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Between 1930 and 1960, the Roman Catholic Mission emerged as one of the most consequential external forces reshaping the indigenous institutions of the Bette people of Obudu, in what was then Ogoja Province of colonial Nigeria. Extending from the mission station founded at Ogoja in 1921 and consolidated after 1932 under the Irish St. Patrick’s Missionary Society, the Mission entered Bette country alongside, and frequently in tandem with, the apparatus of British indirect rule. This paper argues that Catholic evangelisation functioned as more than a religious undertaking: it operated as an agent of colonial change that reorganised Bette political authority, religious cosmology, education, and family life. The argument is developed through, rather than merely alongside, a sustained reading of the relevant scholarship. The paper sets the Obudu material against four bodies of literature: the Nigerian mission historiography descending from Ajayi and Ayandele; the long debate over the explanation of African conversion opened by Horton and contested by Fisher and Ifeka-Moller; the scholarship on colonial rule, custom, and the limits of invention associated with Afigbo, Ranger, and Spear; and the Comaroffian account of consciousness together with its critics. It argues that the Obudu evidence supports a layered, rather than single-cause, explanation of change, and that the thin European presence in an under-governed province makes the Bette catechist, not the European priest, the primary agent of institutional transformation. Drawing on colonial intelligence reports, regional mission historiography, and an emerging body of Bette ethnolinguistic scholarship, the paper situates Obudu within the wider historiography of Christian missions in Nigeria while addressing a comparatively understudied corner of Cross River history. It concludes that the Bette encounter with Roman Catholicism illustrates a broader pattern in which mission and the colonial State, though institutionally distinct, worked as complementary engines of change along Nigeria’s minority-ethnic peripheries.