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The second great watershed for Roman Catholicism came in the 1960s when the ChurchÕs presence in Africa was reshaped by the twin events of decolonization and Vatican Council II (1962-65). The coincidence of the two movements meant that the process of decolonization helped African Catholics participate enthusiastically in the wholesale change of direction Vatican II proposed for the church; and at the same time Vatican II prepared Catholic Christians to play an active role in decolonization and the political and social upheaval that was its aftermath.
Vatican II stressed understanding; encouraging the use of the vernacular, rather than Latin, in worship, and opening the door to co-operation between Catholic, Protestant and Orthodox Christians. Perhaps the key African Catholic response to Vatican II was the use of the vernacular liturgy and the development of African hymnody and instrumentation. "It may seem odd, but it is probably true, that the most important single effect in Africa in popular terms of the Council has been the change in singing, in hymns , in music, in the use of musical instruments. The pre-Conciliar African church set its heart on the possession of a harmonium. The post-Conciliar African Church glories in its use of drums." (Hastings African Catholicism pp 128-29) Vatican II also permitted, and even encouraged African Catholic Christians to read Protestant vernacular translations of the Bible.
At the same time, however, Vatican II, which "brought the Church into the 20th century" also made the Church more firmly western in its modernity. When the Church "de-mystified" folk Catholicism, reducing her approval of healing shrines, holy water, statues and candles, she removed the points of contact between traditional African religions and Catholic Christianity, changes which were resisted by African Catholic Christians.
Vatican II also encouraged the development of local ecclesiastical leadership, precisely at the time when African nations were asserting their independence from colonial domination and developing local leadership. In 1960 most priests and virtually all bishops were European or American. Many of them enthusiastically embraced the principles of Vatican II and worked to develop African liturgies, hymns and musical styles. By the early 1970s they began to leave Africa, voluntarily relinquishing their leadership positions to African churchmen. By the African Synod of 1994 90% of the hierarchy was African.
As the missionaries left the African bishops became more conservative than their white predecessors, and began to reign in the reforms initiated by the missionary priests and bishop. This coincides with a political shift from the heady independence of the 1960s to an increasingly repressive series of regimes in the 1970s. The bishops in Uganda under Idi Amin, the Congo/Zaire under Mobutu, Ethiopia under Mengistu, , the Sudan, Angola and Mozambique found themselves struggling for their survival and that of their flocks, working to equip them to withstand persecution and accept martyrdom. They also found themselves isolated from each other and no longer speaking with a common voice, as they had in the 1960s when travel grants and conference money were plentiful.
Institutionally, the 1970s saw the Catholic Church in Africa recover the importance of the catechist. Catechists, are lay, frequently married, church leaders, in charge of village churches. They teach the people the basics of the Christian faith and lead weekly worship. Catechists had been the main factor in the spread of Christianity in the 19th century, though the office had fallen into disfavor in the 20th. For many African Catholics, the catechist remains their only link to the church, apart from the very occasional visit by a parish priest for the eucharist, baptisms, and marriages. These "Small Christian Communities" as the African Synod of 1994 refers to them, led by catechists, are places where Christians can "laugh and dance and sing and celebrate." They have played a key role in allowing the Church to survive, and even to thrive under the state persecution of the 1970s and 1980s.
Because the catechist played such an important role in African Catholic Christianity, the Church became relatively non-sacramental. Since Catechists cannot administer sacraments, the sacramental ministry of the Church became peripheral, while weekly worship moved to the foreground of African Catholic Christian experience.
In the 1990s a number of the more repressive African regimes were overthrown and a greater openness became possible again. Partly as a result of this new openness and communication among the bishops, the African Church gathered in a great and important Synod, held in Rome, in 1994.
The African Synod, led by Pope John Paul II, defined the Church as the "Family of God," and worked to develop and inculturate that image in the African context. The synodical participants stressed the need to inculturate Christianity in the areas of liturgy, marriage, and reverence for ancestors. Of the three, it placed particular emphasis on the issue of marriage, which had long been an area in which the African Catholic community had struggled with the teachings of the Church.
Marriage has been a special problem within the African Catholic community because many Christians are in irregular marriages. Since the Church does not recognize the validity of traditional marriage ceremonies, the synod encouraged African priests to try to incorporate the sacramental blessing of the Church into the traditional marriage ceremony. However, traditional marriage ceremonies can take months and are sometimes not finalized until the wife can prove her fertility with the birth of her first child. This, of course, does not fit well within the traditional Catholic understanding of marriage as a sacrament which becomes permanent the moment the church pronounces the couple husband and wife, and is not at all dependent on fertility.
A second problem is the frequency of mixed Protestant/Catholic marriages. Many African Christians do not see the difference between Protestant Christians and Catholic Christians, especially at the local level. The difference is often comes down to little more than whether a person attended a Catholic school or a Protestant school. Siblings can be members of different churches with no difference in practice or theology, so Catholic Christians would have no problem marrying Protestant Christians. Mixed marriages, traditional marriages, polygamous marriages, or even simply marriages that were not solemnized in church for lack of a priest at the crucial moment all prevent even devout Catholic Christians from participating in communion. Barring large numbers of obviously devout Christians from the sacraments further marginalizes the importance of the sacraments to ordinary Catholics worshipping under the leadership of their catechist.
At virtually the same time as the bishops were meeting at Rome in the synod of 1994, African Catholics became embroiled in what may be the worst moment in the history of the Church in Africa. Through the course of 1994 Catholic Christians, some of them in leadership roles, played a major role in inciting racial hatred and genocidal violence in Rwanda. The majority of both Tutsis and the Hutu in Rwanda were Catholic, so much of the genocide involved Catholic Christians slaughtering other Catholic Christians, frequently as the victims sought sanctuary in Churches. http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/rwanda/etc/script.html http://www1.cfcsc.dnd.ca/Op_Lance/rw10f.html http://www.ofm.org/3/news/assasin7.html
The Church was unable, or, in some cases unwilling to control the violence. As the Church faces the new millennium, it has set itself the task of confession, repentance, and reconciliation. It does so with good hope and some optimism. http://www.vatican.va/search/ricerca_en.htm
This page was based on the following sources, which you can consult for more detailed information:
Main Internet Site for the Catholic Church in Africa: http://www.rc.net/africa/catholicafrica/
Adrian hastings, African Catholicism, Essays in Discovery, SCM Press, 1989
Aylward Shorter, "The Roman Catholic Church in Africa Today" in Christianity in Africa in the 1990s edited by C Fyfe and others. Edinburgh: Centre of African Studies, University of Edinburgh, 1996 pp 22-38