The Post-Conciliar Church in Africa

No Turning Back the Clock

Magesa

• Publisher: Pickwick Publications
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781532609138
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Denominations

The Second Vatican Council (Vatican II, 1962-65) was distinctly different from other councils in one significant aspect. In all the areas it discussed, this council did not see itself as the end of a process, but rather as a beginning. It opened, not closed, doors--whether doctrinal or disciplinary--for ongoing reflection, for possibilities of ever-improving knowledge and understanding.Laurenti Magesa offers this book as a stimulus for African (Catholic) Christians to continue digging deeper into and benefiting from the spiritual treasures that the Council still contains. For the theologian or historian of Vatican II, some of the information may be quite familiar, but all of it is important if one is to grasp the scope, meaning, and implications of the Council for the Church and people of Africa.

Chapter 1

Who Shaped Vatican II?

The obvious question to ask about Vatican II and the Church in Africa is this: was the African theological and pastoral view present at the Council? The answer is quite frankly, not really! At the first seven Ecumenical Councils of the Church (namely: Nicaea I, Constantinople I, Ephesus, Chalcedon, Constantinople II, Constantinople III, and Nicaea II), Africa’s voice was very much present. The Church then was still strong in the northern regions of Africa before the Muslim invasion and conquest there in the seventh century. So Africa, or, more precisely, that part of northern Africa that had received the Gospel then, was generally fairly well represented in these Councils—if, perhaps, not in numbers, at least in political diplomacy and theological muscle. One notes in this respect the theological acumen and leadership authority of The Episcopal Sees of Alexandria and Carthage in these early meetings. With Vatican II, however, the story is different.

Statistics and percentages will help to draw the picture.1 Of the approximately 2,860 fathers who attended the four sessions of the Council, only about 10 percent, or a total of about three hundred bishops, came from Africa. Of these only about thirty were indigenous. The rest belonged to missionary organizations. This means that they predominantly represented the theological and pastoral views of their European-sending Institutes. But one wonders whether even the indigenous African bishops at the Council could have been expected to reflect African theological and pastoral standpoints. Though reportedly remarkably well organized, on account of their small number and lack of Africa-oriented theological expertise, their theological and pastoral views were easily overshadowed. Unlike their counterparts from Europe, African bishops did not as yet have qualified theological experts (periti) to advise them. Moreover, they all had been trained in the Roman or Latin Catholic academic philosophical and theological traditions and inevitably mirrored this training in their thinking and contributions.

Bishops Joseph Blomjous of Mwanza, Tanzania, Vincent McCauley of Fort Portal, Uganda, Marcel Lefebvre of Dakar, Senegal, and Denis Hurley of Durban, South Africa, were the “stars” from Africa. But all of them were missionaries, belonging to European Mission Institutes. Among the indigenous or native-born and diocesan-priest bishops, there were Laurean Rugambwa of Bukoba, Tanzania, and Joseph Albert Malula of the then Leopoldville, Zaire (now Kinshasa, DRC). Again, it is true that whatever interventions the latter made on the Council floor were highly influenced by their missionary colleagues. For this reason, some Church historians have claimed, rather implausibly, that the missionary bishops must have ghostwritten these interventions for them. Whatever the case may be about this issue, it is certain that African voices did not impact very much the deliberations and outcome of the Council, not least because the Council was palpably Eurocentric in its structure and agenda.

Though largely muffled and unable to influence the general orientation of the Council, a few voices from Africa were nevertheless incisive. One was Bishop Soares de Resende of Beira in Mozambique, who even then wanted a Church of and for the poor, questioning the value of ornate Church decoration and insignia as not being in accordance with the Spirit of Christ. Another was Bishop Raymond Tchidimbo of Conakry in Guinea. He complained about the “Western outlook” of sections of the schema on the Church in the world today. As he saw it, the draft did not pay enough attention to the difficulties the people of Africa were suffering under the yoke of “poverty,” “underdevelopment,” “colonialism,” and “discrimination.” It is somewhat surprising that the noted anti-apartheid campaigner Bishop Hurley is not recorded to have condemned this aberration against human dignity and rights in his official submissions.

The driving engine of the Council was understandably made up mainly of European and North American cardinals, archbishops, and bishops, and their expert theologians. A list of the most significant prelates at the Council must include names like the Archbishop of Milan, Giovanni Battista Montini (later to become Pope Paul VI), the Archbishop of Krakow, Karol Wojtyla (later to become Pope John Paul II), and Professor Joseph Ratzinger (later to become Pope Benedict XVI). Other significant personalities were Cardinals Jan Bernard Alfrink from the Netherlands, Leon-Joseph Suenens from Belgium, Augustin Bea, Joseph Frings and Julius Dopfner from Germany, Franz Konig from Austria, and Eugene Tisserant and Giuseppe Siri from France and Italy respectively. From North America, most notable were Cardinal Francis Spellman of New York, Cardinal Albert Meyer of Chicago, Archbishop John E. Dearden of Detroit, and Cardinal James Francis McIntyre of Los Angeles, U.S.A. Another powerful voice was in the person of Cardinal Paul-Emile Leger of Montreal, Canada.

