In any discussions relating to European Christianity, the reality of societal secularisation looms large. Each month brings fresh evidence of the de-Christianisation of Europe’s nations. News headlines tell the same story either directly or indirectly. Only a minority of English people now describe themselves as Christian. Record numbers of Germans renounced their church membership last year. A Spanish criminal has been granted his request to be euthanised before his trial, thanks to legislation introduced by the country’s Socialist-Communist government.
Even in the more traditionalist countries of central and eastern Europe, there has been no lasting religious revival since the fall of the Soviet Union: churches remain mostly empty, and congregations are disproportionately grey.
It says much about the general feeling among Christians that one of the most popular books over the last five years was The Benedict Option by Rod Dreher. “The light of Christianity is flickering out all over the West,” the American convert to Eastern Orthodoxy wrote, whilst warning of a looming persecution to come and urging believing Christians to focus their energies on “building communities, institutions, and networks of resistance that can outwit, outlast, and eventually overcome the occupation.”
These warnings came to mind during a recent five-week trip to eastern Africa, undertaken with the support of Aid to the Church in Need Ireland and several Catholic organisations. In South Sudan, I spent three weeks as a guest of “Solidarity with South Sudan,” visiting projects run by the organisation in the world’s most impoverished country.
Solidarity with South Sudan brings together male and female religious from many international orders, each of whom commit to living in a community and carrying out work to develop South Sudan’s capacities in the provision of social services. Across a large country whose cities can only be reached by air due to security and infrastructure problems, Solidarity with South Sudan runs facilities such as the teacher training college in Yambio (one of only two in the country), the nurse training college in Wau, and an agricultural training facility in Rimenze which works to educate farmers on techniques such as how to sustainably maximise food production.
Aside from reconfirming the importance of the Church’s role in human development (which was examined thoroughly in Robert Calderisi’s Earthly Mission: The Catholic Church and World Development), it is difficult to spend time in sub-Saharan Africa without being struck by the sharp contrast in how the same faith is practised on different continents. Youthful nuns and other clergy are commonly seen in public places going about their work. Masses are very well-attended and the style of worship is notably different.
For instance, at a Mass in rural Kenya celebrating the 40th anniversary of a local nun’s profession, a uniformed marching band made up of former street children played a triumphant tune. A lively cortège of nuns, young and old, danced down the aisle before the two-hour Mass began; a Mass which featured far more music, a much-involved congregation, and a 40-minute homily by a priest who wandered up and down the church while cracking jokes and gesticulating energetically. It would be a mistake to call this a ‘Charismatic’ Mass. Indeed, Western terminology is inappropriate to describe it. As one European missionary priest explained, this is simply “African.”
A subtle change within Africa’s Church has been underway for some time; one which could be detected at the dinner table in a centre for African missionary priests in Kampala, Uganda. Whereas the older clerics are typically more reserved, they were outnumbered there by the many boisterous young men drawn from across the continent, whose appearance and banter were more reminiscent of a football team than a room of European priests.
As an Irish missionary priest with many years of African service later pointed out, the older African clergy were taught and trained by European religious at an earlier stage of the continent’s evangelisation. Conversely, the young priests, like the Nigerian weightlifter at the next table, have been schooled by their own compatriots, and as such, they did not acquire European mannerisms. Unlike their elders, theirs is a more authentically African Catholicism.
Not only is the African Church more alive; it is also clearly growing. Despite the limited educational opportunities in South Sudan and the appalling suffering endured during the civil war which started in 2013, the national major seminary is home to 146 seminarians, and the number has been growing each year.
Kenya is an even better example, as the country has been relatively stable since gaining independence in 1963. More than 2,700 priests have passed through Nairobi’s St. Thomas Aquinas Senior Seminary since its establishment soon after independence, and at the last count, there were 920 diocesan seminarians nationwide: a figure which does not consider the large numbers in training for the various religious orders.
