The following essay was published on January 2 by Jozef Duháček at the Slovak website Christianitas and is given here in translation, with permission.—PK
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| Catholic priest celebrates Mass in Kenya |
When you study history, it often happens that what you thought was a historical fact turns out to be just a story with no basis in reality. For example, many Americans grew up believing that the Boston Tea Party took place because the colonists disagreed with the tax imposed on tea by the British government. However, I recently discovered that all the tea was dumped into the sea in Boston in protest against the British government’s plan to subsidize the East India Tea Company and grant it a monopoly in the colonies, with the aim of making British tea cheaper than that which Boston merchants imported from India. The tea party was not a protest against expensive tea, but an act of protectionism against cheap tea. The story of the protest against the British tea tax was just a widespread narrative—and a completely reversed one at that.
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| Boston Tea Party |
Another false story says that Marie Antoinette told the French people that if they had no bread, they should eat cake. This is also a complete lie. There is no evidence that she said this, and it was attributed to her during the revolution as propaganda to justify her execution. Many history textbooks mindlessly repeat this story in order to discredit the old regime and glorify the atrocities of the revolution.
History is full of such narratives, and the older we get, the better we are at exposing them. Narratives are repeated, but they are never substantiated. They are used as evidence in other discussions, but they are rarely the subject of discussion themselves. They are convenient, providing an easy sense of certainty without effort (the truth, on the contrary, requires patience, diligence, and careful sifting through details). Narratives are often nested within each other like Russian matryoshka dolls, with smaller narratives forming the building blocks of larger ones, until a monumental edifice of fiction is created, where the individual parts reinforce each other and hold the whole structure together.
A beautiful example of such a construction is the so-called Black Legend, which describes the atrocities committed by the Spanish in the New World. It originated in England and the Netherlands as a propaganda attack by Protestants on the Catholic Spanish Empire. It contains a number of lies, here and there developed from facts taken out of context, which were intended to portray the Spaniards as extremely cruel colonizers, fanatical inquisitors, and racially and culturally backward tyrants.
Perhaps no event in Catholic history has generated as many narratives as the Second Vatican Council. From claims such as “the new lectionary contains more of the Holy Scriptures” to “Eucharistic Prayer II comes from the earliest days of the Church,” decades of fabricated myths have been woven to justify the reforms of the Council and explain the obvious demographic decline. One such widespread myth is: “Although the Church in the West is in crisis, the reforms of the Council have been successful in Africa! Catholicism is flourishing in Africa! The African Church has many vocations, is missionary, and is growing promisingly.” This is what “Catholic” portals, newspapers, and dailies tell us, and many of us believe it without bothering to seek any proof.
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| Second Vatican Council |
It is not difficult to see that Msgr. Barron is guilty of the same logical fallacy of which he accuses Douthat and others. Nevertheless, this oft-repeated argument about Africa deserves closer examination, as it is one of the great myths of our time.
To be honest, any examination of the state of Catholicism in the “global south” must include the fact that, although Catholicism is growing in absolute numbers due to population growth, Protestant and Pentecostal sects are growing much faster in percentage terms—and tragically attracting many former Catholics into their ranks. This does not sound like an indisputable “success story.”
It is noteworthy that the growth of Catholicism in Africa was proportionally much higher before 1970, i.e., at the end of the so-called “Tridentine” period. The conclusion is inevitable: if the Second Vatican Council was intended not only to preserve the status quo of the 1950s, but also to launch a new evangelization and missionary expansion, then it has failed in Africa.
What we see in the claims about the excellent state of African Catholicism—a myth that is refuted by the facts—is very similar to what we see in almost every discussion about the successes of Vatican II or liturgical reform: an enormous willingness to ignore evidence or perhaps even distort the truth—for ideological reasons.
In Africa, which is very often presented as a showcase for the “successes of Vatican II,” the number of Catholics receiving the sacraments per 1,000 inhabitants has fallen by half since the Council until 2015, as statistics from religionnews.com show: “More Catholics, fewer receiving sacraments: A new report maps a changing church.”
This topic is addressed in a book published by Os Justi Press entitled Is African Catholicism a “Vatican II Success Story”?. This concise book, which brings together contributions by four authors, effectively challenges this narrative by referring to history, liturgy, and common sense.
