Dear Benedikt,
Greetings from Abuja, and thanks for your last mail.
Many thanks for taking your time to respond at some length to my memorandum, which, as I indicated, was written over 12 years ago. I am well aware that I wrote the memo as an outside observer, coming from a different socio-historical and religious environment, and with very limited exposure to the complex realities and challenges of the German Church, having spent only one year in the country.
I have given some thought to the content of your response, and I must say that I agree with you on a lot of the submissions therein โ especially those regarding the need to re-conceive the juridical and administrative structures, in order to make the processes in our Church more consultative and inclusive. To that extent I will agree that a number of the provisions of the 1983 code of Canon Law can perhaps no longer be considered adequate enough to deal with the emerging governance and management challenges of the Church today, and the legitimate demands of an increasingly informed lay faithful, who should ordinarily be involved at every level of decision making in the Family of Christ to which they belong as legitimate sons and daughters.
Perhaps one area in your response that called for serious reflection and questioning on my part, is your critical submission (which is apparently gaining currency among a growing number of scholars in Germany), namely, that what we are witnessing in Germany and much of Europe today is not the process of secularization, as I presumed in my memorandum, but โthe fundamental transformation of religionโ and religious attitudes. This is a point you stressed very much in your paper at our June Symposium, and which you have also highlighted in this last response to my memo. I must say however that this is a position that some of us (here in the Church in Africa) may find rather difficult to embrace too quickly, at this moment of our own unique evolution or development as Christian communities. And here I think I speak not only for the clergy in the Catholic Church, but for a good number of ordinary Christians and Christian scholars (of various denominations) across the continent of Africa.
As you are aware, there are parts of Sub-Saharan Africa where Christian missionaries from Europe and America only got to for Christian evangelisation, less than one hundred years ago. Parts of Northern Nigeria for example received the Gospel of Christ in the 1930s! With all enthusiasm, many of our people abandoned their traditional religions, and embraced the Christian faith that came along with elements of Western civilisation, which were inspired by what was then understood as the Judeo-Christian worldview and value systems. Embracing the Christian faith (which some local critics have continued to refer to as โthe White manโs religionโ) and the ecclesiastical institutions that came along with it, often amounted to a major socio-historical, psychological and spiritual disruption, from which many communities are yet to fully recover.
So while our new converts in Africa are still just struggling to ground themselves in, and make sense of this new religious and spiritual worldview and the value systems that arrived with it โ and as indicated above, this has often been a rather difficult and sometimes painful process, on account of the loss of identity that the process sometimes entails โ here we are now with the very notion of religion, and some of what we were only recently taught are fundamental elements of the Christian faith and practice, โchangingโ or experiencing a major transformation in the land of our missionaries! This is rather problematic for many of us non-European Christian observers of the evolution of the Church in Europe.
If indeed it is true that the notion of religion as such is changing in Europe; if it is true that some of what we understood as fundamental elements of the Christian faith, which missionaries from Europe bequeathed to us less than one hundred years ago, no longer make sense to many modern day European Christians, then there is arising a feeling among many Catholic and non-Catholic Christians in Africa today, of being left stranded by their โspiritual fathers and mothersโ in Europe. And sadly, this is happening at a time of widespread aggressive fundamentalist Islamic expansionism and outright persecution of Christians in some territories where the Muslim populations have political dominance.
To put it simply, I do not believe that many African Christians are ready just now to embrace the changing notion of religion that may be happening in Europe, by which the mystical and sacramental elements of the Christian religion are more or less discountenanced, in favour of the Caritas dimension of the faith. I believe that the call for us to embrace or at least accommodate such change or transformation in the notion and practice of religion today, is likely to generate another wave of identity crisis for a people who are yet to recover fully and find their grounding after the major socio-historical and spiritual destabilisation brought about by both the colonial and Christian missionary enterprises in sub-Saharan Africa.
Of course many of us here understand that Caritas is an integral part of the Christian faith and practice, and the gospel constantly challenges us to show that we are Christians by the quality of our love โ such show of love being among the principal โfruitsโ of the life of faith and hope, of mystical or spiritual union with the divine, that is nurtured by way of the sacramental life of the Christian community. Caritas as such is what unites all established religions. The Christian faith has no monopoly of Caritas. Christianity is not unique in its teaching on love and compassion or mercy and forgiveness. I believe that our unique identity as Christians and as Catholics stems from the Mystical and the Sacramental elements of our faith, not in the Caritas that other religions almost equally teach. If therefore we can establish that a generation of people do not consider the mystical and sacramental dimension of Christianity of any critical importance, then our mutual dialogue needs to be broadened beyond the future of Church Leadership as such, to the future of the 2000 year enterprise we have come to know as Christianity.
I have been asking myself: Is the kind of religion identified with Wonder, Mystery, Cult and Sacraments truly obsolete? Does Caritas as such amount to the practice of religion? What about the core element of transcendence? And is the Caritas work of the Church not supposed to be inspired by the deeper spiritual (mystical and sacramental) dimension of the faith? What does it mean to say โCaritas Christi urged nos?โ Is it not the mystical union with Christ (which for Catholics is nurtured in the Sacraments) that fundamentally inspires our charity work as Christians? Does the “theoandric” nature of Christ the God-made-incarnate not imply that we believers share at one and the same time in the earthly and heavenly and in the material and spiritual? What kind of Christianity shall we end up with on account of this ongoing change or transformation in religion? Will a shift of focus to material, human, this-worldly concerns not make the Christian religion so much poorer and so much weaker than what we have today? The many glaring failures of organised religion through the course of history notwithstanding, isnโt there still a place for some of the โold time religion?โ
These are among the questions arising in my mind since I read your mail and started reflecting upon the assertion that religion itself is undergoing a major change or transformation in Germany. I will continue to give some thought to the challenge before us, and perhaps when the opportunity arises, discuss with some of my colleagues here in Africa, especially those that have some exposure with the contemporary issues of the Church in Europe. And like I noted above, the debate now needs to be expanded (beyond the question of leadership and management or the juridical and administrative structures of the Church) to the broader topic of our mutual understanding of the notion and practice of religion as such in modern world.
May the good Lord lead us alright. Amen.
God bless you.
April 20, 2021
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