Миссияларды қорғау: Тарихи контекст пен діни мақсаттар

Protectorate of missions is a term for the right of protection exercised by a Christian power in a Muslim or other non Christian country with regard to the persons and establishments of the missionaries. The term does not apply to all protection of missions, but only to that permanently exercised in virtue of an acquired right, usually established by a treaty or convention (either explicit or tacit), voluntarily consented to or accepted by the non Christian power after more or less compulsion. The object of the protectorate may be more or less extensive, as it may embrace only the missionaries who are subjects of the protecting power or apply to the missionaries of all nations or even to the native Christians who are their recent converts. This article deals with a historical approach to the 'legitimation' of protectorates by the need to facilitate the 'holy' duty of spreading the Christian faith, as invoked by Catholic, Orthodox and Protestant colonial/imperial powers.

Both Einhard and Notker the Stammerer refer to envoys traveling between the courts of Charlemagne, king of the Franks, and Harun al Rashid. They mention the exchange of gifts and friendly discussions about Christian access to holy sites. This exchange of embassies was due to the fact that they both were interested in subduing the Umayyad emirs of Córdoba. Charlemagne and his successors made use of any concessions to establish pious and charitable foundations there, to protect the Christian inhabitants and pilgrims, and to ensure the availability of Christian worship. The destruction of the Arab Empire by the Turks put an end to this first protectorate, and for reasons that were not purely religious, led to the Crusades, as a result of which Palestine was conquered from the Saracens and became a Latin, French speaking kingdom. The Christian rule was later replaced by that of Islam, but during the three centuries of Crusades, which had been undertaken and supported mainly by France, the Christians of the East had grown accustomed to look to that country for assistance in oppression or to gain more leverage in their dealings with the Ottomans, while France valued its increasingly important role in the region and its accompanying geopolitical benefits. By compelling Austria to spend its forces in defense against the Ottomans in the East, he hoped to weaken it and render it unable to maintain its power in the West. As early as 1528, Francis I had appealed to Suleiman the Magnificent to restore to the Christians of Jerusalem a church which the Ottomans had converted into a mosque. The Sultan refused on the plea that his religion would not permit alteration of the purpose of a mosque, but he promised to maintain the Christians in possession of all the other places occupied by them and to defend them against all oppression. The Franco Ottoman alliance caused quite a scandal in the Christian world, but endured for many years, since it served the objective interests of both parties. Henry IV continued the policy of a Franco Ottoman alliance and received an embassy from Sultan Mehmed III in 1601. The capitulations were made to entice and encourage commercial exchange with Western merchants. According to their terms traders entering the Ottoman Empire were exempt from local prosecution, local taxation, local conscription, and the searching of their domicile. Ahmed expanded the capitulations given to France, specifying that merchants from Spain, Ragusa, Genoa, Ancona and Florence could trade under the French flag. In the capitulations of 20 May 1604 appear two clauses relative to the protection of pilgrims and of the religious in charge of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in consideration of and for the honor and friendship of the French king. The result of this friendship was the development of the Catholic missions, which began to flourish through the assistance of Henry IV and his son Louis XIII, who introduced the system of capitulations to Moroco. The Franco Moroccan Treaty (1631) gave France preferential tariffs, the establishment of a Consulate and freedom of religion for French subjects. Before the middle of the seventeenth century, various religious orders (Capuchin, Carmelite, Dominican, Franciscan and Jesuit) were established, as chaplains of the French ambassadors and consuls, in major Ottoman cities (Istanbul, Alexandria, Smyrna, Aleppo, Damascus, etc. ), Lebanon and the islands of the Aegean Archipelago. They assembled the Catholics to instruct and confirm them in the Catholic faith, opened schools to which flocked the children of all rites, relieved the spiritual and corporal miseries of the Christians in the Turkish prisons, and nursed the pest stricken, which last office made many martyrs of charity. French influence reached its peak during the reign of Louis XIV, whose prestige, due to his victories and conquests, was significant at the Porte. Louis XIV gave the missionaries material and moral support. Thanks to him, the often precarious tolerance, on which the existence of the missions had previously depended, was officially recognized in 1673, when on 5 June, Mehmed IV not only confirmed the earlier capitulations guaranteeing the safety of pilgrims and the religious guardians of the Holy Sepulchre, but signed four new articles, all beneficial to the missionaries. The decrees secured the tranquil possession of their churches, explicitly to the Jesuits and Capuchins, and in general "to the French at Smyrna, Saïd, Alexandria, and in all other ports of the Ottoman Empire". France, under Emperor Napoleon III supplied half.

Beginning in the 15th century, popes granted to the Crown of Portugal the right to designate candidates for the sees and ecclesiastical benefices in the vast domains acquired through the expeditions it sponsored in Africa and the East Indies. This is sometimes called the Portuguese Protectorate of Missions, but more properly the "Portuguese Patronage" (Padroado). It allowed the King of Portugal to benefit from a certain portion of the ecclesiastical revenues of his kingdom, and it carried the condition that he should send good missionaries to his new subjects, and that he should provide with a fitting endowment the dioceses, parishes and religious establishments established in his acquired territories. The Holy See contested Portugal's assertion of these rights to regions it claimed but never conquered, including the greater part of India, Tong king, Cochin China (both in present Vietnam), Siam and especially China. Portugal tried to exert influence through its ambassadors to China in the 18th century, instructing them to intervene as much as possible to protect missionaries and native Christians from ongoing persecution in the provinces. Portugal's authority was not comparable to the protectorate regime exercised by France in the Near East or Far East in later centuries and Portugal's rights as protector were never recognized by a host nation. No Christian power exercised a protectorate in China before the 19th century.

