The magical recipe of 'inculturation' and the "promised land" of Vatican II: A look at African Catholicism 60 years later
Is African Catholicism Stronger Like the Mvule or Mutuuba Tree Where Birds of All Feathers Might Perch and Nest? Is it Rather a Young Tree or Even Worse? Has 'Inculturation' Worked?
Above: Construction of a mission at Peramiho, August 1878. Credit: source.
The Abbot Nulius of Peramiho, Tanganyika (present day Tanzania 🇹🇿) rejected any experimentation with the liturgy as though he could smell it six years before the closing of Vatican II.1 It is important to recall that the liturgy developed largely in a monastic-ascetic tradition and not a populist-pietistic one. The shift in liturgical life began around the middle ages where we can talk of the Catharist heresy and the elevation as a reaction to one or more variants of the Berengarian and Catharist movements with their denial of the transubstantiation.
Modern changes, according to many experts are basically the separation of the Church with her past. Aiming to dissociate the Church from what is deemed incompatible with the modern spirit, the work of reform is seen as bending the liturgy to the times and not the times to the liturgy. Verwimp, Bishop of Kisantu made such a submission, that the liturgy should be adapted to modern mentality-- a point which in fact opens the document Sacrosanctum Concilium.2 Kisantu in then Congo-Zaire was part of a large mission land which had become a hornet's nest for agitators of change and Archbishop Lefebvre questioned the criteria used in the selection of bishops in his submission to the antepreparatory commission of the Second Vatican Council.
There's a stark contrast however between Verwimp of Kisantu and Marcel Lefebvre. On the one side we have agitation for changes and on the other a voice calling for caution. In the same complex we have the Bishop of Oran, Algeria, by the names of Bertrand Lacaste whose submission was the very antithesis of Nostra Aetate and Dignitatis Humanae, which hints on the fact that he knew where in the media such ideas were coming from.3 The modern media was in other words involved in the campaign that would lead to the ideas expressed in the two documents.
In other words, here was the time for bishops of Africa to be duelling against each other. Following the earlier generation of missionaries whose zeal had brought the faith to the continent, a new liberal leaning generation had sprung up in the eve of the council. Be this as it may, it was not these who would implement the experiments on faith and liturgy. It would be African native bishops and their new generation of clergy. Thus of course the elements captured under the discussion called ‘inculturation’ are traceable to 1959.4
Fast forward to September, 1959 in Batavia, Nijmegen: a modernist theologian Edward Schillebeeckx had gathered around him a league of European bishops and thus was organized the Dutch convention on the liturgy which many bishops of Africa attended including the first native cardinal Laurean Rugambwa. A coalition was born which would give fire to the progressive elements towards a certain yet to be defined ‘inculturation.’ This Schillebeeckx was advisor to the entire Dutch conference of bishops, and specially endeared to Cardinal Benard Alfrink of Utrecht.
Gaining the ear of this cardinal pulled sufficient resources in his direction so as to be able to martial forces from Africa and Europe. Thus testimony to the Dutch coalition, Peter Kelleter of Bethlehem in South Africa submits a sum of everything proposed by the conference which would be explained in Africa as ‘inculturation.’5 In other words, every element of the liturgical reform that looks unprecedented is contained in his summary addressed to the antepreparatory commission.
The word ‘inculturation’ itself nevertheless became a catch word which could imply many things. It was given a definition by John Paul II in the aftermath of the council on which many liberals could latch to drive their agenda. By 1994 when the fourth instruction on the proper implementation of the liturgical reform was promulgated, there still wasn't a fixed meaning given to this word. African missiologists merely played around with various interpretations of the word. It remained a theological jargon which could be freighted with diverse meanings.
The word ‘adaptation’ came to approximate this jargon. The instruction on the liturgy and inculturation which aimed at offering directive on articles 37-40 of Sacrosanctum Concilium had to bear in mind the African reality. Gaudium et Spes with its Eurocentric bias had not captured the reality of nations endowed with different perspectives of anthropology, like Africa. The techno-optimism of the document deliberately excludes to a great extent the humanity of those who do not enjoy the benefits of scientific progress, a note on which the document opens. Perceiving the modernist optimism of the council, Africans became worried of what was to become of their culture.
