African Catholic by Elizabeth A. Foster

Author:Elizabeth A. Foster
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Harvard University Press

African priests who publicly examined and defended Catholicism in the postwar period were often simultaneously critical and celebratory of the church. These men, whose clerical commitments made them perhaps even more personally invested in their faith than passionate laymen such as Alioune Diop or Joseph Ki-Zerbo, were eager to define Catholicism in a way that they could square with their experience as black men, though it was not always easy for them to do so. In a presentation on “Theology and African culture” at Alioune Diop’s Second Congress of Black Writers and Artists in Rome in 1959, Father Robert Sastre, who served for a time as a chaplain for colonial students in Paris and editor of Tam-Tam alongside Father Joseph Michel and then later became bishop of Lokossa, Benin, explained this dilemma.120 Acknowledging the profound tensions between his priestly vocation and his forays as a black intellectual, Sastre told his audience, “It is veritably impossible to know how to reconcile the demands of complete and submissive faith with the lucidity of an intellectual who is probing the vicissitudes of the history of his race, to speak in front of men who do not share my faith of things that cannot be fully grasped without faith, and to expose to the faithful cracks in the theological edifice that they consider seamless and solid, and definitively constructed.” Yet, he continued, “I must face the challenge in the name of my faith and in the name of my negritude, as I am certain that both of them cannot help but grow in stature from the confrontation that I will engage in before you, and which constitutes the heart of my life as an African priest.”121 Sastre chose to see the potential dissonance between Catholicism and negritude as an opportunity for growth and discovery, rather than an impasse that undermined his faith.

Raymond-Marie Tchidimbo, ridiculed by some Spiritan superiors for his intellectual aspirations, also publicly addressed the challenges of being African in the church in the 1950s and 1960s. He relied heavily on Emmanuel Mounier’s personalism and cited the Frenchman frequently in his work, which included the article for Diop’s 1953 student issue of Présence africaine entitled “The African Student Confronts Latin Culture” as well as a 1963 volume of reflections on Catholicism, L’homme noir dans l’Église, that appeared with Présence africaine.122 Like Alioune Diop and other Catholic African activists, Tchidimbo wanted to speak for a church that welcomed all. “The Catholic Church is not the creation nor the property of the West,” he wrote, “it is the property of all good souls who wish to watch it, know it, and love it.”123 Tchidimbo called on the church to be true to its own universal values and diversify its ranks for its own sake.124 He did not shy away from critiquing missionary errors, of which he had bitter firsthand experience: their tendency to subordinate African clergy, their refusal to recognize the transient nature of their task, their failure to implement Vatican directives.125 Yet he also

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