I just stumbled upon this column about the internals of the Catholic Church and found it of considerable general interest.
Tucson, Arizona Sunday, 5 January 2003
A Christian revolution is rising in the Third World
By Philip Jenkins
Ever since the sexual-abuse crisis erupted in the U.S. Roman Catholic Church, commentators have regularly compared the problems faced by the church to those it faced in Europe on the eve of the Protestant Reformation.
Those problems included sexual laxity and financial malfeasance among the clergy.
The trouble with reform, 500 years ago or today, is that people disagree - sometimes violently - on the direction it should take.
We are at a moment as epochal as the Reformation itself - a Reformation moment not only for Catholics but for the entire Christian world.
Christianity as a whole is both growing and mutating in ways that observers in the West tend not to see.
If we look beyond the liberal West, we see that another Christian revolution, quite different from the one being called for in affluent American suburbs and upscale urban parishes, is in progress.
Worldwide, Christianity is actually moving toward supernaturalism and neo-orthodoxy.
The changes that Catholic and other reformers today are trying to inspire in North America and Europe run utterly contrary to the dominant cultural movements in the rest of the Christian world, which look very much like the Counter-Reformation.
But this century is unlike the 16th in that we are not facing a roughly equal division of Christendom between two competing groups.
Rather, Christians are facing a shrinking population in the liberal West. During the past half-century, the critical centers of the Christian world have moved decisively to Africa, to Latin America and to Asia. The balance will never shift back.
The growth in Africa has been relentless. In 1900, Africa had just 10 million Christians out of a continental population of 107 million - about 9 percent.
Today, the Christian total stands at 360 million out of 784 million, or 46 percent. And that percentage is likely to continue rising, because Christian African countries have some of the world's most dramatic rates of population growth.
Meanwhile, the advanced industrial countries are experiencing a dramatic birth dearth.
Within the next 25 years, the population of the world's Christians is expected to grow to 2.6 billion (making Christianity by far the world's largest faith).
By 2025, 50 percent of the Christian population will be in Africa and Latin America, and an additional 17 percent will be in Asia. Those proportions will grow steadily.
European and Euro-American Catholics will within a few decades be a smaller and smaller fragment of a worldwide church.
Now, the annual baptism total for the Philippines is higher than the totals for Italy, France, Spain and Poland combined.
The number of Filipino Catholics could grow to 90 million by 2025 and perhaps to 130 million by 2050.
The denominations that are triumphing across the global South - radical Protestant sects, either evangelical or Pentecostal, and Roman Catholicism of an orthodox kind - are stalwartly traditional or even reactionary by the standards of the economically advanced nations.
The Catholic faith that is rising rapidly in Africa and Asia looks very much like a pre-Vatican II faith, being more traditional in its respect for the power of bishops and priests and in its preference for older devotions.
Meanwhile, a full-scale Reformation is taking place among Pentecostal Christians.
Pentecostal believers reject tradition and hierarchy, but they also rely on direct spiritual revelation to supplement or replace biblical authority.
And it is Pentecostals who stand in the vanguard of the Southern Counter-Reformation.
Though Pentecostalism emerged as a movement only at the start of the 20th century, chiefly in North America, Pentecostals today are at least 400 million strong worldwide and heavily concentrated in the global South.
By 2040 or so, there could be as many as 1 billion, at which point Pentecostal Christians alone will far outnumber the world's Buddhists and will enjoy rough numerical parity with the world's Hindus.
The changing demographic balance between North and South helps to explain the current shape of world Catholicism.
Last year, Pope John Paul II elevated 44 new cardinals, of whom 11 were Latin American, two Indian and three African.
The next time a papal election takes place, 57 of the 135 cardinals eligible to vote will be from Southern nations. Early this century they will constitute a majority.
Neatly illustrating the cultural gulf that separates Northern and Southern churches is an incident involving Moses Tay, the Anglican archbishop of Southeast Asia, whose see is based in Singapore.
In the early 1990s, Tay traveled to Vancouver, British Columbia, where he encountered the totem poles that are a local tourist attraction.
To him, they were idols possessed by evil spirits, and he concluded that they required handling by prayer and exorcism.
This horrified the local Anglican Church, which was committed to building good relationships with local Native American communities and which regarded exorcism as absurd superstition.
The Canadians, like other good liberal Christians throughout the North, were long past dismissing alien religions as diabolically inspired. On that occasion, Tay personified the global Christian confrontation.
On moral issues, too, Southern churches are far out of step with liberal Northern churches. African and Latin American churches tend to be very conservative on such issues as homosexuality and abortion.
For 30 years, Northern liberals have dreamed of a Third Vatican Council to complete the revolution launched by Pope John XXIII - one that would usher in a new age of ecclesiastical democracy and lay empowerment.
It would be a bitter irony for the liberals if the council were convened but turned out to be a conservative, Southern-dominated affair that imposed moral and theological litmus tests intolerable to North Americans and Europeans.
If a future Southern pope struggled to impose a new vision of orthodoxy on America's Catholic bishops, universities and seminaries, the result could be an actual rather than a de facto schism.
In the Anglican Communion, the most ferocious battle to date occurred at the Lambeth World Conference in 1998, which adopted, over the objections of the liberal bishops, a forthright traditional statement proclaiming the impossibility of reconciling homosexual conduct with Christian ministry.
The predominance of Southerners at future events of this kind will only increase.
Nigeria already has more practicing Anglicans than any other country, far more than Britain itself.
The Lambeth debate also initiated a series of events that Catholic reformers should study carefully.
Since 2000, some conservative American Episcopalians have traveled to Moses Tay's cathedral in Singapore, where they were consecrated as bishops by Asian and African Anglican prelates, including the Rwandan Archbishop Emmanuel Kolini.
These bishops have become missionary bishops, charged with ministering to conservative congregations in the United States, where they support a dissident "virtual province" within
the church.
They and their conservative colleagues are now part of the Anglican Mission in America, which is intended officially to "lead the Episcopal Church back to its biblical foundations."
By any reasonable assessment of numbers, the most significant transformation of Christianity in the world today is not the liberal Reformation that is so much desired in the North. It is the Counter-Reformation coming from the global South.
And it's very likely that in a
decade or two neither component of global Christianity will recognize its counterpart as fully or authentically Christian.
* Philip Jenkins teaches history and religious studies at Pennsylvania State University, 407 Weaver Building, University Park, PA 16802. This commentary was excerpted from the October 2002 Atlantic Monthly and appeared in longer form in The Free Lance-Star of Fredericksburg, Va. (http://fredericksburg.com). Jenkins' most recent book is "The Next Christendom" (Oxford University
Press, 2002). |
