As believer numbers dwindle in many industrialised countries, Africa has picked up the slack. In 1980, only 7 per cent of the world’s Catholics were African.
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Pope Francis’ first Africa trip will highlight the problems of building dialogue between Christianity and Islam as both religions grow fast on the continent, threatening to widen an already volatile fault line there between them.
“The goal of the caravan is to move as a group and pray together along the way with people of other faiths, the objectives are that each one of us prays for peace, chooses to embrace peace and to share that peace with others along the way”, said Archbishop Kivuva.
“But its lay structures are still too weak and the clergy has difficulty keeping up with the changes African society is going through”.
Widespread human rights abuses committed by Seleka led to the formation of a Christian militia known as the anti-Balaka, who have targeted Muslims and sent tens of thousands fleeing to neighboring countries. Being gay is not a sin but homosexual acts are, according to the Catholic church.
(Nairobi) – Pope Francis is due to start his first trip to Africa on November 25, 2015, with visits to Kenya, Uganda and the Central African Republic.
US President Barack Obama, whose father was Kenyan, likened discrimination against gays to racism, speaking during a visit to Kenya, where about a third of the population is Catholic.
Regardless of the challenges, Africa is a place of guarantee for the Catholic Church, which has withered in Europe and the Americas because of growing secularism and competing evangelical and Protestant churches.
Gay rights activists are hoping that he will address the issue, especially after he earlier responded to a question about a gay priest by saying: “Who am I to judge?”
Homosexuality is illegal in most of Africa with South Africa being the only African country that where gay or lesbian marriage is legal.
“As we welcome the pope, we stand in unity to secure our nation”, CS Joseph Nkaissery, Kenya’s interior minister, said in a message broadcast over Twitter on Monday. The message of Pope Francis is very clear in this regard.
The last stop of the visit, where Francis is scheduled to stay in the capital of Bangui for only one night, has prompted a host of questions about the pope’s security given continual violent clashes there between largely Muslim and Christian armed factions. Boko Haram, a terrorist group running rampant in Africa, is responsible for the deaths of over 6,000 people and continues to rape, pillage and murder their way through villages and towns.
Jo-Renee Formicola, a political science professor at Seton Hall University, believes Pope Francis will ask that people “rise above their humanity” by refusing themselves to allow their hearts to harden against the atrocities spreading across their nation.
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“The trip of the pope to Bangui will be, above all, a great consolation for a Republic that feels so forgotten by the whole world”, said Fr. Jean-Claude Nzembele, who has worked in the country intermittently since 1994.