Their society was not the industrial society which preoccupied the framers of Gaudium et Spes. Worse still, their culture is not represented in the document precisely because great ignorance on many things African still reigned in the Church. Thus as early as 1974, we see efforts by African scholars in Rome to come up with a sort of ‘black theology’ (Sedos Bulletin/ Documentation Sedos), and this so called ‘theology' is supposed to be an aid to inculturation, the ‘incarnation of the gospel.’6
On the other hand also, the fact that the bishops seem preoccupied with a desire to ‘incarnate’ the gospel shows a climate of decline. After the success of the first missionaries, the new Church had to find relevance in the middle of many changes: independence movements with their socialism, clerical modernism with its own challenges and the dissatisfaction of the faithful with every novelty.
In the midst of this talk of the council, some African bishops had resisted the novelties. The very first native African bishop Joseph Nakabaale Kiwanuka (consecrated by Pius XII in 1939) for example resisted the shortening of the divine office.7 The council never heeded his appeal, with the deplorable result that we have a document on the liturgy which is termed magisterial, but it's fourth chapter makes a logical blunder in summary: that fewer psalms for one canonical hour and elimination of one canonical hour equals more prayer. Fewer psalms (tehilim, Hebrew meaning songs of praise) and longer readings: this is what makes for more prayer according to Sacrosanctum Concilium chapter four.8
Nonetheless, the fear of losing culture as the Church becomes techno-optimistic was justified. It is the response which seems unthinkable. The old piety and liturgy had been a protective frame for the unity of the Church or as a native Bishop in Rwanda-Urundi put it, the Sensus Unitatis Ecclesiae. It was thoroughly in Latin. It also protected the sense of mystery that should accompany a solemn act of worship. The Tridentine liturgy was more theocentric and personal, the new liturgy was supposed to be more communitarian and anthropocentric.
It is this that would be its blow and the death of a project called inculturation that was both too simplistic and cumbersome on a practical level. The instruction on the implementation of article 36 of the liturgy constitution for integrating vernacular in the liturgy (20th March 2001) states: “Only the more commonly spoken languages should be employed in the liturgy, avoiding the introduction of too many languages for liturgical use, which would prove divisive …”9 What was therefore the status of the liturgical rites which didn't meet this requirement? In Africa, there are well over 500 indigenous languages and dialects, 60 alone occurring in a tiny country like Uganda.
Nonetheless for all their innovativeness, the African clergy had to begin from scratch. Whereas ‘prophet’ Kinjikitile Ngwale of Tanganyika was equipped with a mixture of flour and water which the Maji-Maji resistance thought could serve as a magical portion to divert bullets from colonial army officers, the Africans had literally nothing close to a recipe, except one for disaster. Kinjikitile could equally have sommersaulted with laughter against his clients as against the African bishops. It is not the supposedly magical recipe of ‘inculturation’ that will protect the Church against modernism but doctrinal orthodoxy.
Lastly, cultural relativism will not offer a solution in the struggle for relevance after Vatican II. We have been in the experiment long enough. It seems there is a need to return to the drawing board and re-examine the origin of the confusion. Of late, it was feared even by Benedict XVI that Africa will become insulated to other societies as they become more atheistic and irreligious, yet in his document Africae Munus, he claims the continent is a Spiritual lung for humanity. When he speaks in an audience on St. Augustine which forms part of his collection of seventy leading Christian thinkers, he hints again at the Novatians. He doesn't point at the Europeans, no. These advocates of a worldview opposed to Christianity are not the origin of the schism. It is an Africa which becomes increasingly fragmented by primacy of culture in so diverse an ethnic composition, which enters the field of liturgy. Here, the risk is probably high for schism.10
We begin to learn as early as 1974 of a ‘Marian schism’ in Kenya, in an issue of Sedos Bulletin.11 This kind of schism spread in East Africa and found adherents in Uganda. By the time thousands of Christians perished in Kanungu by the deception of a one Kibwetere and his priests Kataribabo and Kasapurari, who had received holy orders from legitimate Church authorities, it is the same bishops who refused to implement indults offered by Paul VI and John Paul II for the Tridentine liturgy to be offered, by which they might have fished many souls out of the fire that consumed them. Instead as the pope was busy welcoming the new millennium, thousands were perishing in flames fanned partly by the confusing changes in both the Church and wider society.
