AFFRINGUES, BRUNO d'
Certosino, b. at Saint-Omer in 1546, d. at the Grande-Chartreuse in Grenoble in 1632. Of noble birth, he combined an excellent intellect with great piety and purity of life. He studied in Paris, traveled in Italy, stopped in Turin and Padua, visited Venice and Rome, and, upon returning to France, was elected vicar general of the diocese of Carpentras. Finally, although the favor of the bishop and the Pope seemed to offer him a rapid career, he entered the Carthusian Order at the Grande-Chartreuse and received the habit in 1591 at the age of forty-five. Distinguished as prior of the Carthusian monastery of Villeneuve-lez-Avignon, he was elected general of the order in 1610.
As regards the relations between Catholicism and Central and Eastern Asia, the A. remained outside this sphere: for Marco Polo, towards the end of that century, simply noted that “there they worship Mahomet.” In the 16th and 17th centuries four Jesuits passed through there, summoned to his court by Akbar from Goa: Father A. Montserrat (1581), Brother Bento Goes (1603), Father G. De Castro, a native of Turin, who followed the emperor Jahangir to Kabul, entrusted with the care of the Christians who were with the imperial troops (1625–26); and Father E. Roth, who wrote that he had found a group of Christians in Kabul and, because he believed them to be descendants of St. Thomas, maintained that they were not people who happened to be there by chance or passing through, but had been resident there from time immemorial.
Christians, Portuguese, and Indians, in the 18th century, were found in the retinue of the viceroys of Kabul and among the soldiers stationed there, for whom it seems that a Jesuit would occasionally travel as far as Kabul. Certainly, Christians were taken from Lahore to Kabul and Kandahar in 1752 by Ahmad Shah Durrani, founder of the modern Afghan kingdom, for artillery service, and a Jesuit visited them twice a year. Armenian Catholics, who had come from Persia, settled in Kabul during the invasions of Nadir Shah in Afghanistan and India between 1736 and 1747; they were not numerous, but were respected and influential, especially when Armenian women entered the royal family. They inhabited a quarter of their own in the very Bala Hissar, the citadel-colony of Kabul and seat of the royal palace, and had a walled-off section in the ancient cemetery of the city, where they gathered every Sunday. At the time of the mission of M. Elphinstone (1809), there was also a Greek priest.
When Abdurrahman expelled the Armenians for being related to the rebel Ishak Khan (1888), there was no longer a Christian community in Kabul. However, the employment by the same king of Englishmen for sanitary and technical services—and, after Abdurrahman (1919) had rejected British protection—of people of various nationalities, to which was added the staff of legations and embassies, led Pius XI, during the visit of Amanullah (1928), to consider establishing in Kabul, under the official form of chaplain to the Italian Legation (which already had authorization in its treaty), a priest charged with the religious care of Catholics residing in Afghanistan. This was carried out in 1932 with the sending of a Barnabite father and the erection of a chapel in the Italian Legation, where about 400 Catholics living in the Afghan capital would gather.