Traveling abroad to proselytize requires research, said one local clergyman.
“You have to watch out where you go,” said Father Timothy Deutsch, of Alpine’s Queen of Angels Catholic Church, referring to the recent death of John Allen Chau, a missionary from Washington state who recently was killed on the remote North Sentinel
Island while trying to reportedly convert the Sentinel tribe to Christianity. “It was highly imprudent.”
Deutsch pointed out that sponsors have a role in the approval of any given mission, though it is not clear that Chau was acting on behalf of any church or sponsor .
“If anyone was over him,” he continued, “They should have thought— ‘Is this prudent?’”
Deutsch cited the dangerous missionary work of Saint Damien of Molokai, who ministered in a Hawaiian leper colony and eventually succumbed to the disease in 1889. A mission that might have been deemed highly dangerous from the start.
