Tempels, Placide

Placide Tempels was a Franciscan missionary and charismatic founder of the Jamaa movement in Africa. A native of Belgium, Tempels entered the Franciscan order in 1924, was ordained in 1930, and was assigned in 1933 to the Belgian Congo (Zaire). After ten years as a “bush father” in Katanga (Shaba) Province and feeling his missionary endeavors to have failed, he abandoned manuals, catechisms, and traditional methods, and devised a system of evangelization adapted to the thoughts, feelings, and inner aspirations of the Congolese. Through dialogue and encounter, he discovered the central and basic desires of the Bantu people: life, fecundity, and vital union. These values, fused with Franciscan theology and Flemish religiosity, became the basis of the creative adaptation of Catholicism to Black African culture known as the Jamaa. In 1944-1945 Tempels published a series of articles in Flemish detailing the basic concepts of the Jamaa. Later published in book form in French, and then in English under the title Bantu Philosophy, this work quickly became the center of lively debate. Some insisted it deserved to be condemned for contaminating Catholic doctrine with African beliefs. Others held that, with careful guidance, the Jamaa could facilitate Catholic missionary endeavor. But when the movement emerged as a subculture within Congolese Catholicism and began to spawn a variety of what were considered to be problems, deviations, and aberrations, the enthusiasm of many of its supporters waned. Tempels’s superiors prolonged his scheduled one-year leave in Belgium from 1946 to 1949, and when he returned to the Congo, he learned that the Propaganda Fide had forbidden him to resume missionary work. Although restricted to routine pastoral and teaching tasks and frequently transferred, he maintained contact with his Jamaa lieutenants, who urged him to publish Notre Rencontre, a collection of mafundisho (lessons) in Jamaa doctrine. Beginning in 1960, several Congolese dioceses imposed restrictions on the Jamaa, and over the next ten years all the founder-leaders of the movement left the country. Tempels returned to Belgium to undergo surgery in 1962, never to return to Africa. He was assigned to the Franciscan friary in his hometown and forbidden to publish or speak publicly. In 1964 he was summoned to Rome to face charges of heterodoxy and improper conduct, but the Holy Office never issued any condemnation of him or the Jamaa. It did, however, urge the hierarchy of Zaire to exercise prudent vigilance over Jamaa ideology and practice. Failing health plagued Tempels in his last years.

Cyprian J. Lynch, OFM

Bibliography

Placide Tempels, Catéchèse bantoue (1948).

——, Bantu Philosophy, Colin King, tr. (1953).

——-, Notre Rencontre (1962).

Willy De Craemer, The Jamaa and the Church: A Bantu Catholic Movement in Zaire (1977).

Johannes Fabian, Jamaa: A Charismatic Movement in Katanga (1971).

This article is reproduced, with permission, from Biographical Dictionary of Christian Missions, copyright © 1998, by Gerald H. Anderson, W. B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, Grand Rapids, Michigan. All rights reserved.