Sample Creeds

(More sample creeds will be available on this page in the near future.)


Congregation of the Holy Ghost in East Nigeria, The Masai Creed, c. 1960

The Congregation of the Holy Ghost, also sometimes called "Spiritans," were founded at the beginning of the nineteenth century with the establishment of a seminary. Practically from the beginning, and particularly after their merger with the Congregation of the Holy Heart of Mary, the Spiritans manifested a zeal for the foreign missions.

One of the most noteworthy of their mission fields was East Africa, present-day Nigeria, beginning in the second half of the nineteenth century.1 And it was there, through their evangelization of the Masai people, that they engaged in some of the earliest and most successful experiments in "inculturation."

The results of that inculturation are visible in their homegrown adaptations of the liturgy of the mass and other Roman Catholic services.2 Although it was composed primarily by Western missionaries, The Masai Creed, composed about 1960, consciously strove to incorporate elements of the native culture--"always on safari," "but the hyenas did not touch him"--into the fundamental trinitarian structure of primitive creeds.