These schismatics wished to restore the ten commandments of God. They claimed an allegiance to Mary but their distress was inseparable from the disconcerting changes of the post-conciliar epoch. Naturally their place of release was a cultic group that shifted their attention by emphasising private revelation and a quasi-independence from Church and wider society. This typically schismatic attitude frequently manifests in the body of believers, including the most recent Uganda Martyrs day celebrations when it was reported that a group of laity were claiming to have witnessed an apparition of the Blessed Virgin Mary.
Clearly, it is the sense of unity that is at stake and in question. It isn't a question of a ‘black theology,’ of ‘incarnation of the gospel’ or vernacular liturgical texts. This unity can only be restored by returning to tradition. Many African prelates have pointed to this direction, but few have the courage to follow it. One reason perhaps is that the Vatican II Church is about damage control, and many clergy have been caught in the habit of crisis management, presiding over decline-to the extent that even worthy suggestions seem hopeless. In any case, history shows that the Church especially in Sub-Saharan Africa flourished quite early after the First Vatican Council (1869-70).12
It is as if the Holy Spirit inspired the Church in this time that the greatest restoration following the ravages of the Risorgimento was not in securing the possessions of the papacy in Rome, but in launching deep into the heartland of Africa. Likewise today, people rejoice that a new pope, Leo XIV will return the lost fortunes of Rome. On the contrary, it is by going back into the interior castle that every Church will discover its faith and need for God, the source of life in fullness. Let us then draw out of the presumably magical circles flaring with inculturation and turn towards the Lord. Let us begin with the liturgy. The renewal starts here.
cf Acta et Documenta Concilio Oecumenico Vaticano II Apparando, Series I (Antepraeparatoria), Vol. II (Concilia et vota episcoporum ac praelatorum), Pars V, p. 487. His expression to the antepreparatory commission was clear: Non ad experimentum, introducantur. Understandably, he was a monk who wished to keep the liturgical tradition intact.
Ibid., p. 152. He submitted: “Opportunum etiam mihi videtur benedictiones Ritualis melius adaptari ad modum vivendi et cogitandi nostri temporis.”
Ibid., pp. 110-111. This bishop was for the condemnation of the errors of false religions instead of emphasis on what they might share with Catholicism. His opinion, viewed today in light of the attitude of contemporary Catholics (false tolerance) which is confused with charity, might look extreme. But if we consider that even the so called “free enterprise system” as an element of liberal economies derogates fake commodities, it is easy to see that on a supernatural level, his approach— that of condemning the errors of false religions is actually the exercise of true charity. He points out statements that would appear in the documents Nostra Aetate and Dignitatis Humanae, for example where it is claimed that in Islam the Blessed Virgin Mary is at least honoured, and that even Jesus Christ is at least regarded as a prophet.
The truth, then, is that the modernism which had its outburst during Vatican II was the result of deterioration under Pius XII. This pope permitted form-history criticism in his encyclical letter Divino Afflante Spiritu whose corollaries the previous popes had condemned (See Pius X, Pascendi Dominici Gregis no. 34; Leo XIII Providentissimus Deus no. 17). These popes knew that a good tree cannot bear bad fruit and condemned even the method itself in kind. Pius XII thought that this method had been adapted suitably, even sidelining the express prohibition of St. Pius X by motu proprio (voluntary grant of a constitution) entitled Praestantia Scripturae in which an excommunication was decreed against those who do not adhere to the standards established by Pascendi, Lamentabili Sane and the judgements of the Pontifical Biblical Commission on the Mosaic authenticity of scripture.
In other words, the question of “inculturation” and obsession with “autonomous cultures” seems to be (if we may excuse the expression), the measure for ensuring that somehow modern man can co-exist with primitive man. One is engrossed with scientific progress, while the other is stuck in his “sort of” primitive cultures.
