always been among the producers of history. This serves the purpose of self-assurance, the description and formulation of identities, which our order has been able to cultivate and sometimes invent in a special way over the centuries. In the case of the Missionary Benedictines, there is also the fact that a story of successes and defeats should be told in such a way that external readers are motivated to support the missionary work. This part of the historiographical production of the Missionary Benedictines is therefore also characterised by apologetics, and occasionally also by panegyric.
Since the 1970s, however, there has also been a more academic examination of our history, for example on the part of missionary theology. And sources from our archives are also increasingly being edited, although much remains to be discovered here. From the mid-1990s, the archives of the Archabbey of St Ottilien, which had previously been protected by a strict arcane discipline, were opened up for academic use. Anette Volk compiled her own catalogue of the archival holdings on Tanzania, which was published in the University of Leipzig Papers on Africa series in 2002. Both were prerequisites for the scientific work of recent times.
I would also like to mention that the renovation and careful redesign of the Mission Museum in St Ottilien, which was reopened in 2015, also required, and will continue to require, a great deal of reflection on approaches to our history.
Tour d'Horizon
In a short tour d'horizon, I would like to briefly present the more recent events in the history of our Congregation.
Cyrill Schäfer, a monk of St. Ottilien and a renowned historian, has edited several volumes of source material on the founding of the Missionary Benedictines, with a focus on the programmatic and biographical writings of Andreas Amrhein, the founder and first source of ideas of St. Ottilien.
Four years ago, Sigrid Albert, who is with us today, published the diary of Norbert Weber, who visited German East Africa during the Maji-Maji War in 1905, under the striking title Mission im Krieg (Mission in War), a source that has unfortunately received little attention to date. We have the same author to thank for a history of the Archabbey of St Ottilien and its worldwide activities, which has been published serially in the journal Vox Latina since 2009 and is being compiled anew and very thoroughly from the sources. The 53rd instalment was recently published. Thankfully, these instalments are also published in German from time to time.
In 2017, the late missionary theologian Karl Josef Rivinius, a Steyl missionary, wrote a history of the beginnings of Benedictine missionary work in East Africa on his own initiative.
Johannes Mahr has dedicated the last 15 years of his life to missionary Benedictine historiography and has now written about a metre of bookshelves: several smaller monographs, plus 3 volumes on missionary activity in East Asia, 7 volumes on the history of Münsterschwarzach Abbey and the first volume of a planned trilogy on the work of the missionary Benedictines in the colony of German East Africa. This volume was to be presented here today. Its completion has been slightly delayed.
What all these publications have in common is that they were produced in the context of our monasteries. Good readability for a non-academic audience, including our monastic convents, is an important criterion for all due seriousness.
In contrast, the reception of contemporary cultural studies discourses is recognisably in the foreground in the more recent publications, which were produced in the academic field and thus at a greater distance from our monasteries - keyword postcolonial studies.
Christine Egger's book Transnational Biographies: The Missionary Benedictines of St. Ottilien in Tanganyika 1922-1965 was published back in 2015, familiarising us for the first time with the topics of contemporary historical research and the underlying theories.
Richard Hölzl, whose habilitation appeared in print in 2021, set a strong accent. The title Gläubige Imperialisten (Faithful Imperialists) was a bombshell and, as such, also a wake-up call. The book mainly deals with the missionary Benedictines.
Bettina Brockmeyer's book Geteilte Geschichte, geraubte Geschichte: koloniale Biografien in Ostafrika (1880-1950) was published in the same year and by the same publisher (Campus Verlag). In this book, she combines the biographies of a young African who is taken to Germany and later returns to his East African homeland as chief, a colonialist and a missionary Benedictine. The lives of the three crossed geographically in Iringa and also with the missionary Benedictines. Vivid and readable descriptions of the circumstances are combined here with a categorisation of the narratives in modern theoretical discourses.
What are we actually doing here today?
The subtitle of today's event is "The Missionary Benedictines re-read their history".
First of all, I would like to point out that the various missionary orders have developed quite different approaches to mission and also to their own history, depending on their own tradition. This is a differentiation that I find somewhat lacking in Hölzl's first chapters.
The Benedictines are indeed characterised by a commitment to culture, including book culture. This has its origins in the monks' way of life, in which reading the Holy Scriptures and other books has a firm place.
The "re-reading" of the title refers to a re-lecture. A rereading or new reading of what has actually been known for a long time. This has a long tradition: the monastic
The aim of reading practice is not to read a lot, but rather to immerse oneself repeatedly. The beautiful image of rumination, or rumination as it is called in Latin, is occasionally used for this purpose. As is well known, the cow brings food that has already been digested once back into its mouth in order to grind it up a second time, digest it again and extract more nutrients from it. This is how the practice of monastic lectio is described. And perhaps that is also what we are trying to do today and at this time. To chew up our history once again in order to discover what is overlooked, unnoticed and undigested.
A second religious virtue, humility, can perhaps help us here. It requires us to take a realistic look at the realities and shortcomings of our lives and work.
An outside perspective often helps here. In the chapter on the reception of foreign monks in the Rule of St Benedict, it says: "If, in humility and love, he expresses a well-founded criticism or draws attention to something, the abbot should consider wisely whether the Lord has not sent him for this very reason."
I think that is a very useful hermeneutic for approaching these more recent publications.
However, we also have something to contribute to these postcolonial discourses:
1. a rather unprecedented continuity. The institutions founded by the Missionary Benedictines still exist in most places today - transformed, of course, but still in a clearly recognisable continuation of what began more than 100 years ago. This can be seen in buildings, archives and practices, but also in an awareness of this continuity that finds expression in anniversaries and narratives. There are not only historical memories here, but also living memoria.
2. the bearers of this memoria are part of the indigenous societies. There may still be a European here and there, but the people in charge of these institutions are all indigenous. The issues that are being discussed here today are of direct interest to them. They are heirs of the missionaries, just as they are descendants of the people and societies affected by colonialism.
This is where I see the special opportunity of our Missionary Benedictine Re-Lecture: that we can include actors in this reflection who can and probably must negotiate the ambivalences of this history in their own identity - not only historically, but also very much in relation to the present. I would therefore also like to thank the many confreres from East Africa who are here today for this event. It is my fervent hope that this Relecture does not end here today, but that it is only just beginning, and that its next sessions can take place under completely different auspices, perhaps in Dar es Salaam, in
Iringa or in Songea.
