Christian Responsibility Beyond the Home Front

Pious brotherhoods had organized spiritually motivated men (and some women) during the interwar decades, but during the late 1930s, the emergence of cercles (aid societies) sponsored by French-funded Catholic Action allowed for an even greater degree of professional organizing for Catholics in Cameroon. The goals of the cercles were initially straightforward, and mirrored those of confréries: spread Christianity in towns and villages, organize social life and rituals around the liturgical calendar, and mobilize the apostolate to address challenges to family life, social stability, and marriage alliances. As Catholic Action expanded its focus from missions to clinics, hospitals, and orphanages, it helped link them to the cercles it financed, and transformed these aid societies into professional organizations. These new professional cadres with a religious identity lent new meanings to Christian membership and constructed new possibilities for reformist and social action. Perhaps most importantly, cercles, along with confréries, became large and influential enough to attract not only financial investment from Catholic Action, but also from parishes and organizations in France, which allowed for more communication between French and African Christians, and imparted a sense of inclusion in a wider community of believers than simply the one demarcated by the local church or missionary society.

The main Catholic organization that worked to link African and French dioceses was the Association des Ligeurs Universitaires et Missionnaires (AdLucem), which, along with Catholic Action, sponsored social outreach paired with technical training for African Christians. Ad Lucem's directors in France, Abbé Robert Prévost and Cardinal Achille Liénart, Bishop of Lille, were trade union sympathizers who had been active in the Worker-Priest Movement as a means of reconnecting a disaffected and despiritualized industrial class with the Catholic Church. Ad Lucem also had spiritual and social connections with the broader Action Catholique, or Catholic Action movement, which likewise had a base in Lille and was deeply committed to deepening the spiritual foundations of France's civilizing responsibility within the nation as well as throughout the world as part of securing souls against the menace of communism.