British academic Paul Seabright recently published an intriguing new book called <em>The Divine Economy</em>, which attempts to offer an economic analysis of religion. For admirers of belief, it includes the consoling premise that “religion is not in decline; it is, in many ways, more powerful than it has ever been”.
To prove the point, Seabright wanted to open with a vignette to capture the enduring appeal of religious faith. It was natural, arguably even inevitable, that he chose a setting in Africa – specifically, a Pentecostal megachurch in Accra, the capital city of Ghana, where his heroine, Grace, devotes a considerable portion of her meagre income to supporting the lavish lifestyle of Pastor William.
More than two centuries ago, when Samuel Johnson wanted to refute Bishop Berkeley’s idealism, he famously kicked a rock. Today, anyone wishing to rebut what was once known as the “secularisation hypothesis”, which held that religion was on an irresistible slide toward extinction, need do no more than look at Africa, where religious faith is not only alive and well but flourishing.
According to 2018 research from the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life, a stunning 89 per cent of people in sub-Saharan Africa, meaning nine in ten, say that religion is “very important” to them. An overwhelming 79 per cent of sub-Saharan Africans report attending religious services at least once a week, by far the world’s highest average.
For most Africans, the existence of a mystical, invisible, spiritual world, which surrounds and shapes the tangible realities of experience, is simply axiomatic. The point is certainly valid for the particular form of institutional religion known as Roman Catholicism.<br><br><strong>RELATED: <a href="https://catholicherald.co.uk/podcast/the-problems-posed-by-private-revelations-with-simon-caldwell/?swcfpc=1"><mark style="background-color:rgba(0, 0, 0, 0)" class="has-inline-color has-vivid-cyan-blue-color">Private revelations and the problems they pose, with Simon Caldwell</mark></a></strong>
During the 20th century, the Catholic population of sub-Saharan Africa shot up from 1.9 million to more than 130 million – a staggering growth rate of 6,708 per cent, some of which can be explained by overall population growth, but a healthy share of which is also due to missionary fervour.
Today, African priests are, in many ways, the new Irish, serving in missionary capacities all over the globe. Some years ago, I did a piece on Catholicism in Texas, which featured the lone parish in a small town divided between wealthy white ranchers and impoverished Hispanic farm workers. The two previous pastors – one Anglo, one Mexican – had, predictably, been rejected by competing halves of the congregation.
The bishop’s ingenious solution was to assign the parish to a Nigerian <em>fidei donum</em> priest, who happened to be the scion of a princely family, and who was embraced by both sides.
Such a happy outcome was possible only because Nigerians are generating a bumper crop of vocations, with many of them today heading abroad. Bigard Memorial Seminary in south-eastern Nigeria is said to be the largest Catholic seminary in the world, with a student population roughly one-fifth the total number of seminarians in the entire United States.
Not to put too fine a point on things, but without Africa the Catholic Church today would be in serious trouble.
All of which makes the relationship between Africa and the Vatican in the Pope Francis era an especially interesting tale, because it’s marked by both shadows and light, promise and peril, and it also opens up vistas on competing futures.
To confirm that truth, we need to begin at another point of the compass: Germany. In the aftermath of Vatican II, one popular book about the council was Fr Ralph M Wiltgen’s <em>The Rhine Flows into the Tiber</em>, a title chosen to emphasise the decisive role that progressive German theologians and prelates had played on virtually every issue the council considered, from ecumenism to liturgy and beyond.
Today, a similar account of the Francis papacy might be titled <em>The Rhine Flows into the Rio de la Plata</em>, to capture the eerily analogous way in which German theology and pastoral experience have had a mammoth influence on the Argentine pope’s agenda, especially his most controversial moves – including communion for divorced and civilly remarried Catholics, a position pioneered by German Cardinal Walter Kasper, to the blessing of couples in same-sex unions, reflecting the already existing practice in many German parishes and dioceses.
The main difference between Vatican II and today is that such an account of the Francis papacy actually would have to be titled <em>The Rhine Flows into the Rio de la Plata…and Hits the Zambezi</em>.
The experience of the last 11 years is that progressive forces in the Francis papacy, often originating in Europe, at key moments have encountered stiff resistance from pockets of the rest of the world, above all the African continent.
There is a special sort of irony about the fact that history’s first pope from the developing world, who sees himself as an apostle of the peripheries, nonetheless has pursued an internal ecclesiastical agenda which often reflects the agenda of the West, arousing opposition and alarm from the traditionally marginalised quarters of the world he so obviously wants to serve and represent.
To be clear, it’s not as if the relationship between Francis and Africa has been entirely contentious. He’s made four trips to the continent, each drawing massive crowds and genuine popular enthusiasm. They’ve also occasioned some of the Pope’s most impassioned and consequential political gestures, from his push for peace in the Central African Republic to his <em>cri du couer</em> in the Democratic Republic of Congo, “Hands off Africa!…It is not a mine to be stripped, or a terrain to be plundered.”
On a wide range of social policy issues, from war and peace and climate change to the analysis of free-market global capitalism, Pope Francis and African Catholicism are broadly aligned.
