Liberation theology African style

[didymus]

Liberation theology African style

After the pope ended his Africa swing on Monday, my wife and I remained in Cameroon for most of this week, pondering the impact of the trip and taking stock of the African church. The experience reinforced an impression I’ve long had, and here it is in a sound-bite: What African Catholicism has to offer the global church is liberation theology without the hang-up over ecclesiastical authority.
First, the “liberation” part. Ask the typical American Catholic to tick off important issues facing the church, and you’re likely to get a dose of insider Catholic baseball: women in the church, teachings on sexual morality, the power of the pope or the bishops versus the laity, and so on. Put the same question to a typical African, and the answer is usually more outward-looking: war, corruption and bad governance, human rights, poverty.

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The first is the church’s cultural warriors, who think of Africa only in terms of reinforcing conservative stands on abortion and homosexuality. That’s certainly true as far as it goes; many African Catholics include homosexuality on lists of social evils such as prostitution and thievery, without a trace of self-consciousness. In the same vein, the idea of a “pro-choice Catholic” seems an almost unthinkable contradiction in terms. Yet those cultural values (which are hardly exclusive to Catholics) stand alongside a cluster of other instincts that would give many American conservatives heartburn, such as a passionate critique of global capitalism, concern for climate change and environmental protection, putting curbs on corporate power, and opposing conflicts such as the U.S.-led war in Iraq. Here’s one illustration of the point: at Benedict XVI’s Mass in Yaoundè last Thursday, a surprising number of local Catholics sported Obama t-shirts, something that would be difficult to imagine in the States.

The second camp likely to be nonplussed is liberal Catholic reformers, accustomed to thinking of liberation theology as an ally in efforts to decentralize power in the church and to promote changes such as ending clerical celibacy or ordaining women. In reality, even the most progressive African Catholics have relatively little interest in such questions.

“Our theology reflects the problems of our communities, which are social problems, not internal ecclesiastical questions,” said Fr. Antoine Babè, dean of the theology faculty at the Catholic University of Central Africa in Yaoundè, Cameroon’s capital. “These Western preoccupations don’t concern us very much.”