by Wolfgang Schonecke, Kenya, December 1999
THEME = THE CHURCH
The Third Millennium will be a time of
testing and challenge for the Church.
But how will the Church
respond?
The Church in Africa has experienced in the past century, a rapid growth that is unparalleled in Church history. 113 million Africans (or 15% of the population) are Catholics. Seminaries and novitiates are full. European visitors to a Sunday Mass in an African parish are enthraled by the liveliness of the liturgy. In spite of innumerable problems, the African Church, as the African people, radiates a vitality and joy of life that is contagious. In the chaos of civil wars and ethnic conflicts, the Church has often remained the only functioning institution that brings relief and offers hope.
The African Synod of 1994 was a hallmark of a Church that has come into its own. Becoming a Church-as-family, dialogue and inculturation were the catchwords of that Synod, and things have happened since. Drumming and dancing, so central to celebration in Africa, have become part of Mass. There have been some attempts to bring clergy and laity closer together, such as the courageous decision of the Zambian bishops to create a Zambian Catholic Forum, where bishops, priests, religious and laity come together once a year, to look at major issues together. There are many signs that the Catholic Church in Africa has taken root and keeps growing.
But one cannot ignore other signs that this millennium will be a time of testing and challenge. It could put the Church in front of situations for which it is ill prepared. Let us mention some of the challenges that could await the Church in the years to come.
The African Synod pointed to lack of competent and committed leadership as one of the key problems on the continent. The generations of African leaders after independence (with a few exceptions), stood out because of their incompetence and corruption. They continued to use the tribal "divide-and- rule" tactics of their colonial masters, brutally repressed any opposition and enriched themselves beyond imagination at the expense of the masses. Some of the negative features of political leadership are seeping into the Church. Lay people frequently complain about ethnic divisions among the clergy and religious, abuse of church funds, and a clergy behaving like chiefs rather than pastors. At the same time, the laity find it hard to take up their own Christian responsibility in Church and society.
But more serious than abuse of authority, is the fact the seminaries do not form future priests for the needs of a changing society. The basic model of formation in the Church, is still the seminary of the Council of Trent that envisaged a relatively stable society, where the priest had a well-defined role and was expected to have the answers to all questions. But culture and society in today's Africa are anything but stable. Nobody can predict how Africa will look like in twenty years from now. What is needed today, are church leaders capable of critical analysis and creative imagination, who can respond with courage and foresight to change. Present models of priestly formation emphasise conformity to rules and repetition of acquired knowledge rather than personal thinking and reflection. A model of Church-as-family living in dialogue, is paid lip service, but meets stiff resistance should anyone dare to put it into practise.
Furthermore, although democratic system have not yet taken root in most African countries a "democratic culture" is emerging, in which people are better informed and no longer ready to believe any authority. The clergy are still trained in a strongly hierarchical vision of Church, and subjected to an authoritarian system in the seminary. Bishops and priests will have an increasingly difficult time to function meaningfully in this emerging democratic culture. Unless there is a concerted effort to rethink the formation of future priests and religious, for which there seems to be no will at present, the Church is likely to have a serious leadership crisis before long.
When theologians began to talk about inculturation as a major condition for rooting the Christian faith on African soil, the problem was mainly how to integrate traditional African beliefs and customs, with Christian ideas and values. A generation further, the problem has become far more complex, because today's culture has become a strange mixture. The movement of democratisation in the early nineties, wanted political change. But dictatorial regimes quickly learned to talk the language of democracy, while subverting the democratic process. What they did not manage to suppress, was a certain liberation of the media. A freer press proliferated, private radio and TV spread, a certain elite got access to the Internet. The Media opened the doors for the global culture to enter the remotest village. That new media culture is secular and indifferent or subtly hostile to religion. And it begins to shape the thinking, feeling and lifestyle of people, most visibly among urban youth. The Catholic Church is totally unprepared to deal with this phenomenon, apart from some local efforts to establish local radio stations, which at times are too devotional to attract a younger audience. It is fundamentalist and pentecostal Christian groups that have understood the challenge, and put their money and mouth into the creation of a Christian media culture. How Christian the message of popular evangelists really is, may be open to question. Some offer an escape religiosity to the poor, others preach the "Gospel of prosperity" to the newly rich, to legitimise their often ill-gotten wealth as a blessing from God. Even if often off-centre, they are highly effective and draw huge numbers of Catholics away from the Church, with attractive gospel music and state-of-art communication equipment and skills. The Catholic Church is still putting most of its money into buildings instead of communications.
The hierarchical vision of the Church makes it very hard to give the laity the needed encouragement and freedom to operate effectively in the world of the media. The global secular media culture is invading Africa massively. It could, with a generation, wreck the same damage as it is done in West.
The Catholic Church in Africa has had an enormous political influence in recent years. When Communism collapsed, the Church jumped whole-heartedly on the democratic bandwagon, without always realising the implication for its own structures. Courageous Pastoral Letters set off movements that brought down dictatorial regimes in several countries. Justice and Peace Commissions did great work in civic education and monitoring elections. Elsewhere, the Church was involved in the struggle for constitutional change, in campaigns on the debt crisis and denouncing human rights infringements. At times it paid a high price for its commitment to justice and peace.
This is not obvious, and new obstacles block the way. Politicians have learned to simply ignore Pastoral Letters and go on doing what they are doing. The Media takes less notice than they used to. More seriously, there is a growing credibility gap that manifests itself in two ways. While the Church promotes democratic structures in society, it finds it extremely hard to get out of a pre-Vatican model of Church and create effective participatory processes of decision-making in the Church. When Church leaders appeal to politicians to be accountable to the public, their words often sound hollow. Moreover, the Church in Africa has not taken a clear option for the poor in practical terms. Episcopal palaces and extravagant religious houses keep going up in the face of people who are pushed to the edge of existence and lack the basics of life.
In the whole of Africa, the AIDS pandemic is devastating whole populations, and the poor are getting poorer and the rich richer. The Church's teaching is sound and clear, but where does the Church stand in practice? In this as in all other areas of life, deeds speak louder than any among of words. If the life- style of the clergy and religious becomes increasingly distant from that of the ordinary citizen, the Church in Africa could loose the poor, as the European Church lost the working class in the 19th century.
Dialogue was one of the keywords of the African Synod. It remains perhaps the greatest challenge to the Church in the third millennium. There is little genuine dialogue within the Church, between bishops and their priests, between priests and the laity. Yet, the Church cannot become a family without a spirit and structures of dialogue. And that is hard for a Church that is very clerical. There is little dialogue with other Christians. The mainstream churches have co-operated in bible translations, and occasionally issue a common political declaration. But ecumenism is still in its infancy. Nor are most fundamentalist, evangelical and pentecostal Churches interested, as they regard the Catholic Church as the "Whore of Babylon" and the Pope as the "apocalyptic beast". Volumes have been written about inculturation, the dialogue between Gospel and traditional beliefs and cultures that are experiencing profound change, but little has been done in spite of the insistence of the African Synod.
Hardest, yet necessary, is a dialogue with Islam. The traditional tolerance of African Islam is undermined by imported fundamentalist ideologies, that proselyte aggressively and work for the imposition of Sharia Law where they can. Yet, a fundamentalist Christianity and a fundamentalist Islam are heading for confrontation. The Catholic Church has the extremely difficult, but urgent task to start a dialogue with the forces of moderation in Islam.
Change on the African continent is dramatic and profound. The African Synod has given the right orientations how to evangelise this emerging world, in ways that are credible, relevant and effective. But does the Church have the courage and strength to do it?
END