During his first apostolic journey to Africa from March 17 to 23 of this year, Pope Benedict XVI visited only two countries, Angola and Cameroon. However, this pilgrimage shows the future of the Catholic Church more than any other. A new Christendom is appearing in what was long believed to be a missionary continent.
In 1900, only 1.9 million Catholics lived in Africa. That number has exploded to over 150 million today. The number of African seminarians is rapidly growing, yet is insufficient as about half of all baptized Africans are adults. The exponential growth is not limited to Catholicism. The Anglican and Lutheran Churches are booming across Africa and it is arguably impossible to understand Pentecostalism without appreciating its growth in the Third World. Since the arrival of European missionaries in the nineteenth century, Christianity, particularly Catholicism, has since experienced a rapid expansion in Africa. African Catholicism’s effects will be felt worldwide.
Catholics in industrialized nations will undoubtedly see their church revolutionized by this growth, which is also occurring in Asia and, to a lesser extent, Latin America. As many Western dioceses struggle to attract new religious vocations, priests and seminarians from Africa and the rest of the Third World are being exported to a growing number of parishes in wealthy nations.
Africans will exercise more influence on the governance of church affairs as more Africans are being named cardinals and holding other high-ranking church positions. It is also reasonable to predict that an African pope will be elected within the next few decades.
A church increasingly dominated by the Third World will above all show a greater devotion to social justice. It is certainly a sign of the times when Matthew Parris, a British journalist and self-described atheist, acknowledges that Catholic missionaries are improving the daily lives of millions of Africans.
Operating thousands of orphanages, AIDS hospices, schools and charitable NGOs, the African Church is likely producing many future saints. Despite the hopes of Western dissident theologians, the church in Africa is greatly orthodox, also on questions of sexual ethics. Thus the African church is a socially conscious and doctrinally unbending one.
Many European states were traditionally closely allied with churches. Thus the process of democratization went hand-in-hand with secularization. An excellent example is that of the church’s loss of influence in Spain after the fall of General Francisco Franco’s military regime.
As mass Christianity is still a relatively new phenomenon in African history, the Church is not treated as a part of the authoritarian regime that must be rejected for social progress.
Future political developments in Africa can create an alternative to traditional Western notions of church-state relations, which have largely been marked either by virtual inseparability mutual hostility.
It is beyond doubt that Pope Benedict XVI saw a larger and more faithful African Church in 2009 than did Pope John Paul II in 1998, who in turn visited a stronger church than did Pope Paul VI in 1969.
The remarkable growth of Christianity in Africa truly shows the universality of the Gospels.
The church in turn is becoming less Roman and more Catholic.