Early in 1740, actor-turned-revivalist George Whitefield journeyed to Savannah after a preaching tour that had taken him to Philadelphia and New York before heading south to Charleston, where he arrived in January that year. At the time, Charleston was experiencing communal angst. A few months before, in September 1739, an uprising occurred in this colony where African slaves were a majority—perhaps even two-thirds of the population. Around two dozen whites lost their lives, and several plantations were burned. Popular belief held that a Catholic priest inspired the revolt since apparently many involved in the uprising were Catholic Kongo people who hoped to escape to St. Augustine where Spanish Catholic authorities had promised them freedom. The assault came on a Sunday early in September. Later that month new colonial legislation that required white men to be armed at all times—even while attending Sunday worship—would become law. Whites assumed that the timing was intended to assure that the revolt occurred before that provision took effect, since most did not ordinarily carry firearms to church on Sunday.

Discussion of mission in east Roman or Byzantine history has typically focused on imperial ambitions, royal conversions, and a “top-down” approach to Christianization. The Christian emperor, the earthly image of the heavenly king, had been called by God to propagate the faith and civilize the barbarians. Toward this end he sent out emissaries to foreign potentates, and the conversion of the ruler was soon followed by the Christianization of his people. Such narratives largely ignore missionaries “from below,” deemed “accidental” evangelists, and focus instead on imperially sponsored or “professional missionaries.” Several recent studies have added nuance to the traditional picture by devoting increased attention to mission from below or presenting Christianization as a process comprising multiple stages that spanned several centuries. Building on my own previous article on this theme, the present essay will reexamine narratives of unofficial mission on the eastern frontiers, in particular accounts of captive women credited with converting whole kingdoms to the Christian faith. In each case a female ascetic has either been taken prisoner or has lived for some time as a captive in a foreign land just beyond east Roman borders. The woman's steadfast adherence to her pious way of life, performance of apostolic signs, and verbal testimony to faith in Christ move the ruler and his people to accept the Christian God.

On July 11, 1666, the new cathedral in the French colonial capital at Quebec was finally consecrated by the vicar apostolic of New France, Msgr. François de Laval. Catherine de Saint-Augustin, a nursing sister who belonged to the Hôtel-Dieu de Québec, described the elaborate ceremony in her journal. The celebrants in their regalia made three trips around the church sprinkling holy water and chanting prayers before they came to the main door. After striking the door three times with a cross, “to signify the power of Jesus Christ, sovereign bishop of the Church,” they entered, and majestically processed toward the high altar. Upon the altar sat four candles, which signified “that Catholics (have) spread to the four corners of the world.” In the middle of these was a single cross, “that of Our Lord,” which symbolically linked the entire Church throughout the world to its (European) center—“au milieu du monde.” Following a number of minor rites including lessons and responses, the bishop circled the altar seven times sprinkling its base with holy water. The relics of saints were interred within it, and the church was dedicated to the holy trinity—the new seat of a new bishop in a “New” World.

In Christianity and the Social Crisis (1907), Walter Rauschenbusch compared the sin of speculating in land to the sin of slavery. The great theologian of the Social Gospel tried to open his audience's eyes to the sinfulness of land speculation by reminding them that not long ago, Christians had been unaware of the sinfulness of slavery. Before the abolition of slavery, he wrote, “there were millions of genuine Christians, honestly willing to see and do the right thing in other matters, to whom it seemed a preposterous proposition that slavery is incompatible with Christianity.” To these honest believers, slavery was a necessary social institution like the family or the school. Today, he continued, most Christians, despite their genuine faith, do not realize “that it is a crying wrong to hold land idle for speculation in cities where men's lungs are rotting away … few who realize that it is a flat denial of Christianity to take advantage of the needs of your fellow man to buy his labor cheaply or sell him your goods dearly.” Christians were blind to the evils of industrial society just as they had been blind to the evils of slavery. Both slavery and land speculation were social sins, morally deficient practices that were so deeply embedded in the economic and social structure that they seemed to be “a necessary and inevitable part of the structure of society.” Social sins were different than individual sins. “Genuine Christians” did not tolerate individual sins like drunkenness, adultery, or murder, but they had tolerated slavery.

Today, most Catholics attending Mass come forward to receive communion as a matter of course. But this fact actually belies a very long history of low communion frequency and an institution's often losing struggle to have Catholics regularly receive the body of Christ. Already by the end of the fourth century, communion frequency in the Church, both East and West, had declined rapidly. Thereafter, outside small circles of especially devout communicants, communion at Mass remained for most Catholics an infrequent act. Yet during the mid-twentieth century, in the space of just a few decades, this situation showed signs of quite dramatic reversal. In the nineteenth century in Australia, average communion frequency among most practising Catholics was relatively nominal—perhaps three or four times a year was typical. On the eve of the Second Vatican Council, however, most Catholics in Australia were partaking of communion fortnightly and even weekly. Why this shift? What happened in the course of a generation which turned around a situation spanning many centuries in the Church's tradition of eucharistic worship?