Is African Catholicism a "Vatican II Success Story"?

The familiar claim that Catholicism is booming in Africa-that it is the one continent where the Second Vatican Council has yielded abundant good fruits-does not square with available data and descriptions, as we discover in the late George Neumayr's reportage on Ivory Coast, a Nigerian Catholic's analysis of harmful inculturation inflicted on Africans by racially stereotyping European liturgists, Claudio Salvucci's questioning of the Zaire Use on the basis of Congolese history, and Peter Kwasniewski's evaluation of the evangelical potency of preconciliar faith, life, and worship. In Africa as elsewhere, traditional Catholicism conquered whole populations and fostered immense cultural creativity. Under the new ecclesiology, new ecumenism, and new liturgy of progressive Western intellectuals, ever-larger numbers are falling away to Protestant sects and deracinating secularism.

PRAISE FOR THIS BOOK:

"Accessible and informative, this agile volume...questions much of the received wisdom about the alleged 'success' of the Catholic Church in Africa in the last few decades.... Will introduce the reader to an ecclesial reality far more problematic and fractured than the naively optimistic portrayals often found in Catholic publications.... An important critique of simplistic accounts of liturgical inculturation."-Thomas Cattoi, PhD, William and Barbara Moran Chair in Early Christian Theology and Interreligious Relations, Angelicum, Rome

"Post-Vatican II scholarship on the Catholic Church in Africa privileges a quasi-dogmatised narrative of a continental pastoral triumph premised on inculturation and realised in all-around growth.... This book dares to challenge that narrative by questioning its assumptions....Serves as a welcome corrective foray into a fraudulent historiography...based on eurocentric ideological preoccupations." -Michael Kakooza, PhD, Strategic Management, Eastern Africa

"The entirety of this book, brimming with intelligent observations and illustrated with unknown and appealing historical examples, will trigger conversations that should not be postponed any more."-Fr. Federico Highton, PhD, ThD; co-founder of two sub-Saharan parishes; Director of the Omnes Gentes Project

"As a priest celebrating the traditional Latin Mass in East Africa for twenty years, I appreciate your collective work. The Faith has been damaged by the new spirit of this council in Africa like everywhere else, even if the consequences are not of the same magnitude (yet)."-Fr. Christophe Nouveau, IBP, Kampala, Uganda

"My impression of Ugandan people is that they have a deep and genuine faith, a natural modesty, ready generosity, refreshing transparency, and a joyful reverence.... I believe the TLM would be, in certain ways, less 'foreign' to the faith, history, and liturgical sensibilities of Africans than is the Novus Ordo."-Janet E. Smith, PhD, moral theologian and advocate for Ugandan seminarians