From the beginning of the mission, the Jesuits in Chad had resisted the Vatican's clerical Africanisation. They opted instead to request more French missionaries. This strategy seemed so effective that, on the eve of independence, the Vatican confirmed a new missionary era for the African Church with Fidei Donum in 1957. In Chad, at least, missionary Christianity had successfully overcome the nationalist challenge that had driven the Vatican's Africanisation agenda. In 1972, Charles Vandame, head of the mission, and other European Jesuits sought to enhance the statutory jurisdiction of Chad. They were in control; they had made Chad their stronghold.

A similar trend was observed in other areas. In Chad, ‘White men were back in the driving seat. They controlled the planification of African economies; decided the careers of African politicians; fixed the prices for raw materials; and had more white populations than before independence.’ Postcolonial Chad was born, with Europeans still controlling all areas of Chad's society: the economy, the military, and even the Church.

Two years after its independence, in 1962, a French missionary, Henri Véniat, was ordained bishop of Sarh, the second-largest city in Chad. The ordination itself was a triumphant celebration of the Jesuits’ strategy of delaying clerical Africanisation in Chad. Véniat was not the last in a long list of Frenchmen ordained bishops in the Sahelian country. He was the symbol of a rebirth of missionary Christianity. The entire delegation of Chad in the Vatican Council was made of Europeans, as were the large majority of African bishops who attended. While these bishops pushed for a progressive agenda in the Council based on inculturation and real openness about clerical celibacy, they nevertheless retained power in Chad.

Véniat's ordination was also the first official encounter between Chad's Westernised Catholicism and Cameroon's increasingly Africanised Catholicism. Africans witnessing the episcopal ordination understood that Véniat might have been the only choice available in a Church still lacking in indigenous clerics. François Ngaïbi was Chad's single Chadian priest. Véniat's ordination, however, symbolically represented the beginning of a new era of rebirth of missionary Christianity in Chad.

Alongside the strengthening missionary Christianity, there was economic and political neocolonialism.