Ross Douthat: belief

Transcript context

…Your forthcoming book is an estimate that perhaps by 2040 there will be 460 million African Catholics, twice as many as in Europe. Arguably they go to mass much more often. So if you imagine a future Catholicism where the letter of James is more central to the Bible, there’s more exorcism, more fasting, holy water is more important, there’s a more magical view of the Eucharist, arguably a kind of supernaturalism is more primary, would your reaction just be, “Well, my loyalty is to the church, so I’m just going to go with that flow,” or do you feel there’s some more Eurocentric view of Catholicism that’s being lost in a way we would want to fight for? Both. I would think that the future of an African Catholicism, of a sort of Africanized Catholicism, is better than many, many futures that I can imagine, but I would still be sorrowful if particularly European distinctives within the church are lost in that transformation. I think if I were playing the optimist, I would say that there is a Euro-African future for the church where African forces, African migration, African ideas, African leaders help renew and enrich and return European Catholics to their faith. And you can find small, strange examples of this. Like Robert Sarah, who is this Guinean cardinal who is seen as a partial antagonist to Pope Francis in certain intra-Catholic debates. He went to the Vendée in France for the anniversary of the Vendée and gave a speech there hailing the resistance of Catholics to the revolutionary regime in France in the 18th century, which is kind of this extraordinary moment, not anything you would have imagined 150 years or 200 years ago. And a kind of moment that, yeah, lets you briefly imagine that kind of — that there could be a Catholicism that revived certain European elements in the process of becoming more African. But that’s a very, from a Catholic perspective, optimistic view, and the likelihood is that things will be more chaotic and messier and so on. But ultimately my first loyalty is or tries to be to the church rather than to European culture, so I would certainly take an African Catholicism over the museum that we have in Europe today. When you see how much behavior Islam or some forms of Islam motivate, do you envy it? Do you think, “Well, gee, what is it that they have that we don’t? What do we need to learn from them?” What’s your gut emotional reaction?…

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