The well-known claim that Catholicism is flourishing in Africa—that it is the only continent where Vatican II has borne rich fruit—is not consistent with the available data and descriptions, as shown by the reports of the late George Neumayr from Ivory Coast. Moreover, a Nigerian seminarian analyzes the harmful inculturation imposed on Africans by racially stereotyping European liturgists. Claudio Salvucci asks critical questions about the so-called Zairean rite based on Congolese history, and Peter Kwasniewski evaluates the evangelizing potential of preconciliar faith, life, and worship. In Africa, as elsewhere, traditional Catholicism won over entire nations and stimulated enormous cultural creativity. However, under the reign of the new ecclesiology, new ecumenism, and new liturgy of progressive Western intellectuals, more and more people are turning to Protestant sects and uprooted secularism.
It was Neumayr’s articles on this topic in the American Spectator magazine that brought this issue to the forefront of a broader discussion. Neumayr had long questioned the African narrative and traveled to Ivory Coast, one of the most Catholic regions in Africa, to find out the true state of Catholicism there. Unfortunately, Neumayr fell ill and died in Africa in 2023. Only a few of his essays have been published so far, which can be found in this book and are an excellent introduction to the question of African Catholicism. On January 13, 2023, Neumayr posted this comment on social media: “As Freemasons grew stronger in Ivory Coast, they were condemned not by Catholic bishops, but by Pentecostal preachers. (Catholic) bishops only criticized them weakly, out of fear after it came to light that they had allowed the head of the lodge to receive Holy Communion.”
In his final weeks, he published a series of articles in The American Spectator that are instructive, albeit depressing, and testify to the decline of Catholicism in Ivory Coast and the many parallels with other parts of post-conciliar Africa. Neumayr was a man of keen observation, and he wittily shows that Catholicism in Ivory Coast is very, very far from its heyday. Neumayr effortlessly introduces foreigners to the issues of contemporary African culture and liturgical life through an interesting travelogue. His visit to Ivory Coast, especially its capital city, offers a valuable insight into the decline caused by the post-colonial situation. We learn that the rule of Western states (whatever its shortcomings) was not the only stabilizing factor that has been removed over the past seventy years. The ancient Roman liturgy, which once evangelized and united these countries, has been replaced by a rite that has become a source of division owing to the multitude of local dialects; speakers are humiliated when this or that dialect, not their own, is chosen as the language of celebration for a particular Mass.
As this seminarian shows, the enormous fragmentation is further exacerbated by the political progressivism of many parish priests who promote socialism from the pulpit and allow heresy to flourish in their communities. One of the officially tolerated forms of heresy, as the seminarian explains, is liturgical inculturation, which has been spreading in Africa since the Second Vatican Council. Based on numerous scholarly sources, he explains how inculturation differs from adaptation, which was a healthy way in which the Church once integrated its liturgical rites into the healthy aspects of a culture. It is worth noting that the idea of an “inculturated” African liturgy did not originate with Africans themselves, but with European experts who speculated on what would best suit their African brothers.
One of the most interesting reflections in the book comes from this essay, where the author rejects the idea that liturgy in indigenous languages can save those languages:
Latin has never been a threat to the Igbo language, but English is. And this is not because English is taught in school or sometimes used in the church, but principally because Igbo is no longer spoken in many Igbo homes, no longer the mother tongue; making it the liturgical language does not help. The English language may indeed threaten the identity of the Igbo people, but post- Christian Western values, torn as it were from God and from the natural law, pose a mortal and infernal danger. A largely sentimental revitalization of traditional Igbo customs and its incorporation into the liturgy stand little chance in stemming the surging and sophisticated onslaught of the decadent West. (p. 67)This section is indeed very interesting and is complemented by chapters by Claudio Salvucci, which describe what the adaptation of the liturgy before the Council looked like in practice. Salvucci writes about the Catholic Kingdom of Congo and points out that efforts to inculturate a kind of constructed “paradisiacal” African heritage actually ignore the real history of African Catholicism and erase the very heritage that we claim to want to respect. Unlike the modern “Zairean rite,” which includes ceremonies that were never part of traditional African Catholic culture, the Mass in the presence of the King of Congo had several elements that organically integrated his royal role into the liturgy—without violating a single prescribed rubric of the Mass. Salvucci asks: “How can we speak of the inviolability of non-Catholic customs and demand their preservation in the Church when at the same time we discard our own native Catholic customs and culture?”