Strangely, for a country like Kenya, where somewhere between one-fifth and one-third of the population is Catholic, this influx of vocations can be a mixed blessing. While relatively wealthy dioceses like Nairobi can afford to educate every potential seminarian, sharp regional income disparities mean that poorer dioceses in rural regions cannot.
Fr. Antony Mwituria, who is in charge of funding the education of Kenya’s future priests, estimates that Kenya’s seminaries have lost out on 250 potential seminarians over the last decade as a result of these inequalities. Twenty-five young men eager to become priests are turned away each year, in other words. And while churches in poorer countries can receive Vatican support in such cases, Kenya has become prosperous by regional standards. As a result, the Kenyan Church is expected to pay for its seminarians.
In order to create a long-term domestic funding stream, the Kenyan bishops have established an endowment fund along the lines of those which exist in the American college system. Fr. Mwituria’s team are now working to expand the number of Kenyan Catholics making regular donations into it. The existence of this innovative fund is a sign of how Africa’s Church has grown past the initial missionary phase. However, with many African nations lagging behind Kenya in economic terms, it is certain that a similar situation exists elsewhere in the continent, particularly in countries where there are not enough lay Catholics with the resources to meet this challenge independently.
All this leads to the question: what more could the declining European Church (still asset-rich and containing a large number of wealthy believers) do to assist the rising African Church, in order to bolster the long-term future of Christendom?
Financial assistance is still being provided, as it has been for centuries: plaques on the walls of African schools, hospitals, and other social service providers make clear just how important support from Europe continues to be.
The long-standing missionary tradition also remains important, even though the average European missionary in a country like South Sudan is now generally much older than in the past, while their total population is surpassed by African missionaries from nearby countries. Notably, the continental flow of priests has been reversed: it was reported in 2022 that while there were only 348 Italian priests serving in the missions, there were 2,631 foreign-born priests serving in Italy. Similarly, there are approximately 1,800 foreign-born priests working in France. Indeed, African bishops are increasingly unhappy with the growing number of their priests who go to Europe and never return.
The increasing reliance on African clergy is perfectly understandable in light of the shortage of vocations in Europe, and could be viewed as a gesture of generational gratitude by the African Church, which owes its existence to the European missionaries of yesteryear. At the same time though, it can go too far. John L. Allen, editor of Crux, has repeatedly highlighted the tensions in this area and the possibility that a serious mistake is being made.
“If Roman Catholicism were a multinational corporation, it would not take a systems analyst long to realize that there is a serious mismatch between the Church’s market and its allocation of resources. Two thirds of the Catholics today are in Africa, Asia, and Latin America, but just slightly over one third of the Catholic priests,” Allen wrote a decade ago in The Future Church. “If the Church responded to corporate logic, it would implement a scheme for the redistribution of its priests to where its business is growing.”
In the same book, Allen quoted the late Monsignor Joseph Obunga, who had served as secretary-general of Uganda’s Bishops Conference, and who suggested in 2004 that African dioceses should receive more support from the West: “I would like to see more collaboration between the Americans, who have got money, and the Africans, who have got vocations.”
It is worth considering why more has not been done since then, in light of the continued difficulties faced by Africa’s growing Church. For instance, if the Kenyan Catholic Church is losing 25 seminarians each year, surely the many European dioceses with a good deal of resources but very few seminarians could make up the shortfall, with the proviso that some of those seminarians would later serve in Europe? Rather than rely on ad hoc support, a structured long-term agreement for mutual collaboration could be put in place: country to country, or diocese to diocese.
Decades of institutional decline in European Christianity appears to have nurtured a gloomy insularity which blinds some from seeing the bigger picture. Those already preparing for the catacombs have forgotten that the Western Church’s travails are only part of a broader global story. The success of The Benedict Option is one sign of this mentality setting in. In Dreher’s defence though, his book is focused on Europe and North America. Its subtitle is “A Strategy for Christians in a Post-Christian Nation,” and in it, he expresses his hope that “[b]y God’s mercy, the faith may continue to flourish in the Global South.”
