The contribution of African Christians to the church

I am indebted to my friends of our diocese’s Black Catholic Ministry Commission for an informative fact sheet about the contribution of African Christians over the course of centuries. I would like to share it since it deserves wider circulation.
It may come as a surprise to Caucasians of European descent like me that the church did not originate in Europe but in Asia’s south-western corner. Israel borders on Africa’s Egypt, where the Acts of the Apostles (8, 26-40) tells us the deacon Philip baptized an unnamed court official of Queen Candace of Nubia, referred to by Luke as the Ethiopian eunuch. This new convert to Christ represents a drastic religious change for the originally all-Jewish church, which did the unthinkable thing of welcoming in a gentile. The earliest Christians had no intention of founding a new religion and in fact would have thought this treasonous. They were Jews following the Torah, the first five books of our Bible, which forbid consorting with gentiles. Some Christians thought others to be radical for advocating this. St. Paul, a contemporary of Jesus, fought uphill against the original college of bishops to make us catholic, that is, universal and all-inclusive, not restricted only to Jews or whites. Score one for Africa.
Long before white nations became Christian, with Armenia being the first, Africa heard and accepted the Good News. In antiquity the continent produced three popes: St. Victor (189-99), St. Melchiades (311-314) and St. Gelasius (492-96). It also produced great mystics and martyrs like Sts. Cyprian, Zeno, Anthony of Egypt, Moses the Black, Pachomius, Maurice, Athanasius, Pisentius, Mary of Egypt, Cyril of Alexandria, Monica of Hippo and her son Augustine, Perpetua and Felicity, and Thecla. Augustine proved to be one of the greatest minds of all church history, influencing the church for 1,600 years until the present.
A year before Columbus set sail west, King Nzinga-a-Nkuwu Mbemba (Alfonso the Good) and his Kongo subjects made their profession of faith with the help of Portuguese missionaries. In 1517, Pope Leo X ordained as titular bishop of Utica the first native bishop of West Africa, Bishop Henrique, the son of the king. By this time, the genocidal practice of African slavery was well in place throughout Europe and the Americas.
In the lands where the slave trade flourished, French and Spanish missionaries were allowed by the colonizers to minister to enslaved and free Africans as long as they did not teach them to read. Communities of Africans arose in Mobile, Ala., in New Orleans, and in St. Augustine, Fla. Inhabitants of these communities and other Catholic blacks venerated St. Martin dePorres, a Peruvian of African descent who is the only black saint of the western hemisphere to date. Aware of our catholicity, we have named parishes of all colors after him and the other African luminaries.
This catholicity after which we name ourselves has recently been put to the test locally as the shortage of priests and the financial insolvency of a third of the diocese’s parishes made the merging of 124 parishes into 70 mathematically unavoidable. If there are not enough priests – and the average age of Camden priests is about 66, with one being ordained for every 10 that die, retire or resign – the bishop has no choice but to stretch the personnel drumhead tighter. If parishes must close because of too few members adequately contributing, inevitable mergers relocate worshippers so that people of different colors and cultures find themselves worshipping side by side, sometimes at a new location. This really unsettles some people. Catholics are deeply grateful to our burgeoning number of international priests who come to our diocese for five or 10 or more years on loan from, ironically, Africa, as well as from Europe, Asia and Latin America.
I think our grandchildren in a hundred years will look back on this time and say that this merging of parishes did more for improving race relations than anything else in our time. It is undeniable that we have yet to arrive at the place of truly accepting people of color as equal. So God sees to it that we assemble together, perhaps in a different parish with a new name, and offer each other the sign of peace, really meaning it. That will hear Catholics together praying the word “Our” Father as though we regarded people of other races as sister and brother.
Let us repeal the Second Amendment ASAP.