Mansfield Fox

Law student. Yankees fan. Massive fraggle. Just living the American dream.

Sunday, November 21, 2004

The "Rest" Will Save the West, Vatican Hopes

Tim Schnabel points me to this article, on the Vatican's plan to use priests from Africa to re-evangelize the West.

I've already partially experienced this trend, though with priests from South Asia - in both Amherst and my grandmother's town in Rhode Island, the assistant pastors are very orthodox missionary priests from India. It's an interesting phenomenon; one of the weird (and unanticipated) consequences of colonialism - I've got to imagine that Arthur Rhodes and his ilk didn't think that when they were spreading the various European languages and Christianity throughout Africa and Asia they were creating a kind of backup Europe that could come on-line if the original every broke down for some reason. But then, thus has it ever been: I suspect St. Paul wouldn't've guessed that within 1000 years Syrian and Palestinian Christianity would be all but gone, and the new Christian heartland would be among the descendants of the German and Celtic barbarians.

Christianity has not always been a primarily European religion; indeed, it wasn't even originally European at all. There's no reason to anticipate, I suspect, that it will be a primarily European religion in the future. Perhaps my descendants will live in a world where people complain of the long line of central African popes, and are shocked to see an Italian chosen to sit on the throne of Peter.