There are plenty of other signs of the same problem, however, including the inordinate amount of energy which Europe’s conservative Catholics have invested in issues to do with the Latin Mass. Sincere as though traditionalist concerns may be, it is difficult to escape the conclusion that these are the religious equivalent of ‘First World Problems’ which would not be taken seriously by fellow Christians facing real challenges.
One serious consequence of this myopia has been the widespread indifference to the growth of anti-persecution across the world, as recently highlighted in Aid to the Church in Need’s report entitled Persecuted and Forgotten? Far more could be done to confront this issue and support Christians being persecuted around the world, if only those in affluent regions would prioritise this.
In the same way, a more structured approach to supporting African seminaries (or building new parishes and Catholic schools, for that matter) would ultimately benefit both Africa and Europe alike. Immigration has already created closer links between the continents, and regardless of how little attention is placed on Africa, its clergy are going to play an increased role in Europe in the coming decades.
At a time when Catholics are meeting more and more co-religionists from abroad in increasingly diverse parishes, strengthening the connection between different parts of the Church should be viewed not just as a moral priority and a practical necessity, but also as a way of building social connections focused on a unique bond.
Investing more attention in Africa is not colonialism 2.0, and the African Church is not a colonial structure. In 1900, there were only 1.5 million Catholics in Africa. By 1958, as the pace of decolonisation began to accelerate, this had grown to 16 million, according to Robert Calderisi’s Earthly Mission: The Catholic Church and World Development (2013). By 2020, that figure had risen to almost 257 million, and is on course to surpass Europe’s 286 million in the near future. The flowering of Christianity in Africa has occurred after Europe’s flags were taken down and as its own missionaries gradually took the lead in a process that European clergy had begun.
“The Faith is Europe. And Europe is the Faith,” Hilaire Belloc wrote a century ago. We need to get back to the first part of that sentence, and get beyond the second, by honouring the Christian roots of Europe and appreciating that the future of the Church is not bleak, but black.
The African Church is the Life Raft that European Christianity Needs
A group of nuns prays at Namugongo Martyrs’ Shrine during an open air mass held by Pope Francis on November 28, 2015. (Photo by GIUSEPPE CACACE / AFP)
In any discussions relating to European Christianity, the reality of societal secularisation looms large. Each month brings fresh evidence of the de-Christianisation of Europe’s nations. News headlines tell the same story either directly or indirectly. Only a minority of English people now describe themselves as Christian. Record numbers of Germans renounced their church membership last year. A Spanish criminal has been granted his request to be euthanised before his trial, thanks to legislation introduced by the country’s Socialist-Communist government.
Even in the more traditionalist countries of central and eastern Europe, there has been no lasting religious revival since the fall of the Soviet Union: churches remain mostly empty, and congregations are disproportionately grey.
It says much about the general feeling among Christians that one of the most popular books over the last five years was The Benedict Option by Rod Dreher. “The light of Christianity is flickering out all over the West,” the American convert to Eastern Orthodoxy wrote, whilst warning of a looming persecution to come and urging believing Christians to focus their energies on “building communities, institutions, and networks of resistance that can outwit, outlast, and eventually overcome the occupation.”
These warnings came to mind during a recent five-week trip to eastern Africa, undertaken with the support of Aid to the Church in Need Ireland and several Catholic organisations. In South Sudan, I spent three weeks as a guest of “Solidarity with South Sudan,” visiting projects run by the organisation in the world’s most impoverished country.
Solidarity with South Sudan brings together male and female religious from many international orders, each of whom commit to living in a community and carrying out work to develop South Sudan’s capacities in the provision of social services. Across a large country whose cities can only be reached by air due to security and infrastructure problems, Solidarity with South Sudan runs facilities such as the teacher training college in Yambio (one of only two in the country), the nurse training college in Wau, and an agricultural training facility in Rimenze which works to educate farmers on techniques such as how to sustainably maximise food production.
