PONTIFICAL INSTITUTE OF THE HOLY APOSTLES PETER AND PAUL AND OF THE SAINTS AMBROSE AND CHARLES FOR THE FOREIGN MISSIONS. — The Pontifical Institute of the Foreign Missions of Milan, as it exists today, derives from the union—effected in 1926—of the Institute of the Foreign Missions of Milan, established in 1850 at the wish of Pius XI and through the collective initiative of the bishops of the Lombard province, with the Seminary of the Holy Apostles Peter and Paul for the Foreign Missions, established in Rome in 1874 through the Avanzini (v.), founder of the Acta Sanctae Sedis.
In Milan the Institute was founded with the character of a provincial institution, while remaining wholly dependent upon and at the disposal of the Holy See through the Congregation of Propaganda; its juridical status was not religious but secular, almost as an implementation of the apostolic mandate inherent in episcopal dignity; it was, however, organized in the form of a society bound by a permanent bond of unity and activity, expressed first by the “formal promise” and, from 1924, by an oath.
The Institute’s first mission, taken over from the Marist Fathers, was in Micronesia and Melanesia (1852–55); a second—though under the authority of a Spanish apostolic prefect—was established in Labuan and Borneo (1855–60). The first had to be abandoned because of the deaths of two members (one of them murdered, Fr. Mazzucconi [v.]) and the illness of all the others; the two missionaries of the second, after withdrawing, were assigned to the prefecture of Hong Kong (1858); other missionaries were then sent to India, to the vicariates of Hyderabad and Calcutta (1855). In the Institute’s second decade, these last three centers—Hong Kong, Hyderabad, and central Bengal (which developed from Calcutta)—formed its first genuinely autonomous missions, with their own ecclesiastical superiors. Shortly before 1870, two new centers, in Burma and Honan (China), were entrusted to the Institute of Milan. Their difficult and slow beginnings underwent more significant development in the first decades of this century.
In 1911 the opening of houses for the vocations of grammar- and secondary-school students began: Monza, Genoa, and a center for missionary vocations in southern Italy.
After the union of the Institute of Milan with that of Rome, the apostolic field of the new Pontifical Institute expanded to another province of China, Shensi, where the Seminary of Rome had had, during the Boxer Uprising (1900), a genuine martyr, CRESCENTE (v.), beatified by Pius XII on 18 February 1951. In the other regions, however, where the Fathers of Rome had been sent, in Australia and America, the missions were no longer autonomous missionary units.
After the Ethiopian War of 1935–36, the Institute received a prefecture, that of Neghelli, which later ceased to exist as a result of subsequent events, while the Second World War, with its repercussions in the Far East, inflicted great damage on the Institute’s missions (seven missionaries killed by Communists or straggling soldiers in China, 1941–42). With China and India closed, or nearly so, a considerable number of its members moved to Brazil and Portuguese Guinea, and it opened procurator houses in England and the United States.
At present the Institute has the following missions: in China, Hong Kong (v.), Hanchung (v.), HINAYANA (v.), Weihwei (v.), Kaifeng (v.). In India: Bezwada (v.), Dinajpur (v.), HYDERABAD, DIOCESI DI (v.); in Burma, apostolic vicariate of Toungoo (v.) Keng tung (v.). In Africa, the missions of Portuguese Guinea; in America, the nullus prelature of Amapà and missions in Paraná, Manaus, and S. Paulo.
The Institute now has 479 priests, about one thousand students, and approximately seventy brothers. Its missions comprise 260,000 Catholics and 43,000 catechumens; 2,000 indigenous catechists are employed in the missions, together with 1,030 schoolteachers.
A particular merit of the Institute has been its intensive promotion of the missions in Italy, begun from its earliest years through the dissemination of missionary publications (reports by missionaries from Oceania) and then, from 1872, carried on regularly through Le missioni cattoliche; during the first twenty years of this century, the work was developed in a particularly notable way by Fr. Paolo Manna, through numerous periodical and occasional publications, and an even greater impetus was given to the missionary movement by the establishment of Missionary Union of the Clergy (v.), which also made Italy’s first attempt at a cultural journal (Rivista di studi missionari, 1919–22).
The Institute can present eminent figures only in the field of missionary activity proper, given its specific character as a missionary institute; at least the following should be mentioned: Salerio, Mazzucconi, and Raimondi among the earliest, and Marietti, Parietti, and Barbero among their immediate successors; then Biffi, Tornatore, Volonteri, Scarella, and Pozzoni, not to mention the more recent figures. They were all missionaries—many of them also bishops—who left indelible traces wherever they worked, almost all of them founders of new centers of Christian life. Some also found time for cartographic work, such as Salerio, Reina, and Volonteri; or for literature in indigenous languages, such as Fr. Goffredo Conti, who created the first indigenous Christian literature for the Karen tribes of Burma, who had no writing system; Marietti, who wrote, in excellent Bengali, a sacred history, an ecclesiastical history, books of polemic against the Protestants, and other minor works; and Msgr. Taveggia, author of a good Bengali version of the New Testament. Salerio, Rocca, Macchi, Manna, Pezzoni, Monfrini, and others wrote good monographs on indigenous populations.