Unfortunately, this is exactly what has happened in Africa over the past 70 years, and the alleged fruits of these changes do not correspond to the simple narrative we have all heard—namely, that “the Church in Africa has experienced a genuine renaissance since the Council!” On the contrary, as the Nigerian seminarian and Dr. Peter Kwasniewski clearly show in graphs depicting quantitative data, the pace of growth on the continent has slowed dramatically since 1970, even though the number of Catholics continues to increase due to population growth. This change cannot be fully explained by secularization, as the growth rate of Protestant sects is increasing while that of Catholicism is declining.
Kwasniewski describes the unifying power of the old Mass, whose homogeneity and rituality have brought millions of Africans to Catholicism in past centuries. The revival of the old Mass in several places on the continent gives great hope for its spread in the future, so that the important task of cultural adaptation and flourishing can continue unhindered. Kwasniewski recalls that Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre was a missionary in Africa from 1932 to 1959, and under his leadership, Catholicism spread extensively in the regions of Africa for which he was responsible. These included twelve archdioceses, thirty-six dioceses, and thirteen Italian apostolic prefectures.
As elsewhere in the world, Africans were denied something that was already a precious part of their Catholic heritage. Several thriving parishes with traditional Latin Masses in Africa, particularly in Nigeria and Gabon, suggest that African Catholics would perhaps flock to these Masses if they were more accessible. Their inaccessibility cannot therefore be used as an argument against their appeal or power.
Another significant problem that the proponents of the success story of Vatican II in Africa tactfully conceal is the shameless mixing of pagan practices into Catholic liturgy and faith.
Rev. Edwin Ezeokeke, a doctoral student in systematic theology at the John Paul II Catholic University in Lublin, wrote a thesis entitled Theological Analysis of Syncretic and Pagan Beliefs and Customs in Catholic Funerals in Igboland, Nigeria, in which he lists a number of animistic rituals and beliefs that tarnish the beautiful image of the African Church. He concludes his thesis with the words:
Many people in Igboland are Catholics but Catholic faith and the Gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ especially his teachings on death and resurrection are yet to take deep root in their lives. This is why many Catholic faithful incorporate lots and lots of pagan practices and beliefs in the Catholic burials and funerals. Many see this as inculturation. But as I have said above, inculturation is never and will never be syncretism. They are two different things with totally different meanings. Inculturation is recommended for evangelization. It entails a sincere and honest appreciation of the dimensions of other cultures in so far it does not alter the main essence of the Church’s identity. Syncretism alters the main essence and meaning of the Church’s identity. This is exactly what the above pagan practices do to Catholic Church in Igboland especially as it concerns her burial and funeral rites. These practices completely alter the entire essence and meaning of the Catholic burials and funerals.Der Spiegel magazine published an article by Thilo Thielke entitled “Christianity in Africa: Jesus in the Morning, Voodoo in the Evening,” in which he vividly describes how animism mixes with the Christian faith. In the text, he quotes voodoo shaman John Odeh:
“Christianity has destroyed our culture. The people have lost faith in our ancient gods and values,” the animist priest laments. Ape skulls, amulets and shells are laid out on the concrete floor of the adjacent garage. Figures of Ogun, the god of iron, Orunmila, the god of wisdom, and Olokun, the god of waters, adorn this unusual shrine. Osalobua, the supreme God, punishes theft swiftly and without mercy, says Odeh. And the dead hear every lie told by the living. “The pastors go to church in the morning and preach Christianity,” says the voodoo priest. “And in the evening they come to me and speak with their forefathers.”I personally heard the testimony of a priest from France, where the shortage of local priests is being remedied by importing priests from former African colonies. This priest said that Africans first celebrate a new Mass in the church and then spend the whole evening drumming and chanting their pagan rituals in the rectory. “But without the Council, it would probably have been worse…” (!).
However, the overall message of this introductory book is very positive. Perhaps it will open the door to further study of the Church in Africa, as it would be helpful to see an even stronger emphasis on demography.
Mark Twain once said, “The trouble with the world is not that people know too little; it’s that they know so many things that just aren’t so.” This book is an excellent response to those who “know so many things that simply are not true” about Africa. The book Is African Catholicism a “Vatican II Success Story”? can be obtained from Os Justi Press or from any Amazon outlet.