Aside from reconfirming the importance of the Church’s role in human development (which was examined thoroughly in Robert Calderisi’s Earthly Mission: The Catholic Church and World Development), it is difficult to spend time in sub-Saharan Africa without being struck by the sharp contrast in how the same faith is practised on different continents. Youthful nuns and other clergy are commonly seen in public places going about their work. Masses are very well-attended and the style of worship is notably different.
For instance, at a Mass in rural Kenya celebrating the 40th anniversary of a local nun’s profession, a uniformed marching band made up of former street children played a triumphant tune. A lively cortège of nuns, young and old, danced down the aisle before the two-hour Mass began; a Mass which featured far more music, a much-involved congregation, and a 40-minute homily by a priest who wandered up and down the church while cracking jokes and gesticulating energetically. It would be a mistake to call this a ‘Charismatic’ Mass. Indeed, Western terminology is inappropriate to describe it. As one European missionary priest explained, this is simply “African.”
A subtle change within Africa’s Church has been underway for some time; one which could be detected at the dinner table in a centre for African missionary priests in Kampala, Uganda. Whereas the older clerics are typically more reserved, they were outnumbered there by the many boisterous young men drawn from across the continent, whose appearance and banter were more reminiscent of a football team than a room of European priests.
As an Irish missionary priest with many years of African service later pointed out, the older African clergy were taught and trained by European religious at an earlier stage of the continent’s evangelisation. Conversely, the young priests, like the Nigerian weightlifter at the next table, have been schooled by their own compatriots, and as such, they did not acquire European mannerisms. Unlike their elders, theirs is a more authentically African Catholicism.
Not only is the African Church more alive; it is also clearly growing. Despite the limited educational opportunities in South Sudan and the appalling suffering endured during the civil war which started in 2013, the national major seminary is home to 146 seminarians, and the number has been growing each year.
Kenya is an even better example, as the country has been relatively stable since gaining independence in 1963. More than 2,700 priests have passed through Nairobi’s St. Thomas Aquinas Senior Seminary since its establishment soon after independence, and at the last count, there were 920 diocesan seminarians nationwide: a figure which does not consider the large numbers in training for the various religious orders.
Strangely, for a country like Kenya, where somewhere between one-fifth and one-third of the population is Catholic, this influx of vocations can be a mixed blessing. While relatively wealthy dioceses like Nairobi can afford to educate every potential seminarian, sharp regional income disparities mean that poorer dioceses in rural regions cannot.
Fr. Antony Mwituria, who is in charge of funding the education of Kenya’s future priests, estimates that Kenya’s seminaries have lost out on 250 potential seminarians over the last decade as a result of these inequalities. Twenty-five young men eager to become priests are turned away each year, in other words. And while churches in poorer countries can receive Vatican support in such cases, Kenya has become prosperous by regional standards. As a result, the Kenyan Church is expected to pay for its seminarians.
In order to create a long-term domestic funding stream, the Kenyan bishops have established an endowment fund along the lines of those which exist in the American college system. Fr. Mwituria’s team are now working to expand the number of Kenyan Catholics making regular donations into it. The existence of this innovative fund is a sign of how Africa’s Church has grown past the initial missionary phase. However, with many African nations lagging behind Kenya in economic terms, it is certain that a similar situation exists elsewhere in the continent, particularly in countries where there are not enough lay Catholics with the resources to meet this challenge independently.
All this leads to the question: what more could the declining European Church (still asset-rich and containing a large number of wealthy believers) do to assist the rising African Church, in order to bolster the long-term future of Christendom?
Financial assistance is still being provided, as it has been for centuries: plaques on the walls of African schools, hospitals, and other social service providers make clear just how important support from Europe continues to be.
The long-standing missionary tradition also remains important, even though the average European missionary in a country like South Sudan is now generally much older than in the past, while their total population is surpassed by African missionaries from nearby countries. Notably, the continental flow of priests has been reversed: it was reported in 2022 that while there were only 348 Italian priests serving in the missions, there were 2,631 foreign-born priests serving in Italy. Similarly, there are approximately 1,800 foreign-born priests working in France. Indeed, African bishops are increasingly unhappy with the growing number of their priests who go to Europe and never return.
