The local parishioners, the Italian missionaries and 'Thainess': the everyday practice and conflicts of inculturation in a Catholic Parish in Northern Thailand

Inculturation is the process through which the Gospel incarnates into a given culture, purifying the ‘evil’ elements of the culture and ‘ennobling’ the pure ones. This thesis analyses the creative tension generated by inculturation in a Catholic Parish in Northern Thailand. In this Parish, inculturation entangles together the Gospel, Thai national culture (‘Thainess’) and the enculturated worldviews of the Italian missionaries and the local parishioners - who are mainly converts from animism.
Following a grounded-theory methodology, unstructured interviews and participant observation were conducted. The data reveal that the Catholic ‘organic cosmos’ of the local parishioners derives from their enculturated animistic worldview: the parishioners know that God exists by ‘experiencing’ Him daily. God often intervenes in the parishioners’ lives because He inhabits the finite cosmos, along with other religious entities. The ‘irrelevance of belief’ means that conversion to God is perceived as a change in behaviours: ‘to have faith’ means to abide by the Catholic rules. The thesis concludes that in the religious sphere the Gospel does incarnate into the local enculturated worldviews.
However, Cuturi (2004) affirms that incarnating the Gospel only into the religious sphere of a culture provides a Catholic façade for a non-Catholic culture. The “counter-cultural” Gospel must also incarnate in the wider social system: it must turn the “sinful” structures of society into moral ones (Mattam, 2002). The data reveal that the missionaries and the parishioners do not agree on what is ‘sinful’ in Thai culture: the missionaries criticise three aspects of ‘Thainess’ that the parishioners and the Thai Catholic Church uphold as necessary to be Catholics integrated in Thai society. I frame this conflict as a misunderstanding between an honour-shame culture (Thailand) and an innocence-guilt one (Italy).
An unanswered question remains: how to decide which cultural elements need to be regarded as ‘sinful’ in inculturation?