Yet there’s equally no mistaking the fact that some of the greatest blowback Francis has encountered to his <em>ad intra</em> agenda, meaning for the internal life of the Church, has come from Africa and Africans.<br><br><strong>RELATED: <a href="https://catholicherald.co.uk/cardinal-sarah-denounces-atheistic-western-bishops-who-prefer-the-world-to-the-cross/"><mark style="background-color:rgba(0, 0, 0, 0)" class="has-inline-color has-vivid-cyan-blue-color">Cardinal Sarah denounces ‘atheistic’ Western bishops who prefer the world to the cross</mark></a></strong>
During the two contentious Synods of Bishops on the family in 2014 and 2015, which eventually produced <em>Amoris Laetitia</em> and its cautious opening to communion for civilly remarried Catholics, African prelates such as Cardinal Wilfrid Napier of Durban, South Africa, emerged as influential dissident voices.
In the wake of the Synod on the Amazon in 2019, when some participants argued against mandatory clerical celibacy, it was Cardinal Robert Sarah of Guinea who organised a book-length defence of celibacy just as people were expecting Francis to issue his conclusions – even controversially enlisting Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI in the project.
Most recently, it was Cardinal Fridolin Ambongo of Congo, the elected president of the Symposium of Episcopal Conferences of Africa and Madagascar (SECAM), who led the African bishops en masse in rejecting the possibility presented in <em>Fiducia Supplicans</em>, a December 2023 document of the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith, of offering blessings to couples in same-sex relationships.
To the extent the past is prologue, what does this brief recap of recent history augur for the Catholic future?
In the short term, it suggests that Africans are destined to play an important role in the next conclave. At the moment there are 17 African electors, meaning cardinals under the age of 80 and thus eligible to elect the next pope, out of a grand total of 127. Admittedly, not every African elector is the same – Cardinal Peter Turkson of Ghana, is probably more likely to be open to a “continuity” candidate than, say, Sarah.
Nonetheless, in broad strokes the more conservative camp within the College of Cardinals is likely to begin its electoral calculations by counting on strong support from the African bloc, suggesting that African electors may be well positioned to influence the outcome.
There’s also, of course, the possibility that Africa could supply the king, not simply the kingmakers. Many see Ambongo as a hot new contender, not simply due to his opposition to <em>Fiducia Supplicans</em>, but also to the statesmanlike manner in which he handled the situation.<br><br><strong>RELATED: <a href="https://catholicherald.co.uk/cardinal-ambongo-besungu-an-emerging-papal-candidate-due-to-fiducia-supplicans/"><mark style="background-color:rgba(0, 0, 0, 0)" class="has-inline-color has-vivid-cyan-blue-color">Cardinal Ambongo: emerging papal candidate due to Fiducia Supplicans</mark></a></strong>
More broadly, the rise of Africa suggests a sea-change in global Catholicism, no matter who is chosen as the next pope. If demography is indeed destiny, Africa increasingly will set the tone in the Church, which is likely to be a disconcerting experience for many Westerners, no matter what their outlook.
Liberals in the West will be alarmed by the highly traditional sexual morality of African Catholics, while conservatives will be nonplussed by African Catholicism’s frequently progressive social and geopolitical agenda, including positions on both Ukraine and Gaza that would horrify most Western hawks.
“Synodal” Catholics, meaning those most committed to lay empowerment and the deconstruction of clericalism, may be put off by the sometimes top-down ethos of African Catholic life, where the exercise of clerical authority is generally less contested and contentious. Liturgical traditionalists may be flummoxed by the frequently exuberant and ecstatic nature of African worship, which sometimes bears a merely passing relationship with the official rubrics.
Rationalists may be uncomfortable with the robustly spiritual character of African Catholic religiosity, in which concepts such as apparitions, demonic possession, charismatic gifts and private revelation – often considered slightly exotic or “fringe” components of the faith in the West – are more mainstream.
Secular advocates of Church/state separation will be horrified by the explicit and assertive political roles African prelates are accustomed to playing, given that in many African societies, churches are the only zones of life in which civil society can take shape. As a result, African prelates often criticise governments, demand policies and pass judgment on elections with a brazenness that would put Western lobbyists to shame.
In a very real sense, the bumpy relationship between Africa and the Francis papacy is a hint of things to come, and a misleading one at that. It may suggest the turbulence is ideological, a clash between theological liberals and conservatives.
Instead, something far more profound is afoot. The centre of gravity in Catholicism is shifting, and Western Catholics will be forced to accept that their perspectives, priorities and politics no longer will set the agenda. We may come to feel at times like strangers in our faith home – a sensation, it ought to be said, with which Africans and Catholics from other parts of the non-Western world are wearily familiar.
One may rue this development or revel in it, but such discussions are akin to debating the desirability of winter; whether you like it or not, it’s coming. That soundbite, fittingly, was coined by an African, vis-à-vis the inevitability of globalisation. Nelson Mandela didn’t have the Catholic Church in mind when he uttered it, but it fits like a glove.<br><br><em>Photo: Pope Francis looks on during the welcome ceremony at Martyrs' Stadium in Kinshasa, Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), 2 February 2023. Pope Francis held an open-air mass that drew an estimated million faithful, during a landmark trip to central Africa. (Photo by TIZIANA FABI/AFP via Getty Images.)</em><br><br><strong><strong>This article originally appeared in the June 2024 issue of the <em>Catholic Herald</em>. To subscribe to our award-winning, thought-provoking magazine and have independent and high-calibre counter-cultural Catholic journalism delivered to your door anywhere in the world click <a href="https://catholicherald.co.uk/subscribe/?swcfpc=1"><mark style="background-color:rgba(0, 0, 0, 0)" class="has-inline-color has-vivid-cyan-blue-color">HERE</mark></a>.</strong></strong>
