Book Review: Is African Catholicism a Vatican II Success Story?

As a student of history, there have been many occasions where something I assumed was historical fact turned out to be mere narrative with no grounding in reality. For example, like many Americans, I grew up believing that the Boston Tea Party happened because the colonists were angry about a British tax on tea. I later discovered that the reality was quite different; the Boston Tea Party occurred in protest over the British government's plan to subsidize the operations of the East India Tea Company and grant it a monopoly in the colonies, the purpose being to make British tea cheaper than the tea the Boston merchant class were smuggling up from the Indies. The Tea Party was thus not a protest against expensive tea, but an act of protectionism against cheap tea. The story I'd grew up with about protesting a British tea tax was just a popular narrative—and a completely backwards one at that.

History is full of such narratives, and as I've grown I've gotten better at detecting them. Narratives are repeated but never demonstrated. They are invoked as evidence in other discussions, but are seldom the subject of their own discussion.  Narratives are lazy, affording one the ease of certainty without having to work for it (truth, on the other hand, requires patience, diligence, and the careful sorting of detail). Narratives are often nested within one another like Russian matryoshka dolls, lesser narratives forming the building blocks of bigger narratives, the whole thing rising into one monumental edifice of fabrication, where constituent narratives mutually reinforce one another to keep the entire structure together.

Perhaps no event in Catholic history has generated narratives on par with the Second Vatican Council. From "the new lectionary has more Scripture" to "Eucharistic Prayer 2 is patristic," decades of spin has been woven to justify the conciliar reforms while handily explaining away the corresponding demographic freefall. One such prevalent narrative has been, "Even though the Church in the West is in trouble, the conciliar reforms have been successful in Africa. Catholicism in Africa is thriving!" I'd been told this from the day I entered the Church; I even repeated it myself for years, until my guardian angel slapped me on the cheek and I realized that there was zero evidence for what I was asserting.

I was therefore thrilled to learn about Os Justi's new book, Is African Catholicism a "Vatican II Success Story?" This concise little book does an excellent job casting doubt on this narrative with appeals to history, liturgy, and some common-sense investigative reporting.

The book is a collection of essays from four authors: Peter Kwasniewski, Claudio Salvucci, an anonymous African seminarian, and the late George Neumayr. To my knowledge, It was Neumayr's articles on this subject in the American Spectator that first brought this issue to the fore of mainstream discussion. Neumayr had long questioned the African narrative and had gone to the Ivory Coast to investigate the state of African Catholicism for himself in one of Africa's most Catholicized regions. Only a few of his essays were published before Neumayr sadly took ill and died there in early 2023. The book opens with a reprint of Neumayr's essays, which are an excellent introduction to the question of African Catholicism. With superb observation and matching wit, Neumayr illustrates how Catholicism is anything but flourisihing in the Ivory Coast.

The longest essay in the book comes from an anonymous African seminarian who speaks at length about the problems of inculturation in an African context. This was a wonderfully informative essay that highlights the failures of inculturation. One of the most interesting discussions in the book came from this essay, in which the author rejects the idea that liturgy in indigenous languages will somehow preserve those tongues:

Latin has never been a threat to the Igbo language, but English is. And this is not because English is taught in school or is sometimes used in church, but principally because Igbo is no longer spoken in many Igbo homes, no longer the mother tongue; making it the liturgical language does not help. The English language may indeed threaten the identity of the Igbo people, but post-Christian Western values, torn as it were from God and from the natural law, pose a mortal and infernal danger. A largely sentimental revitalization of Igbo customs and its incorporation into the liturgy stand little chance of stemming the surging and sophisticated onslaught of the decadent West. (pg. 67)

I found the two essays by Claudio Salvucci on the Catholic Kingdom of Congo fascinating. Salvucci discusses how attempts to inculturate some fabricated edenic "African heritage" end up ignoring the actual history of African Catholicism, thereby effacing the very heritage we claim to respect. The book ends with two essays by Peter Kwasniewski on the alleged Catholic demographic "boom" in mission lands, as well as a discussion on how the traditional Roman rite is the surest means of promoting authentic racial integration within the Church.  

Overall I enjoyed this book very much. It's not often that I read a book in one or two sittings, but Is Africa a Vatican II Success Story? was so engaging that I did just that. I hope this work will open the door to further studies of the Church in Africa; I'd personally like to see future work in this area with a  hard focus on demographics. 

Mark Twain once said, "The trouble with the world is not that people know too little; it's that they know so many things that just aren't so." This book does an admirable job answering those who "know so many things that just aren't so" about Africa. I highly recommend the Is Africa a Vatican II Success Story? by Os Justi Press. You can get a copy directly from Os Justi or on Amazon.