A Sacred Safari for the Pope

IT was the first time that a reigning Pontiff had ever visited Africa, and for Uganda, the host country, it was the biggest event since the nation won its independence from Britain in 1962. Roman Catholics number about 3,000,-000 in Uganda--one of Africa's most Christianized countries--but during the visit of Pope Paul VI last week, it seemed as if all of its 9,000,000 citizens had become instant Romans. There were Pope Paul coins, Pope Paul stamps and Pope Paul folk songs, including a pop calypso that likened the Pontiff's visit to "a shooting star in the dark of the night." Shop-door signs along the papal route proclaimed "Pepsi Welcomes the Pope."

The crowds began to gather at Entebbe airport half a day before the Pope was due: women in elegant, bright' ly patterned neck-to-ankle dresses, men toting six-foot cowhide horns, calypso singers and tribal dancers. Shouts went up when the East African Airways VC-10 appeared, flanked by four Fouga jet trainers: "There he is! He's coming, that good man." The Kampala police band, its drummers in leopardskin overalls, played the Uganda national anthem as President Milton Obote greeted the Pontiff. Heads of four other African states stood by in a LandRover: Tanzania's Julius Nyerere, Zambia's Kenneth Kaunda, Burundi's Michel Mi-combero and Rwanda's Gregoire Kayi-banda. Then the Pope was off, in an open Lincoln Continental, for the 28-mile ride into Kampala, past welcoming signs saying, "Papa from the Vatican" and "Holy Father, Bless Our House."

For all the rollicking cheer of his welcome, the Pope was in Africa on serious business. His uppermost concern, he declared even before leaving Rome, was the bitter, two-year civil war between Nigeria and Biafra, but the trip had first been planned around the Pope's dedication of a shrine to 22 African martyrs.* He also consecrated twelve new African bishops and offered a thoughtful analysis of the African Church's spiritual role before a pan-African conference of Catholic prelates that had been meeting all week. Above all, the visit reaffirmed the Pope's concern for the future of the church in Africa.

Growing Fast. The concern is justified. Within a changing Catholicism, the African church itself is changing, seeking to break its identification with the colonial past and to find its place within the emerging nations (see box, page 65). The Church is growing so fast that realistic estimates of its adherents range from 30 million to 40 million--by far the largest Christian body in Africa. As Rome has turned over control of missionaries to some 320 local dioceses and 28 episcopal conferences, the church in Africa has become more autonomous. But it must still depend heavily on outside financial support.

Yet the bishops and cardinals assembled in Kampala last week demonstrated that they were enjoying independence. They approved a plan to strengthen their autonomy with a permanent pan-African secretariat empowered to call meetings of the African bishops and act as a communications clearinghouse. When Pope Paul arrived in Kampala, he heartily endorsed their moves, both toward autonomy and a more vigorous effort to Africanize the church. In Rugaba Cathedral, Tanzania's Laurean Cardinal Rugambwa pledged the symposium's "total solidarity" with Rome (last year, the bishops had praised the Pope's birth control encyclical). Then Paul cut the umbilical cord of four centuries. "You are missionaries to yourselves now," said the Pope. "The Church of Christ is well and truly planted." Expressions of faith, he agreed, should be "suited to the tongue, the style, the character and the genius of the one who professes it."

A New Civilization. Friday morning, at a 5,000-square-foot altar on one of the hills overlooking Kampala, Paul and 50 other bishops and cardinals celebrated an "all-African" Mass to mark the consecration of a dozen black bishops; he urged the new prelates to help create "that new civilization, African and Christian." Later, in an address to the Uganda National Assembly, he reproved colonialism for "having let economic interests prevail over human considerations," and condemned "social situations based on racial discrimination" (an apparent reference to apartheid) as "an affront to the fundamental rights of the human person." On a visit to a poor suburban neighborhood, he declared that "rural Africa must be aided in developing its immense agriculture! possibilities. Local industries must replace the exploitation of raw materials. The African villager must become the master of his own destiny."

Twice during his grueling schedule, Paul had met with Nigerian and Biafran representatives in a vain attempt to mediate the Nigerian impasse--and had even offered to stay in Africa a month if it would help bring peace. He did not stay. On Saturday morning he joined Anglican dignitaries for a brief ecumenical service at their own shrine, then went on to the partially built shrine of the Roman Catholic martyrs, where nearly 100,000 people had gathered for the Mass of dedication. He baptized, confirmed and gave First Communion to 22 young Uganda converts, telling them that being a Christian was "a fine thing, but not always an easy one."

The message might well have been meant for all African Catholics. The more quickly Africa develops--as the Pope wants it to--the more quickly will it face the forces that are disrupting Catholicism in developed countries--urbanization, secularization, loss of faith altogether. Perhaps, as the Pope suggested in one address, the African's "deep sense of community" will help offset these forces, but the church's task will not be easy. Nonetheless, when the papal retinue departed Uganda Saturday, Paul VI left behind a church with a newly realized sense of self and a new pride in virtues that had been too long overlooked.

* In the late 1870s, the ruling Kabaka welcomed the Anglican and Catholic missionaries who followed Explorer Henry Morton Stanley. But after the old king's death, the ruler's dissolute heir did not; the young man resented the fact that his Christian pages refused his homosexual advances. Finally, egged on by a jealous Prime Minister, the Kabaka determined to crush the new religion, and in one bloody, 15-month period, beginning in 1885, ordered the murders or executions of 22 Catholics and at least 23 Anglicans. Paul declared the Catholic martyrs saints in 1964.

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