"The richness of the native heritage of the peoples of Africa can teach the universal Church new ways of Christian living." [1]
"Being aware that the "seeds of the Word" are already present in other religions and cultures (EN, 53), our task is to enter into dialogue with them so as to discover in them those values which resonate with the Gospel." [2]
Inculturation is a recent manifestation of new insights and practices with regard to the mission of the Church. This mission has its roots in Christ's mission and involves a continuation of the mystery of the Incarnation in everything human, more specifically, each and every culture. Peter Charles, S.J., the great Belgian missiologist, introduced the term inculturation into the field of missiology, but he gave it the same anthropological meaning as enculturation which means the process by which one assimilates one's own culture [3] J. Masson, S.J., was the one who, in 1964, [4] invented the expression "inculturated Catholicism". However, we had to wait almost fifteen years for the term inculturation to be used with its present theological meaning. It seems that the first use of the term should be attributed to the 32nd Congregation of the Society of Jesus, December 1974 to April 1975. Likewise, the term seems to have been first introduced to the 1977 Synod of Bishops on catechesis by Father Peter Arrupe, the then Superior General of the Jesuits. [5] Pope John Paul II officially adopted it in his 1979 Apostolic Letter Catechesi Tradendae, and by this very fact, gave it a universal value. Since then, it has been impossible to keep track of all the books and articles that have been written on this subject, even if the term is not always understood in the same way and remains a rather fluid concept in the thinking of many.
[1] Missionary Outlook, p. 5 & 6. This document is one of the two official texts published by the 1972 General Chapter.
[2] Missionaries in Today's World, no. 53. Paragraph III in which this number is found is entitled: Mission and Inculturation.
[3] "Missiologie et acculturation", in Nouvelle Revue Théologique, 75 (1953), p. 19. Since the term inculturation did not exist at the time and he gives it the anthropological meaning enculturation, I think he used it inadvertently. The term he really wanted to use was enculturation, but he made the typographical error of writing inculturation. He certainly had no intention of breaking new ground (he was neither an anthropologist, nor an ethnologist); if he had had this intention, it seems to me he would have said so. In any case, after this article, he never used the word again.
[4] "L'Église ouverte sur le monde", in Nouvelle Revue Théologique, 84 (1962) p. 1038. The text reads as follows: "Today, when precisely the urgency of having a Catholicism inculturated in a multi-dimensional way has become more pressing. Without a doubt, never so much as today, have the major cultural groups of humanity felt, valued and sought to defend their cultural originality, their land with its own character, their language, art, system of symbols, ceremonies, general outlook on life, their 'way of life' in the American style, their Indian svadharma, their Weltanschauung or their negroness, formerly a source of shame, but now unfurled as a proud banner." In an earlier paragraph, the author had written: "As long as the Church was co-extensive with the Mediterranean basin, bound to the Greco-Latin culture, its openness to culture and its dialogue with it were relatively simple. And yet, already in ancient times, the Latin Church experienced difficulties in maintaining contact with Hellenic peoples or Germanic groups. We could no doubt find there the deep causes of the orthodox and protestant rifts from which we still suffer so much today."
[5] Speech published under the title "Catéchèse et inculturation", in Lumen Vitae, 37 (1977), p. 445-450 and also in Arrupe, Peter, S.J., L'espérance ne trompe pas, Paris, Le Centurion, 1981, p. 161-173.
