Persistent Alarms Confronting New Priorities: Protestants in Africa in Italian and French Catholic Magazines (1945–1962)

Anti‐Protestantism was one of the reasons for the revival of missions during the interwar period. By the 1960s, however, Protestants were less and less often mentioned as a threat to missionary efforts, and the decline in inter‐confessional tensions was increasingly considered a relic of the past. This article explores this shift by outlining the reasons for the decreasing hostility towards Protestant missions in Africa during the decolonisation process. Based on an extensive review of generalist and missionary Catholic magazines published in two European countries that were affected differently by the decolonisation process—Italy and France—the article examines how anti‐Protestantism influenced missions, and vice versa, in Africa between the end of World War II and the beginning of the Second Vatican Council. By analysing the national contexts of the articles and the contexts in which the magazines were published, it first unravels the reasons for the persistence of anti‐Protestantism in Catholic missionary culture at the beginning of the 1950s, then explores the gradual emergence of new priorities linked to a new generation of missionaries, such as the fight against communism, the spread of Islam and the formation of new Catholic elites in newly independent African countries.