African Hop: Pope Visits Uganda

“At this blessed moment, for the first time in history, the successor of Peter as vicar of Christ sets foot upon the soil of Africa,” declared Pope Paul VI as he arrived in Kampala, Uganda, July 31, amid a bedlam of tom-toms, native dances, and yellow-and-white papal bunting everywhere. Kampala moviegoers had paid an extra twenty cents a seat that month to help pay for the celebrations.

Christ’s vicar took a little longer getting to Africa than Christ himself, who, as a toddler, journeyed almost as far down into Egypt land to escape the wrath of King Herod. (Although the Pope flew 3,145 miles each way, it’s less than 400 air miles from Rome to the African coast.)

Nonetheless, the pontiff, making the eighth foreign visit of his six-year reign, was welcomed warmly by black Africans and chiefs of state led by Ugandan President Apollo Milton Obote. Although his hope that his visit would produce peace in the Nigerian civil war was fruitless, the Pope’s fifty-one hour stay in Uganda was generally considered to have brought a healthy degree of unity to the country, which has been torn by political, religious, and ethnic divisions.

Alternating peacemaking and church business, Paul consecrated twelve new bishops and gave communion to them, Africa’s seven cardinals, and 100 selected clergy and laymen. Earlier, the Pope had indicated he might prolong his African visit in efforts to get peace talks started between Biafra and Nigeria. But he subsequently ruled out a Biafra stop, lest political motivations be attributed to him and “cancel the impartial assistance which we can still carry out.”

Meantime, the Biafran government announced its forces were observing a three-day ceasefire during the papal visit; the Nigerians rejected the truce as a meaningless grandstand ploy.

Paul’s pursuit of dialogue also brought him face-to-face with the Roman church’s first pan-African conference. Although the conference ostensibly was to steer clear of sensitive political issues, war and tension overshadowed the discussions. Besides Nigeria, topics included Rhodesia, where apartheid on the South African model is increasing; the Sudan, where the Islamic government in the north has been virtually at war with some black tribes in the south; and colonialism in the Portuguese territories of Angola and Mozambique.

Pursuing ecclesiastical “decolonization,” the pontiff told the closing session of the all-Africa bishops’ symposium: “From now on, you Africans are missionaries among your own people. The Church of Christ is well and truly planted in this blessed soil.”

Yet he stressed the need for the universal and traditional expressions of the Catholic faith—noting that its expressions may vary.

“If you are able to avoid the possible dangers of religious pluralism, the danger of making your Christian profession into a kind of local folklore,” he admonished, “or into exclusivist racism or into egoistic tribalism or arbitrary separatism, then you will be able to remain sincerely African even in your own interpretation of the Christian life … you will be capable of bringing to the Catholic Church the precious and original contributions of negritude which she needs particularly in this historic hour.”

Despite his plea, most African churches are inadequately prepared for self-reliance and are largely dependent on outside aid and personnel. More than two-thirds of the 15,000 Catholic priests in Africa are white missionaries from abroad. Unless the recruitment of native priests increases sharply in the next few years, missionaries in many areas could be living on borrowed time. Religious News Service correspondent Frank Comerford, a veteran Kenya newsman, believes that within a decade there could be African bishops in every diocese without even the trickle of priests necessary to man the missions now open—much less to meet the needs of an expanding church.Africa has about 30 million Catholics, and their number is growing at the rate of 4 or 5 per cent a year. In the last twenty years, the Catholic population has increased by 163 per cent; during the same time, the number of priests has increased only 93 per cent. One estimate of Christians of all groups on the continent is about 44 million. There are more than 100 million Muslims, and it has been estimated that of every three converted pagan animists, two become Muslims and one a Christian.

The Pope chose Uganda for his visit because he wanted to make a one-stop trip, and because the central African country has deep Catholic roots. Anglican and Catholic missionaries brought Christianity to Uganda in the late 1870s, engaging in a struggle with Islam. In the 1880s, Mwanga, the young Ugandan monarch, loosed severe persecution on the missionaries and native converts.

Pope Paul closed his visit by consecrating the altar of a shrine commemorating twenty-two black African martyrs who were burned to death by Mwanga. The Pope himself had proclaimed them saints in 1964. In an ecumenical gesture, he joined Protestant leaders less than a mile away at the shrine where twenty-three Anglican and Catholic converts perished in the same massacres. Natives dressed in animal skins and carrying rubber-tipped spears reenacted the role of the savage executioners.

The 71-year-old pontiff seems to thrive on the excitement of enthusiastic crowds and strange faces. Waxing exuberant after he had debarked from his plane-hop and had returned to his summer home at Castel Gandolfo, Italy, he did a little hop of his own. Describing how a group of nuns had danced up and down, flapping their arms to greet him, he swung his arms up and down and skipped.

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