The increasing reliance on African clergy is perfectly understandable in light of the shortage of vocations in Europe, and could be viewed as a gesture of generational gratitude by the African Church, which owes its existence to the European missionaries of yesteryear. At the same time though, it can go too far. John L. Allen, editor of Crux, has repeatedly highlighted the tensions in this area and the possibility that a serious mistake is being made.
“If Roman Catholicism were a multinational corporation, it would not take a systems analyst long to realize that there is a serious mismatch between the Church’s market and its allocation of resources. Two thirds of the Catholics today are in Africa, Asia, and Latin America, but just slightly over one third of the Catholic priests,” Allen wrote a decade ago in The Future Church. “If the Church responded to corporate logic, it would implement a scheme for the redistribution of its priests to where its business is growing.”
In the same book, Allen quoted the late Monsignor Joseph Obunga, who had served as secretary-general of Uganda’s Bishops Conference, and who suggested in 2004 that African dioceses should receive more support from the West: “I would like to see more collaboration between the Americans, who have got money, and the Africans, who have got vocations.”
It is worth considering why more has not been done since then, in light of the continued difficulties faced by Africa’s growing Church. For instance, if the Kenyan Catholic Church is losing 25 seminarians each year, surely the many European dioceses with a good deal of resources but very few seminarians could make up the shortfall, with the proviso that some of those seminarians would later serve in Europe? Rather than rely on ad hoc support, a structured long-term agreement for mutual collaboration could be put in place: country to country, or diocese to diocese.
Decades of institutional decline in European Christianity appears to have nurtured a gloomy insularity which blinds some from seeing the bigger picture. Those already preparing for the catacombs have forgotten that the Western Church’s travails are only part of a broader global story. The success of The Benedict Option is one sign of this mentality setting in. In Dreher’s defence though, his book is focused on Europe and North America. Its subtitle is “A Strategy for Christians in a Post-Christian Nation,” and in it, he expresses his hope that “[b]y God’s mercy, the faith may continue to flourish in the Global South.”
There are plenty of other signs of the same problem, however, including the inordinate amount of energy which Europe’s conservative Catholics have invested in issues to do with the Latin Mass. Sincere as though traditionalist concerns may be, it is difficult to escape the conclusion that these are the religious equivalent of ‘First World Problems’ which would not be taken seriously by fellow Christians facing real challenges.
One serious consequence of this myopia has been the widespread indifference to the growth of anti-persecution across the world, as recently highlighted in Aid to the Church in Need’s report entitled Persecuted and Forgotten? Far more could be done to confront this issue and support Christians being persecuted around the world, if only those in affluent regions would prioritise this.
In the same way, a more structured approach to supporting African seminaries (or building new parishes and Catholic schools, for that matter) would ultimately benefit both Africa and Europe alike. Immigration has already created closer links between the continents, and regardless of how little attention is placed on Africa, its clergy are going to play an increased role in Europe in the coming decades.
At a time when Catholics are meeting more and more co-religionists from abroad in increasingly diverse parishes, strengthening the connection between different parts of the Church should be viewed not just as a moral priority and a practical necessity, but also as a way of building social connections focused on a unique bond.
Investing more attention in Africa is not colonialism 2.0, and the African Church is not a colonial structure. In 1900, there were only 1.5 million Catholics in Africa. By 1958, as the pace of decolonisation began to accelerate, this had grown to 16 million, according to Robert Calderisi’s Earthly Mission: The Catholic Church and World Development (2013). By 2020, that figure had risen to almost 257 million, and is on course to surpass Europe’s 286 million in the near future. The flowering of Christianity in Africa has occurred after Europe’s flags were taken down and as its own missionaries gradually took the lead in a process that European clergy had begun.
“The Faith is Europe. And Europe is the Faith,” Hilaire Belloc wrote a century ago. We need to get back to the first part of that sentence, and get beyond the second, by honouring the Christian roots of Europe and appreciating that the future of the Church is not bleak, but black.
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