We imagine missionaries as imposing orthodoxy on native cultures under the direction of the Roman centre. But the spread of Christianity didn’t happen like that. Pope Francis’ vision of the future of mission work looks more like the past than is usually recognised

On 25 March 2019 Pope Francis visited the Basilica of the Holy House of Loreto in the Le Marche region of Italy. The shrine has for many centuries been a popular place of pilgrimage. Announcing a Holy Year of Loreto (recently extended to December 2021 because of Covid-19), Francis extended the Loreto Litany of Mary to include Mother of Mercy, Mother of Peace, and Help of Migrants.

She is also the patron of aviators and air travellers, a declaration first made a century ago by Benedict XV. Yet early modern historians specialising in the period of the Counter-Reformation are providing new perspectives on the devotion. The rapid spread of Holy House replicas in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, they argue, aided the growth of Catholicism as a global Church.

The devotion was instrumental, they claim, in creating conditions for Catholicism’s “acculturation”: meaning that the cultural influences worked both ways – affecting not only the indigenous converts but the evangelisers too. The observation finds echoes in Pope Francis’ reflections on the Amazon Synod and his encouragement of a de-centred world Church, emphasising a diversity of cultural expressions.