ope Benedict XVI 's first visit to Africa comes at a time when many African Catholics are excited about the growth of the Christian faith in Africa, and concerned about the place and role of the Catholic faith in changing the face of Africa. It is expected that this visit will highlight the great work that the Catholic Church is doing in Africa in the areas of spirituality, health care, development initiatives, and the drive towards more prosperous and stable democracies in Africa.
It is not surprising that the visit does not capture any attention here in Canada or the United States. Most Western news outfits prefer to report only the negative things about Africa. If the Pope was going to Darfur or Zimbabwe, it would have been such'great news' because these countries are in crisis. In addition, the past few months have not been the best for the Catholic Church with the controversy over the lifting of the excommunication of the Holocaust-denier, Bishop Williamson, and the rejection by the Austrian Episcopal conference and Catholic faithful of the Pope's choice of a controversial cleric, Maria Gerhard Wagner as auxiliary bishop in Linz. Some of these controversial issues have focused the attention of the world media as often is the case on the genuine mistakes of the Pope rather than the good things he continues to do.
Here in North America, anti-Catholicism is the last acceptable prejudice�Any negative thing you say about the Catholic church here in North America will stick. However, mistakes of any kind remind us all no matter how highly placed or our religious grandstanding, that we live in an imperfect world of imperfect men and women. No matter how close to God we are, or how wise we think we are, St Augustine reminds us that "everything that is human is imperfect." The real mistake as Jesuit writer, John Powell observes is the one from which we learn nothing. Thus, religious leaders are constantly reminded that they are not perfect, hence the need for humility, wide ranging consultation, and listening to every stake holder in the religious establishment; wisdom is often found in uncommon places, and spirituality and miracles, in the most hidden and unexpected corners.
The visit of the Pope to Africa is a sign that the Pope takes Africa seriously. One could argue that he should have come earlier given the fact that Africa is the place where the future of the Christian faith is being redefined and determined, but one could say better late than never. Many Nigerians will also ask: Why is the Pope not coming to the Giant of Africa, and is instead visiting our 'small neighbour', Cameroun who does not have much to offer the Pope in terms of number and the offertory that comes with large attendance. Again, those who will remember know that the last papal visit to Africa in 1998 was to Nigeria, it is only fair that the Pope visits another country. We also need to remind ourselves as Nigerians that many 'small' African countries are considered 'big' in the international community because of many reasons too numerous to mention here. Our country has not claimed her rightful place whether it is in the Church or in the global community because we have failed to rise to our true national destiny, but this is an issue for another piece. I wish to share what I consider should be important issues which the Catholic church faces in Africa today, which the Pope's visit could highlight.
In his 1994 Exhortation, Ecclesia in Africa Pope John Paul II wrote this about the church in Africa; "Indeed, this continent is today experiencing what we call a sign of the times, an acceptable time, a day of salvation. It seems that the 'hour of Africa' has come, a favourable time." The Pope's expressions: 'historical moment of grace', 'a sign of the times', 'an acceptable time' and 'hour of Africa' indicate his conviction that the Church in Africa has come of age. For instance, while seminaries are closing down in the West, and parishes are being closed in many dioceses in Canada and the USA, seminaries are being expanded in many African countries, while many prospective seminarians and aspirants are being turned down because of the lack of facilities to accommodate them. African priests and religious are now providing pastoral ministries in many North American and European churches in what appears to be a reverse mission from Africa to the North. Many people are convinced that we are at a turning point in the Christian movement, as global Christianity grapples with what is obviously a post-Western Christianity still being determined by forces and personalities from a post-Christian Western society. There is thus a need for a re-evaluation of the relationship between the heartland Christianity of the West and the frontier Christianity of the Global South, where the future of Christianity is presently being determined.
There are three challenges which African Christianity faces which one hopes the Pope's visit could bring to the fore. The first has to deal with a question of identity and is more concerned with the inner dynamics of being Church and the problem of the autonomy of local churches within the universal Catholic family. The second is the question of accountability broadly conceived; the third point is the challenge of religious freedom and inter-religious dialogue with African Traditional Religions and Islamic religion. The other concern here is the apparent state of Catholicism within global Christianity: Is being Catholic perceived today, within societies where the Roman Catholic Church has a strong footing, as a positive force for change and religious and spiritual regeneration?
The question of the autonomy and identity of the Church in Africa is not a specific challenge but a common concern as many local churches struggle with maintaining a balance between contextualisation and communion in a Catholic faith that is still weighed down by a very synchronizing Church authority at the center. This debate was very prominent ten years ago between Cardinal Walter Kasper and the then Cardinal Ratzinger on whether the center has priority over the local. Put in simple language, is what happens in churches in Africa be determined by the decisions made in Rome or are priests and bishops better placed to take pastoral decisions in their parishes and diocese without seeking for permission from the Pope in Rome?
