PopeWatch: Africa and Germany

If Pope Francis has any spare time to read, he could do worse than reading Father George Rutler’s article at Crisis on the Church in Germany and the attitude of German clerics to the Church in Africa:

The social consequences of German idealism were hymned in the refrain “Am deutschen Wesen soll die Welt genesen” (“The German spirit shall heal the world”) and it stained the twentieth century with its bitter irony. By 1912, eugenic theory banned interracial marriage in German colonies. When French occupation forces included African troops after World War I, mulatto progeny were called “Rhineland bastards” and in Mein Kampf, Hitler disdained them as a contamination of the white race plotted by Jews and “negrified” Frenchmen. In 1937, Hitler approved “the discrete sterilization of the Rhineland bastards” by a special Gestapo commission.

While one would not impute such crassness to contemporary intellectuals, mauled as they have been by history yet oblivious to their wounds, a remnant bias seems irrepressible. During last year’s Synod on the Family, Cardinal Walter Kasper expressed frustration with African bishops for opposing more conciliatory attitudes toward homosexuality that he called their “taboo” and said that Africans “should not tell us too much what we have to do.” Cardinal Kasper denied having said this, and managed an awkward apology when a recording of what he said was presented as evidence. The cardinal’s remarks echoed the poorly tutored John Shelby Spong of the Episcopal Church who said of Africans in 1998: “They’ve moved out of animism into a very superstitious kind of Christianity. They’ve yet to face the intellectual revolution of Copernicus and Einstein that we’ve had to face in the developing world: that is just not on their radar screen.”

Kasper’s condescension is not limited to Africa. Before Pope Benedict XVI’s trip to the United Kingdom, Kasper said: “When you land at Heathrow Airport, you sometimes think you’d landed in a Third World country.” Like Kasper, Cardinal Marx seems uncomfortable with anything lacking the advantages of Teutonism, and said of his German Church on February 25, 2015: “We are not a subsidiary of Rome.” But his fellow countryman Cardinal Müller, of a more generous cultural spirit as Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, responded that what Cardinal Marx expressed was “an absolutely anti-Catholic idea that does not respect the Catholicity of the Church.”

After the close of the Synod, the official website of the German bishop’s conference said that the exponential growth of the “romantic, poor Church” in Africa is due to the lamentable fact that “the educational situation there is on average at a rather low level and the people accept simple answers to difficult questions.” And lest anyone think that the “Dark Continent” is a phrase remaindered to the dustbin of history, the website added that in Africa “the growing number of priests is a result not only of missionary power but also a result of the fact that the priesthood is one of the few possibilities for social security on the dark continent.” If this reeks of “the white man’s burden,” let it be noted that Rudyard Kipling actually coined that phrase, not in reference to Africa but to the Philippines during the Spanish American War, and would have been appalled by the German “Uberlegenheitskomplex”—superiority complex.

That complex is redolent of the disdain shown toward the early Christians by Pliny the Younger, Lucian of Samosata, and Celsus who, like the writer for the German bishops, Bjorn Odendahl, regretted with imperious loftiness the rusticity, superstition, and poverty of the followers of the Christus. One does not know what Herr Odendahl is paid for writing such prodigious infelicity, but given the wealth of the German Church, he is not on an African pay scale. The German Church is the wealthiest per capita in the world, and the second biggest employer in their country. The German Catholic leaders, for all their claims to social progressivism, are in the pay of the government through tax subsidies, by which arrangement German priests are paid much more than their counterparts in the United States while their bishops are paid upwards of $189,000 a year plus benefits.

They hardly fit Saint Paul’s description of the prototypical Christians, albeit those in northern Corinth: “Consider your own call, brothers and sisters: not many of you were wise by human standards, not many were powerful, not many were of noble birth. But God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise, God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong” (1 Cor. 1:26-27). And we may infer that among the Corinthian Christians there were not many Aquikantians. It certainly is an oblique glance at the German bishops who hosted opulent dinners in Rome during the last Synod in the villa newly bought by Cardinal Marx’s archdiocese of Munich and Freising for 9.7 million Euros, while African Catholics were being hounded by Islamic terrorists.

During their “ad limina” visit to the Holy See in 2015, the German bishops were told by Pope Francis that a severe consequence their “careerism” was spiritual indolence. According to a survey published in April, 2015 by the German bishops’ own Conference, only 54 percent of priests in Germany go to confession, and only a bare majority of them pray daily, while 60 percent of the German laity do not believe in life after death. The virtual collapse of Catholic life in Germany gives substance to the observation of Cardinal Paul Josef Cordes, president emeritus of the Pontifical Council Cor Unum in Die Tagespost on May 7, 2015, as he critiqued the “superbia” of many German hierarchs: “The existing German ecclesial apparatus is completely unfit to work against growing secularism.” Meanwhile, the number of Christians in Africa has grown from about eight million in 1900 to over half a billion today.

Go here to read the rest.  Pope Francis is fond of the concept of a Church of the Peripheries.  In Africa the periphery is rapidly becoming a core area of the Church.  It is not hard to envision in centuries missionaries from Africa bringing the light of Christ to the inhabitants of darkest Europe.