Malabar rites

Malabar rites is a conventional term for certain customs or practices of the native Catholics of South India, concerning the liturgical rites, which the Jesuit missionaries allowed their Indian to retain after conversion but were afterwards prohibited by Rome.

The missions concerned are not those of the coast of southwestern India, to which the name Malabar coast properly belongs, but rather those of nearby inner South India, especially those of the former Hindu "kingdoms" of Madurai, Mysore and the Carnatic.

The question of Malabar Rites originated in the method followed by the Jesuit mission, since the beginning of the seventeenth century, in evangelizing those countries. The prominent feature of that method was an accommodation to the manners and customs of the people to be converted. Enemies of the Jesuits claim that, in Madura, Mysore and the Karnatic, the Jesuits either accepted for themselves or permitted to their neophytes such practices as they knew to be idolatrous or superstitious. Others reject the claim as unjust and absurd and say that the claim is tantamount to asserting that these men, whose intelligence, at least, was never questioned, were so stupid as to jeopardize their own salvation to save others and to endure infinite hardships to establish among the Hindus a corrupt and sham Christianity.

The popes, while disapproving of some usages hitherto considered inoffensive or tolerable by the missionaries, never charged them with having knowingly adulterated the purity of religion. One of them, who had observed the "Malabar Rites" for seventeen years previous to his martyrdom, was conferred by the Church the honour of beatification. The process for the beatification of Father John de Britto was going on at Rome during the hottest period of the controversy over these "Rites", and the adversaries of the Jesuits asserted that beatification to be impossible because it would amount to approving the "superstitions and idolatries" maintained by the missioners of Madura. Still, the cause progressed, and Benedict XIV, on 2 July 1741, declared "that the rites in question had not been used, as among the Gentiles, with religious significance, but merely as civil observances, and that therefore they were no obstacle to bringing forward the process". The mere enumeration of the Decrees by which the question was decided shows how perplexing it was and how difficult the solution. It was concluded that there was no reason to view the "Malabar rites", as practised generally in those missions, in any other light and that the good faith of the missionaries in tolerating the native customs should not be contested; but on the other hand, they erred in carrying this toleration too far.

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