The experts who swayed the course of the Council were again, understandably, predominantly European theologians. Several of them had been suspect in Rome for their theological views before the Council and some had even been ostracized to different degrees by the Vatican authorities. But because of their work during the Council, they became household names in seminaries and theological institutes everywhere afterwards. They included MarieDominique Chenu, OP, Yves-Marie Congar, OP, Jean Danielou, SJ, Henri de Lubac, SJ, and the layman philosopher Jacques Maritain, all French nationals. Others were the Dutchman Edward Schillebeeckx, OP, the German Karl Rahner, SJ, and Bernard Haring, CSSR. From America there was John Courtney Murray, SJ. Given the fact that Vatican II took place at a time when the push to recognize African identity through the struggle for independence was going on in the political sphere, it is odd again that no theologian from Africa appears on this list as advisor to an African bishop even though there was already a sizeable number of educated African clergy at this time. The collection of essays under the title Des pretres noirs s’interrogent by African priests studying in France had already been published in 1956, six years before the opening of the Council. Thus, the failure of the bishops from Africa to employ the continent’s theologians’ input at the Council is strange.

However, the presence of an African lay auditor at the Council, Eusebe Adjakpley from Togo, though not well known, was “symbolic.” Adjakpley was regional secretary for Africa of the International Federation of Catholic Youth. One of around forty lay and religious observers at the Council during its third and fourth sessions, he made an important intervention on mission. Unfortunately, in subsequent years, the possibility of building up an ecclesiology of communion and sensus fidelium in the Church in Africa, reflecting the role of the laity in the Church as was provided by the presence of Adjakpley and his fellow auditors, was not immediately taken up in any sustained way by the Church in Africa, even in the wake of the Decree on the Apostolate of the Laity, Apostolicam Actuositatem of 1965. It would not be until almost a decade later, in the 1970s, that the hierarchy in some parts of the continent would establish the largely lay-organized pastoral plan and structure of Small Christian Communities as a “pastoral priority” for the Church.

Was, therefore, Vatican II completely lost on Africa? To put the same question in other words, in spite of the insignificant contribution of the Church in Africa at Vatican II as an event, how significant, if at all, has the Council been as a factor in the development of the Church in Africa during the intervening five decades? Part of the answer lies in the dynamics of the Council-event itself. Despite the precise planning and some attempts at stage-management, once begun, the Council took its own course some of whose consequences were unexpected and, in diverse ways, affected the Church in every part of the world.

1. For most of what follows, see O’Malley, What Happened at Vatican II, 2008.

Chapter 2

Tradition and Innovation at Vatican II

“Whatever you are, be a good one!”

This witticism, attributed to Abraham Lincoln, describes accurately what happened at Vatican II. From the announcement of the intention to convene it by Pope John XXIII on January 25, 1959 to its conclusion on December 8, 1965 under Pope Paul VI, its four sessions, each lasting for about ten weeks, were meticulously planned and the discussions relatively well executed. As with every meeting, but especially with one of such size and diversity, there were some organizational and procedural hitches here and there. But these were minor compared to what the Council was finally able to achieve theologically as well as pastorally. Thus, as a Council, Vatican II, whatever else it was, was a good one.

The history of the Council, from its preparation and actual floor discussions until the promulgation of the final sixteen documents, fills volumes. It has been characterized by notable historians of Christianity as “a remarkable Council,” distinguishing itself in every way from any other in history by its size, composition, and variety of topics discussed (its agenda). It still may be ranked as perhaps the biggest and longest meeting in the history of the Church. With about two thousand bishop delegates attending any one of the four sessions, nearly 480 theological advisors, and many observers, this claim is easily borne out. The documentation of discussion at the Council runs into approximately thirty thousand pages, nearly a third of all previous recognized Ecumenical Councils. The media, initially sluggish in reporting the Conciliar proceedings, finally caught up with the importance of this meeting. Now many people around the world could read about the events about the Council in newspapers, listen over the radio, or watch on television from their homes.

By the mid-twentieth century, Catholic missionary work had spread and established itself in most parts of the world. In Africa, through conditions made possible by colonialism, Christianity in general, and the Catholic Church in particular, had dioceses and mission stations throughout the continent. As mentioned, expatriate missionaries were still manning most of these dioceses and mission stations as bishops and priests. But there were now increasing numbers of local men being ordained as priests and religious. Among them a few began to be consecrated bishops. Although seminary philosophical and theological training was uniform worldwide, drawing from the paradigm established earlier by the Council of Trent, the cultural expressions of this training could not be completely obliterated among these African Church leaders. Though the Conciliar deliberations were predominantly of European and North American preferences, as we have indicated in the preceding chapter, their interpretation by African bishops back home was not completely devoid of an African flavor.

The drafts of each one of the Conciliar documents went through rigorous scrutiny. Here, let us merely draw a portrait of how the Council navigated through two equally important pulls: one of tradition and the other ...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Acknowledgements
• Prologue: Remarks by Pope Francis
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: Who Shaped Vatican II?
• Chapter 2: Tradition and Innovation at Vatican II
• Chapter 3: The Holy Spirit at Work
• Chapter 4: Collegial Leadership in the Church in Africa
• Chapter 5: Singing about God in an African Key
• Chapter 6: Culture as the Path of Faith
• Chapter 7: African Paths to Religious Life
• Chapter 8: Dialogue with African Religion
• Chapter 9: New Approaches to Mission
• Chapter 10: The Public Role of the Church in Contemporary Africa
• Chapter 11: The Public Face of Theology
• Chapter 12: Models of Governance for Development in Africa
• Chapter 13: African Cultural Notions of Leadership
• Chapter 13: Violence, Justice, and Reconciliation
• Chapter 15: Human Sexuality in Africa
• Chapter 16: An African Reading of “Charity in Truth”
• Conclusion: No Turning Back the Clock
• Select Bibliography