While I do not wish to get into the debate, it is obvious that a centralising tendency or a universalizing theology which is so often the case in the Catholic family is not a healthy means of promoting autonomy and identity of local churches to meet the specific challenges facing them. This is particularly true in liturgical, doctrinal, and moral issues, as well as administrative and pastoral policies which have to deal with specific local challenges and problems. Does being Catholic mean being the same, having a monolithic culture, and a common curriculum for clergy and religious? Is a universalizing tendency not a tidal wave which will sweep away creativity and dynamism in local churches; extinguishing local customs and ancient traditions' ability to meet the challenges they face? Is it not true that the context is the place where the universal is potentially present and that Catholicism is universal to the extent it makes the particular part of the validating claim of any universality?
The Catholic Church in Africa has been blessed with the vibrancy of the women folk. Effective evangelization in Africa calls for greater involvement of African women in African dioceses and parishes. In many instances women, especially nuns are often treated as second class citizens and hold any position at the mercy of a male dominated hierarchy and leadership across the board. Catholic women in Africa are less visible in leadership in the Catholic churches than in other denominations, especially the Pentecostal, Evangelical, and African Independent churches. Why is this so? Such treatment of women in the Catholic churches in Africa parallels the patriarchal cultural frameworks that furnish and legitimize the ongoing marginalization and abuse of women through various uncritical cultural assumptions.
The Church in Africa is being called at this moment of grace to account to the Lord for how she has used her gifts, her growing number of faithful, and the riches of the Gospel to transform both the Church in Africa and the wider African society. If the dictatorial tendencies in many African countries, the financial mismanagement and ethnicity that have imperilled growth in the public square, are eating deep into the fabric of many dioceses and indigenous religious orders in Africa, how can the Church in Africa be a light to the nations?
Many lay people in Africa complain that they never get from their bishops or priests annual financial statements showing clearly how their offertory and donations have been used. This 'don't ask, don't tell' policy does not make the church credible in challenging the growing high-handedness and lack of accountability in many countries in Africa. The Pope hopefully will challenge his African brother bishops to follow the lead of the Vatican by publishing annual financial statements. This lack of accountability is very depressing and is a problem that has affected many churches in Africa: the people who make donations to the church have a right to know how their money is spent. The idea that church officials are accountable only to God does not hold water: the Church is the visible presence of God in the world (where two or more are gathered in my name, there I am in their midst). This is only a wool being placed in the eyes of ordinary folks to cover up what is becoming a seething corruption in many churches.
Catholicism in Africa is in dire need of an inner renewal of the clergy and religious. While many priests and religious continue to render heroic services and make majestic sacrifices in many dark alleys and hidden corners, as the voice of many voiceless poor in Africa, this has become in many parts of Africa the exception instead of the norm. Many church officials today in some African countries (including Nigeria) receive donations of SUVs, and huge financial gifts, and gratifications from public officials which only continue to erode their authority and undermine the simplicity and poverty of spirit required to arrest the moral, cultural, and spiritual decline in a continent that is awash in religious sentiments, but still far from concretely reflecting these sentiments in the public and ecclesial contexts. Many church officials have become very partisan, publicly supporting one political party or politician over others, some have changed the nature of the liturgy and religious services to accommodate the occasional 'VIPs' some of whom have questionable character and questionable sources of wealth.
The way wealth is being worshipped in Nigeria has made it imperative that churches should indeed become a place where the poor in our land can find succour and be treated as equal sons and daughters of God with the rich and the mighty. If churches promote, recognize, and only honour the wealthy; if priests and church leaders hang around only the wealthy, and if religious leaders display so much wealth, they reinforce the false belief which has taken shape in our cultural imagination in Nigeria that a man or woman is only as great as the size of his or her pocket. Money is not everything, and the poor man of Galilee that we Christians follow will be ashamed to see how wealth is now being worshipped and promoted in our churches in his Name, and how we have tied money to anything one can obtain in the church including miracles, sacraments, and even Christian burials. Many poor people who come to churches on Sunday obviously go home feeling sorry for themselves when there is a lunching or bazaar seeing how their lack of means have made them 'useless' in the Church. It is not surprising that many people do anything in Nigeria to make money and go to any length to show it off; the Church must take some blame for promoting this negative tendency.
Many people in the West are calling for a paradigm shift in Western theologies to meet the new challenges of Western Christianity since the boundaries are shifting in a very fundamental way. If these Western theologies are no longer meeting the challenges of today's Western Church or if the challenges of the Churches in the West are no longer being met by a recycling of the same theological frameworks, are there valid grounds to propose those theologies to the Global South? It is still surprising to many Catholic theologians that the curriculum for the training of priests in African Catholicism is made in Rome, thus making it difficult for local churches in Africa to train their priests and religious to understand the cultural and social context of the practice of the faith. One hopes that the Pope will consider the time appropriate to remove the tag of 'Mission' churches on the churches of Africa. I do believe that most Catholic churches in Africa (especially in Nigeria) are no longer mission churches since they are self-perpetuating, and can be self-sustaining if they shed themselves of the very expensive replication of Western churches' administrative bureaucracy, the use of imported expensive Western vestments, liturgical vessels, sacramentals, tabernacles, altars, and expensive church architecture, chanceries and rectories.
