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"India, your children will be the ambassadors of your salvation," said Pope Leo XIII in 1886. Pope Leo's farsighted prediction reveals a deeper assumption that has proven true again and again: No Christian tradition can thrive in India until the Indian people make it their own.

Through the work of pioneering Jesuit missionaries such as Francis Xavier, Roberto de Nobili, and Constanzo Beschi, Catholic Christianity had begun to strike its roots in Tamil Nadu, the southern part of the country, from the 16th to the 18th century. But in the late 18th century, the church entered a period of severe decline almost to the point of extinction. It was a time of religious crisis in Europe, and the suppression of the Jesuit order in 1773 deprived the mission field of workers. Without adequate leadership by local pastors, some Christians in India relapsed into former ways and some others were forced to convert to Islam.

In addition, Catholic leaders abroad were locked in an ecclesiastical quarrel that had sapped the energies of the church for centuries. The Portuguese in India enjoyed the privileges of royal patronage. Called Padroado, these were rights granted by popes to kings of Portugal to look after church affairs and even to appoint bishops. Frustrated by the Padroado, the Vatican had tried to centralize its mission work in 1622 by establishing the Sacred Congregation for the Propagation of the Faith (Sacra Congregatio de Propaganda Fide). The conflict—often within the same village—between pastors, missionaries, and bishops of Padroado on the one side and those directly under Rome on the other revealed a church divided within itself and lacking singleness of purpose.

But with the strenuous labors of religious societies like the Foreign Missionaries of Paris, along with the restoration of the Jesuits and their return to India in the 1830s, the Catholic mission began to experience an awakening. The division of mission territories into Vicariates Apostolic in 1845 helped to give great cohesiveness to missionary work. And into the turmoil of Bombay came the peacemaking skills of Swiss missionary Anastasius Hartmann. A man renowned for gentle firmness, the new bishop worked to restore order and at one point refused to yield a church to those who perpetuated the schism, even when his opponents blockadedhim inside. In serving as a mediator between Catholic communities he was helped by British officials of the imperial government, who were employing Catholic military chaplains. The Examiner, a Catholic magazine Hartmann founded, served to alleviate confusion and build unity.

Catholicism in India was on the threshold of revival.

In 1841 the French missionary Melchior de Marion Brésillac arrived in India determined "to direct all my own work and thought towards training a native clergy … which has hardly been thought about yet at all." But he encountered such frustration that he finally gave up and returned to France.

Brésillac was not the only one to realize this enormous weakness in the Catholic presence in India. Clément Bonnand, the gifted Bishop of Pondicherry, helped generate a spirit of renewal that prompted at least some Catholics to respond by trying to make Christianity truly Indian in its interpretation, symbols, theology, and leadership. With official backing from Rome, Bonnand strongly supported many reform efforts. In 1844 he convoked a groundbreaking synod that resolved to promote the ordination of indigenous priests and the founding of seminaries to better train them. Bonnand himself set up a printing press for the diffusion of Christian knowledge, established primary schools, trained catechists, and encouraged the founding of new indigenous congregations and religious orders to serve in the fields of education, charity work, and health care. What emerged from these multifarious initiatives was nothing less than a new vision for Catholicism in India

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