See; Desmond Sullivan, “A Church of the Grassroots,” in Documentation Sedos (Rome 17 May, 1974), n. 17. Liberation Theology: Many African settings became hubs of experimentation, and currents of thought borrowed from the independence movements, cf. Cardinal Rugambwa, “The Church is always Revolutionary” (interview with Costa Kumalija), Ibid., pp. 361-365. In the same source (p. 380), a resolution is publicized from a journal: “With regard to the maturation of already evangelized peoples, it was repeatedly stressed that a great deal of theological thinking was required (often in terms of a Black Theology which was identified as a Theology of Liberation) in order that the gospel may be incarnated in Africa.” A new crop of theologians was then in the offing, and this validates in a way the many calls by bishops of Africa for the condemnation of modernism (John Cesana of Gulu), Marxism and communism (e.g Bernadine Gantin and Sisto Mazzoldi, et.c).
Acta Synodalia Sacrosancti Concili Vaticani Secundi, Vol. 1 (Periodus Prima), Pars II (Congregationes Generales X-XVIII), pp. 536-537. He stated: “Some wish to shorten the Divine Office by removing some canonical hours, as though the length of the Divine Office were some hindrance to pastoral work, while priests, burdened with the heavy labours of pastoral duties, would lack time to recite the Office in its entirety. However, we know very well that the pastoral task is fulfilled by prayer and priestly action, of which prayer holds primacy. For in it God Himself is present and works, from whom all the supernatural power of the pastoral ministry flows. Therefore, priests must be reminded again and again to prefer prayer to action.”
NB: The constitution states (Sacrosanctum Concilium no. 86): “Priests who are engaged in the sacred pastoral ministry will offer the praises of the hours with greater fervor the more vividly they realize that they must heed St. Paul's exhortation: "Pray without ceasing" (1 Thess. 5:11). For the work in which they labor will effect nothing and bring forth no fruit except by the power of the Lord who said: "Without me you can do nothing" (John 15: 5). That is why the apostles, instituting deacons, said: "We will devote ourselves to prayer and to the ministry of the word" (Acts 6:4).” Interestingly, these statements from scripture were part of Joseph Nakabaale Kiwanuka’s submission. But then, the council proceeds from this paragraph to state that “The hour known as Matins, although it should retain the character of nocturnal praise when celebrated in choir, shall be adapted so that it may be recited at any hour of the day; it shall be made up of fewer psalms and longer readings,” [no. 89(c)], and “The hour of Prime is to be suppressed” [89(d)]. These sorts of reforms were to be made “In order that the divine office may be better and more perfectly prayed in existing circumstances, whether by priests or by other members of the Church” [Paragraph no. 81]. Note: The incoherence of this entire chapter is surely a textbook case of shoddy work. There are two paragraphs numbered 81 in the English translation online, such that after no. 86, the next paragraph is numbered 81 instead of 87. In any case, the document is a textbook case of recycling text. The amendment suggested by the first native African bishop South of the Sahara was passed over, for such faulty logic to manifest.
The truth of the matter is that when the liturgy is in Latin, there is some assurance that (as it is a matter of discipline in which he is competent) the pope can exercise more regulatory functions. Multiplicity of liturgical books promotes likelihood of abuses cropping in which nobody might be competent to regulate except perhaps the local bishop if he exercises the prudence.
This danger may be more clearly illustrated in this fact: that “inculturation” has many faces, and clearly the “schism” exists in the destruction of the sensus unitatis ecclesiae. I will not go into details here, but anyone who knows the varied African languages even within the same ethnic group knows that one word in a given language can ring with a different meaning in another.
Cited supra.
For a concrete testimony, one need only read In Africam of Benedict XV (1920). This might be coupled with a deep study of the submissions of the future council fathers. On the whole, Catholicism grew by leaps and bounds before Vatican II in Africa. It is a superficial generalization to call it a success of this council. If anything, African Catholicism especially South of the Sahara is a Vatican I (not II) success story, albeit with challenges.