The French Protectorate, as far as a regular convention is concerned, dates from the middle of the nineteenth century, but the way was prepared by the protection which French statesmen had accorded the missionaries for almost two centuries. The zeal and liberality of Louis XIV permitted the foundation of the great French Jesuit mission, which in less than fifteen years (1687–1701) more than doubled the number of apostolic workers in China, and never ceased to produce most capable workers. The first official relations were formed between France and China when the missionaries brought there by the Amphitrite, the first French vessel seen in Chinese waters (1699), presented gifts from Louis XIV to the Kangxi Emperor. The two monarchs shared the expense of erecting the first French church at Peking: the emperor donated land within the limits of the imperial city and the building materials, the French king paid for the labor, the decoration and the magnificent liturgical ornaments. Several other churches erected in the provinces through the munificence of Louis XIV increased the prestige of France throughout the empire. Jean Joseph Marie Amiot arrived in China in 1750. He composed a Manchu French dictionary. Under Louis XV the mission in China, like many other things, was somewhat overlooked, but the government did not wholly neglect it. It found a zealous protector in Louis XVI's minister Henri Bertin, but it felt keenly the suppression of the Society of Jesus. After the suppression, the Jesuits of Beijing resigned from the Society of Jesus and remained as secular priests. A handful of French missionaries, such as Lazarists or members of the Society of Foreign Missions, assisted by some Chinese priests, also helped preserve the Faith throughout the persecutions of the early nineteenth century, during which several of them were martyred. When the English, after the First Opium War, imposed on China the Treaty of Nanking (1842), they did not at first ask for religious liberty, but the murder of the Lazarist John Gabriel Perboyre (11 September 1840) becoming known, they added an article stipulating that thenceforth a missionary taken in the interior of the country should not be tried by the Chinese authorities, but should be delivered to the nearest consul of his country. In 1843, King Louis Philippe sent Envoi extraordinaire Marie Melchior Joseph Théodore de Lagrené to China to negotiate a commercial treaty to secure the same privileges as the British. On October 1844, Lagrené and Qiying concluded the Treaty of Whampoa, which also legalized the practice of Christianity in China. The Second Opium War was ended by the Convention of Peking, which contained an article which stipulated freedom for the missionaries to preach and for the Chinese to practice Christianity. The French ambassador was made receiver of all property previously confiscated, to be transferred to the Christians of the localities concerned. This recognized the general and exclusive right of protection granted to the French over all the Catholic missions in China. The foregoing historical sketch shows that the ancient French right of protection over the missions, in both Turkey and China, was established as much by constant exercise and by services rendered as by treaties. For some time, the government continued to preserve the prerogative of its predecessors, and continued to lend protection, though much diminished, to the Catholic missionary undertakings—even to those directed by religious who were proscribed in France (e. g. it subsidized the Jesuit schools in Syria). The advantages of the protectorate were too obvious even to the least clerical of the ministers for them not to attempt to retain them, whatever the resulting contradictions in their policy. France gained through the protectorate in the Levant and the Far East a degree of prestige and a moral influence which no commerce or conquest could ever have given provided.

In 1875, at the time of the negotiations between France and (nominally Ottoman) Egypt with regard to judiciary reform, the German government declared that it "recognized no exclusive right of protection of any power in behalf of Catholic establishments in the East, and that it reserved its rights with regard to German subjects belonging to any of these establishments". Italy sought to establish its own protectorate by patronizing missionary activities and winning the allegiance of those it supported, but the Congregation for the Propagation of the Faith refused to support its efforts. Instead, on 22 May 1888, the Congregation wrote to the Italian missionaries in the Levant and the Far East to remind them that "the Protectorate of the French Nation in the countries of the East has been established for centuries and sanctioned even by treaties between the empires. Therefore, there must be absolutely no innovation in this matter; this protectorate, wherever it is in force, is to be religiously preserved, and the missionaries are warned that, if they have need of any help, they are to have recourse to the consuls and other ministers of France." On 1 August 1898, Pope Leo XIII wrote to Cardinal Benoît Marie Langénieux, Archbishop of Reims:
France has a special mission in the East confided to her by Providence—a noble mission consecrated not alone by ancient usage, but also by international treaties The Holy See does not wish to interfere with the glorious patrimony which France has received from its ancestors and which beyond a doubt it means to deserve by always showing itself equal to its task. In parallel with this recognition of French exclusivity, the Holy See declined to establish its own diplomatic relations with Turkey and China, even when supported by those governments. Leo XIII rejected any proposal to exchange legates or ambassadors at the instance of French diplomats, who told him those countries had less interest in amicable relations with the Holy See than in evading the authorities granted to the French protectorate.

Critics of the protectorate said that the authorities that granted the privilege to a Christian nation did so under duress, that the system contributed to and exacerbated anti Christian sentiment in those countries, and that it allowed Christian missionaries to disregard the sensibilities of the non Christian population. Those who see benefits in the protectorate system contend that it was the best means of protecting missionaries and their activities and allow that it required that the foreign power minimize its meddling and exercise discretion in asserting its rights. As an example, one study noted that the superior of the mission of southeast Chi li resolved its issues directly with local authorities and sought intervention from the French legation only three times during the difficult period from 1862 to 1884. They believed abuses were minimal, especially in comparison with the benefits.