A vulnerable church in Africa which uses the things discoverable in the African world, to build African faith communities, sensitive to the economic limitations of the faithful will be a sustainable church. If many African Independent Churches and many Pentecostal and Orthodox churches in Africa are surviving without any support from the West, why shouldn't the Catholic churches of Africa survive without going cap in hand as we all do to churches in the West? As long as the Catholic Church in Africa continues to be under the tutelage of the Propaganda Fide as mission churches, there will be no real growth and maturity for the local churches. Many African theologians are hoping that the Pope might reconsider having the Synod in Rome in the fall and instead select an African country to host the Synod. When one thinks of the heavy cost that this will impose on the bishops from Africa and their people, it is obvious this does not make economic, ecological, and biblical sense. Having the Synod in Africa will be an Incarnational way of identifying with Africans by taking a tent with the ordinary and suffering people of this continent. It will also show that the Catholic Church is not treating Africa in a paternalistic way.
Beyond the internal challenges facing African Catholicism is the external challenge which has to do with religious freedom and inter-religious dialogue. Are African Catholics still operating from the worldview of African Traditional Religions or is the faith still superficial, a mere veneer over a deeply rooted traditional worldview? The task of inculturating the Gospel in Africa is still far from being realized, whether with regard to liturgy, morals, ecclesiastical structures, the criteria for clerical life, pastoral practices, translation of Biblical and liturgical texts etc. It seems that the project of inculturation is a landmine for many practitioners as they struggle to sometimes abandon the fruits of their cultural studies in order to find a way of fusing African Christianity into the norms and categories of the institutional church. The challenge of syncretism in African Catholicism remains a real one as Africans look for multiple appeals to traditional religions outside of Christianity to find answers to the questions of witchcraft, ancestral communion, sicknesses, childless marriages, personal, family and communal misfortunes, mental health issues, female genital mutilation, circumcision, demonic attacks, sorceries, sexual identities, and other limit situations which are not addressed in traditional Western Christianity.
There is also the challenge of inter-religious dialogue with Islam. According to a report on religious liberty in Africa published by the Aid to the Church in Need in July 2006 the greatest challenge facing Christianity in Africa is the question of religious liberty. A sample of some of the findings of the report will reveal the extent of this challenge. For instance, although with the ending of a number of civil wars the more intense waves of violence characterizing Angola, the Ivory Coast and Sudan have ceased, the conflict in Uganda that also caused the death of the Caritas worker Okot Stalin and resulted in an atmosphere of persecution addressed at the Catholic Church, is not by any means over. While countries like Morocco and Tunisia are looking for new ways to promote dialogue and tolerance between Christians and Muslims, Algeria in 2006 approved a law punishing conversion from Islam. The Catholic Church, the Protestant community and the Seventh Day Adventists are currently the only non-Islamic denominations acknowledged and allowed to operate in this country.
The same could be said of a country like Egypt. In spite of a degree of openness shown by the government, the clash between Islamic extremists and Orthodox Copts, often the victims of threats, attempts at forced conversions and mass attacks, now seems to have become radicalized in Egypt. Although the Orthodox Copts represent about 15% of the population, in the parliamentary assembly their presence is reduced to less than 1%. They are in practice excluded from even secondary level appointments within the state administration and public education. Income from taxation is used for building and restoring mosques, while other Christian places of worship do not receive public funding.
Radical Islam is not simply a problem of North Africa it is also spreading in sub-Saharan Africa. Radical Islamic advance is also perceived in Kenya, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Chad, Cameroun, Uganda, Sudan and above all in Nigeria, where the enforcement of Shari'a Islamic law tends to also be applied to non-Muslims and has caused continuous tension often resulting in attacks on the Christian communities causing dozens of victims on both sides. The recent religious violence in Jos is only one of many such examples.
What is obvious is that the Church in Africa has the large membership, a very passionate following, and the inner resilience that comes from the Gospel to meet these challenges. Unleashing the inner strength of Catholicism in Africa, and the enthusiasm of African Christians for Christianity will demand finding a balance between innovation and tradition, contextualization and centralization, and the dynamic cultural creativity in African Christianity, and the continuity of the rich history of the Christian faith beyond Africa. The Pope's visit will be significant not by the beauty of the liturgies that he celebrates but by concrete gestures he makes in this direction, and the words that he will say to Africans who still continue to hold on to the Christian faith as the only thing that will never fail them even as many other things around them continue to display signs of instability and decay.
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