AFGANISTAN. –
1. GEOGRAPHY
More than twice the size of Italy (650,000–700,000 sq. km.), A. occupies the northeastern part of the Iranian plateau.A country that is two-thirds mountainous, with extensive desert or steppe areas and a dry continental climate, it is predominantly given over to nomadic and transhumant pastoralism (sheep). Cultivable areas are limited (cereals, cotton, sugar beet); mineral resources are considerable (coal, metals, sulphur), but only petroleum is exploited. Economic development, hindered by Anglo-Russian rivalry (A. is a buffer state), is delayed by the scarcity and archaic nature of communications (caravan trade, lack of railways); the volume of trade is consequently insignificant (exported fruit and woollens in exchange for cotton fabrics and tea).
The population (7–12 million inhabitants) is predominantly of Iranian stock, Sunni Muslim, and nomadic. The State is governed by an Emir, appointed by hereditary right. Attempts at renewal according to Western models have met with little success.
The capital is Cabul (150,000 inhabitants), near the Indian frontier.
2. CATHOLICISM IN A
The earliest information about groups of Christians in A. is found in the Book of the Laws of the Nations by Bardesanes (ed. Fr. Nau, in Patrologia syriaca, I, 2, p. 606 ff.), who lived between 154 and 222. From the fifth century onward, the Christians of A. shared the fate of the Nestorian Church. They resisted, even after the Muslim conquest in the seventh century (Cabul was not taken until 871), as sizeable minorities at least until the ninth century, and thereafter, until the second half of the nineteenth century, in fiercely independent tribes in Kafiristan (that is, “land of infidels”). When the bloody Mongol rule of Genghis Khan (from 1221 in A.) allowed contacts between Catholicism and Central-Eastern Asia to resume, A. remained outside them: for Marco Polo, toward the end of that century, “there simply Malcometto is worshipped.” In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries four Jesuits passed through it, summoned from Goa to Akbar’s court: Father A. Montserrat (1581), Brother Bento Goes (1603), Father G. De Castro, from Turin, who followed the emperor Giahanghir to Cabul, charged with assisting the Christians accompanying the imperial troops (1625–26); and Father E. Roth, who wrote that he had found a group of Christians in Cabul and, because he believed them to be descendants of St. Thomas, maintained that they did not appear to him to be people present there by chance or merely passing through, but residents there ab immemora.Portuguese and Indian Christians were found in the eighteenth century among the retinues of the viceroys of Cabul and among the soldiers serving there; it appears that from time to time some Jesuit ventured as far as Cabul for their sake. Certainly, Christians were brought from Lahore to Cabul and Kandahar in 1752 by the founder of the modern Afghan kingdom, Ahmad Shāh Durreni, for artillery service, and some Jesuit visited them twice a year. Catholic Armenians, who had come from Persia, settled in Cabul during the invasions of Nādir Shāh in A. and India, between 1736 and 1747; they were not numerous, but were respected and influential, especially when Armenian women entered the ruling family. They lived in their own quarter in the same Bala Hissar, the citadel hill of Cabul and the site of the royal palace, and had an enclosed section of their own in the city’s ancient cemetery, where they gathered every Sunday. At the time of M. Elphinstone’s mission (1809), there was also a Greek priest.
After Abdurrahman expelled the Armenians because they had joined the rebel Ishak Khan (1888), there was no longer a Christian community in Cabul: the employment, however, already under that same king, of Englishmen for medical or technical service and—after Abdurrahman (1919) had rejected British tutelage—of people of various nationalities, together with the personnel of legations and embassies, led Pius XI, in the year of Amanullah’s visit (1938), to consider establishing in Cabul, officially in the form of chaplain to the Italian legation, which already had authorization for this in its treaty, a priest charged with the religious care of Catholics residing in A. The plan was implemented in 1932 with the dispatch of a Barnabite father and the establishment of a chapel in the Italian legation, where the approximately 400 Catholics living in the Afghan capital gather.