ROME—As of this writing, Pope Francis is undertaking the longest and most demanding voyage of his papacy, a twelve-day outing to what’s widely being described in most media accounts, and even some Catholic commentary, as the peripheries of the world: Indonesia, East Timor, Papua New Guinea, and Singapore.
To be honest, however, the idea that these venues are “peripheries” is mostly a Western conceit, and, from the point of view of the Catholic Church, a terribly superannuated one. In fact, given the realities of Catholic demography, it would be more accurate to characterize this as a voyage from the peripheries toward what is, increasingly, the beating heart of the faith.
A small dose of math makes the point: There are roughly 1.3 billion Roman Catholics in the world today, more than two-thirds of whom—over 850 million people—live outside the traditional confines of Western civilization in Europe and North America, plus Australia and New Zealand.
That non-Western share of the Catholic population will rise to three quarters by the middle of this century. By 2050, seven of the ten largest Catholic countries in the world will lie outside the West, with only the United States, Italy, and France making the cut.
Granted, none of the four nations Pope Francis is visiting on this trip is really a Catholic powerhouse. Their combined Catholic populations are twelve million, which is roughly the Catholic population of Madagascar all by itself.
Nevertheless, their location means they are where the faith is not only growing today, but is at its most dynamic and vital. Another way of putting the point is that, in a sense, this papal trip is also a journey from the Church’s past to its future, from what was once the cradle of Christendom to its new home in the “two-thirds world.”
This mammoth demographic transition has implications across the board, including for the enterprise of evangelization. Four such consequences are especially worthy of note.
A key part of any evangelical strategy is understanding your audience, your resources, and your challenges . . .
First of all, it’s likely that the nature of Catholic evangelization will evolve in tandem not only with the target audiences, but with the evangelists themselves. As a greater share of evangelists come from the developing world, it’s predictable that they will bring an approach less focused on converting secular skeptics—what Schleiermacher once called the “cultured despisers” of religion—and more on addressing the interests and concerns of those who take the supernatural for granted.
Attitudes towards the supernatural are perhaps the fundamental dividing line between the religious climates of the global North and South. In the South, the spiritual realm is tangible, palpable, and constantly nearby—in some ways, more real than the physical world. Illness, for instance, is as likely to be attributed to evil spirits as to physical causes and this-worldly misfortune seen in light of personal sin instead of bad luck.
According to data from the Pew Research Center, while just 29% of Americans report that they have witnessed divine healings, 56% of Guatemalans, 71% of Kenyans, 62% of Nigerians, and 44% of Indians claim to have done so. Just 11% of Americans claim to have experienced or witnessed exorcisms, but 34% of Brazilians, 38% of Guatemalans, 61% of Kenyans, 57% of Nigerians, and 28% of Filipinos say they have had these experiences.
As a result, forms of evangelism in the future which don’t have a robust supernatural component—which don’t address evil spirits, for instance, or miracles and healings, or other fruits of the Spirit—increasingly will be seen as tone-deaf and ignoring the perceived needs of the people the Church is trying to reach.
To coin a phrase, Catholic evangelism will have to become less postmodern and more Pentecostal.
Second, Catholic evangelization will become less speculative and more Biblical, grounded more in the argot and worldview of Scripture than in the intellectual categories of contemporary Western culture.
The mindset of the non-Western world tends to be earthy, narrative, focused on the tangible presence of the divine, and rooted in the experience of poverty rather than affluence. As Peruvian Protestant writer Samuel Escobar puts it, “Southern Christianity reflects Biblical patterns of thought. Its way of reading scripture doesn’t make much room for higher criticism, or a modern approach that takes away the supernatural elements and rationalizes everything.”
Fr. Peter Schineller, an American Jesuit who has lived and worked in Nigeria, once put it this way in a lecture at the Weston School of Theology in Cambridge, Massachusetts: “The world of Africa is much closer to the world of the Bible than is Cambridge. African scholars, close to the soil, closer to the world of sacrifice, dreams, spirits, angels, can help us to understand what the text of the Hebrew Bible, and the New Testament, actually says.”
Third, evangelists will be addressing Catholic communities whose problems are more those of growth than decline.
This reality is especially clear when we look at Africa, where the Catholic population exploded during the twentieth century from 1.9 million to more than 130 million—a staggering growth rate of 6,708 percent. Perhaps as much as two-thirds of that expansion can be attributed to general population growth, but about a third is due to missionary success.
Today, Catholic seminaries across the continent often are bursting at the seams, parishes are overcrowded, and the challenges of assimilating and catechizing such a large cohort of new believers represents the primary pastoral task.
Asia too, where the pope is currently traveling, saw impressive Catholic growth. Catholicism started the century as 1.2% of the Asian population, according to World Christian Database, and ended the century at 3%, meaning that the Church more than doubled its “market share.”
Catholic evangelism will have to become less postmodern and more Pentecostal.
What all this means is that the global story of Catholicism today is growth, not decline. That’s generally not the impression one picks up from casual conversation or TV sound-bites in Europe or the United States, where talk of decline is the more usual fare. Evangelization will have to catch up to this truth, perhaps focusing less on refuting naysayers and more on reinforcing the already convinced.
Finally, Catholic evangelization in the twenty-first century may have to accept a more explicitly political dimension than is often perceived as acceptable in the West, where concepts of church/state separation and an aversion to what’s seen as “interference” by churches in political affairs are especially strong.
In non-Western nations, religious bodies are sometimes the only meaningful expressions of civil society—the only zones of life where protest can take shape and where concern for the common good can be articulated. One well-known example is the pivotal contribution of Catholic leaders in the Philippines to the fall of the Marcos regime, broadly known as the “People’s Power” movement.
A lesser-known story also illustrates the point, from the small African nation of Malawi.
In the early 1990s, Malawi was still under the eccentric rule of its dictator-for-life, a British and U.S.-educated strongman named Hastings Kamuzu Banda, who had governed the country since independence from the United Kingdom in 1964. Though he’s largely forgotten today, Banda was the quintessential African dictator of his era. His unofficial motto was, “My word is the law.” In March 1992, the seven bishops of Malawi issued a dramatic pastoral letter titled “Living Our Faith,” instructing that it be read aloud in all 130 parishes. They denounced the disparity between rich and poor, as well as human rights abuses by Banda’s political party—the only one allowed—and the government. They called for an end to injustice, corruption, and nepotism and demanded free expression and political opposition.
On the Sunday the letter was read out, attendance at Masses swelled. People wept, shouted gratitude, and danced in the aisles. In one of the country’s largest cities, Blantyre, poor squatters in illegal shantytowns stood up when security forces tried to run them out. Student protests broke out on university campuses. Opposition figures began returning. As news of the uprising circulated internationally, pressure grew for Western powers to take a stand. In 1994, donors froze all foreign aid to Malawi, forcing Banda to call free elections. In effect, his regime was over.
That’s the sort of stand Catholics across the developing world expect their leaders to take, and forms of evangelization shorn of political relevance often will fall on deaf ears.
Does all of this augur a complete reboot of Catholic evangelization? Not at all—in fact, most evangelists active today, even in the Western world, blend all four of these elements in different ways and different forms into their preaching and teaching, so it’s more a question of emphasis and presentation.
On the other hand, as Benjamin Franklin famously put it, “If you fail to plan, you are planning to fail.” A key part of any evangelical strategy is understanding your audience, your resources, and your challenges—and in the Catholicism of both the present and the future, none of those factors will be shaped primarily in what, once upon a time, was considered the center, but today more and more represents the margins.