A week in Kenya challenges Western view of the Church

As a broad generalisation, it’s probably accurate to say that on-the-ground experience of the developing world often issues a fairly stiff challenge to the way Americans think about things, including the Catholic Church.

Think Catholicism is in decline? Visit much of Africa and parts of Asia, where the biggest headache is keeping pace with breakaway growth. Think Christians can’t be at risk in places where they’re a majority? Consider Latin America, where Mexico and Colombia routinely rank as the most dangerous spots on earth to be a Catholic priest.

Roman Catholicism today is a far-flung global religion with 1.3 billion followers, more than two-thirds of whom live outside the West. In the 21st Century, considering other perspectives in thinking about the Church isn’t just a courtesy, it’s a survival strategy.

Earlier this year, I made that point after visiting Lebanon. The same truth was reinforced this week as my Crux colleague Inés San Martín and I were in Kenya, visiting Mombasa, the country’s second city on the gorgeous Indian Ocean coast, and Lodwar, an impoverished and scorching hot town of 50,000 in the largely desert north and the hub for the pastoralist and still largely isolated Turkana people.

Poverty

It was a dazzling, exhausting, and revealing experience, and far too multi-layered for a quick synthesis. Nevertheless, here are three initial take-aways.

Suppose I told you I know a Kenyan prelate who’s devoted his life to serving the most impoverished area in a country known for chronic poverty, who cares deeply about the environment and the impact of climate change on matters such as access to safe drinking water, and who’s risked his life to act as a peacemaker between competing tribal groups in massive refugee camps.

Many Americans probably would say, “Sounds like a real liberal.”

Now suppose I said I’d met a Kenyan prelate who belongs to Opus Dei, who puts a strong emphasis on seriousness about priestly life, who thinks the spiritual basics and bringing people to the Faith are vitally important, and who has little interest in what’s bubbling on the theological avant-garde. The reaction probably would be: “That’s a classic conservative.”

All of the above is true of Bishop Dominic Kimengich of Lodwar, and he’s hardly alone. He laughed gently when I asked him if he thinks of himself as “liberal” or “conservative,” looking at me and eventually saying: “Here, those categories just don’t apply.”

Or, take Archbishop Martin Kivuva Musonde of Mombasa.

One minute, Kivuva will brag about a recent film produced by the archdiocese defending traditional marriage, and the next he’ll light up discussing the latest efforts to promote inter-religious harmony and peace. That’s a keenly progressive cause in Mombasa, a religiously mixed city in which Catholics, Muslims, Pentecostals and Evangelicals, followers of traditional religions, and Hindus all have significant footprints, and all today are under the shadow of cross-border threats from the Al-Shabaab terrorist group in neighboring Somalia.

In Kivuva’s eyes, there’s nothing predestined about religious conflict. The real battle lines, he says, don’t run between Muslims and Christians, but between moderates and radicals – and, Kivuva warned, there are radical instincts in all traditions.

By reputation, Africa is often considered a fairly male-dominated environment, and so is the Church here. Yet our experience this week suggests that much of the future of African Catholicism depends on its women.

In Mombasa, we visited the Holy Family Centre at St Martin’s Catholic Church, which abuts the largest slum in the city.

Breaks

Though the parish doesn’t currently have a school, it’s got a centre serving children outside school hours and during breaks, and it sees the full gamut of challenges – alcohol and drug addiction, victims of human trafficking and prostitution, kids abandoned or marginalised because they’re HIV-positive, and just basic poverty.

The centre is run by a member of the Daughters of Divine Love, an order that’s been serving in the parish since 2004, named Sr Pauline Andrew.

When we arrived on Tuesday, she’d organised a pumped-up reception featuring traditional songs, dances and dress.

The centre draws children from several of the tribes that make up the city’s complex ethnic patchwork, making it a sort of laboratory experiment in co-existence.

Sister Pauline has bigger plans, hoping to see the centre grow into a full-blown primary school served by eight members of her order, who would live in a nearby convent she’s also working on getting built.

At the moment, she and another nun commute 14km every day back and forth to work at the parish, and Sr Pauline said that won’t work when the school is up and running.

Standing with Sr Pauline where the second floor of the new convent is supposed to go as soon as she has the money, I asked why she’s chosen to do such bone-crushing, emotionally draining work.

She looks up from the architect’s plans as if the question were impertinent, says simply “this is where God wants me,” and launches back into a detailed explanation of her plans to model small-scale, sustainable urban agriculture by using land at the school and convent to grow crops.

Formation

Meanwhile in Lodwar, I visited the Bethany Guest House and an adjacent formation centre for aspiring nuns, members of the Sisters of the Good Shepherd of the Immaculate Conception, an order founded under Kimengich.

There, I met Sr Giovanna, who runs the formation centre, and Sr Magdalene, who heads the guest house. They spoke passionately about forming the next generation of women religious to go out and evangelise, teach and serve.

They also described their aim to teach these young girls trade skills for self-reliance, so they can pass them on to others.

Sr Magdalene walked us through the formation centre, explaining what’s been done already and what will need to be done in a hurry. Here too, growth is one main challenge – they’ve got five young women in formation now, with another eight expected to arrive next year.

Sr Magdalene, too, projected a calm determination when asked about all the different ways such an undertaking could go off the rails.

“This is what the Church needs from me,” she said of seeing the effort through – as if the church needing something, and her then delivering it, is axiomatic.

Say what you want about these women and their dreams, but one thing is for sure: terms such as “subservient,” “uncritical” and “second-class citizen” simply don’t apply.

Several international Catholic organisations are involved in supporting the work of the Church in Mombasa and Lodwar, including Miseror in Germany, Missio Aachen, the Pontifical Missions Society, and others. Our trip, however, was sponsored by Aid to the Church in Need, a Papal foundation devoted to supporting the persecuted and suffering church around the world, and so it’s their footprint here that’s clearest to me.

John L. Allen Jr is Editor of CruxNow.com