7. Human Rights and Decolonization in the Missionary Journal of the Salesians (1945-1978)

Abstract

The French Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen forced even the Catholic Church to tackle the theme of human rights. But not until the pontificate of Leo XIII we see some partial opening, and it was to take the dictatorships and totalitarian regimes of the 20th century for there to be a further elaboration. The Second Vatican Council produced documents of a certain importance, among which the Dignitatis humanae that expressed an essential principle for missionary work (the subject of this brief article): true religion had to be put forward as testimony, hence without damaging the “rights of others”. In the Catholic missionary environment many of these problems found their natural terrain of expression. Since the end of the Council, the world of the missions above all was to find itself facing a strong crisis of identity: tensions, contradictions, and impulses which naturally found a broad echo in the pages of the Catholic missionary press, of which the Bollettino Salesiano was an interesting expression. Keywords: Human Rights, Catholic Church, Decolonization, Bollettino salesiano, Salesians, Paul VI