africa – Christian Renaissance Movement

Most of my readership is American, and a small chunk is from Europe. A smattering of readers in Asia from time to time.

So let me tell you that what matters right now in the Church is Africa.

Everyone is seeing the African response to a certain DDF text. Okay. The energy and orthodoxy, by and large, is south of the Sahara these days.

There are certainly problems with some of the way things are done “down there.” Many men enter seminary for the wrong reasons. There are some odd ideas about chastity. There is a certain kind of chaos.

But that is where the Finger of God has come down in this age. Recall that the center of Christendom used to be in what is now Algeria, Tunisia, and Egypt… It has taken some 1600 years for that energy to move across the desert, after a European vacation.

I joke with my many African priest friends sometimes – “Africa is a big country.” They know I am joking but rush to correct me… “AFRICA IS A CONTINENT!” How many times they’ve heard an American or other Westerner something like, “Oh, you’re from Africa? Do you know Fr. XYZ? He’s from Africa too!”

In some places, a diocese will have several hundred seminarians. The bishops have so many men they hardly know what to do with them. And so plenty find their way to a parish near you. And you get their preaching, teaching, confessing, management, leadership. And that will be more and more frequently the case. So why are you not more interested in African Catholicism?

There ARE ways to find out about Catholic Africa without actually going there. But they are either very “formal,” like CNA Africa, or they are so local as to be totally uninteresting to a wide audience unless there is some particular crisis or major event – like the sudden rush of interest in certain bishops and dioceses after Fiducia Supplicans, for example.

There needs to be a news service that is both local and detailed enough to be interesting and informed while still being broad enough to be of interest to all of Africa and beyond. It needs to be run differently than the traditional cable-style news channels, with their bulky and slow-moving systems. We need something more agile and in-depth, something more creative… Something which informs on current events but also goes deeper, something which will give non-Africans a perspective on what exactly is going on in that “big country” so that we are all a little less ignorant.

So that’s another project for 2024.

If investing in or otherwise working on an African Catholic news service interests you, get in touch with me. I have already begun the initial conversation, and I hope things will move forward significantly in the summer or fall. More details to follow.