Is African Catholicism a "Vatican II Success Story"?: Questioning the Conventional Narrative

The familiar claim that Catholicism is booming in Africa-that it is the one continent where the Second Vatican Council has yielded abundant good fruits-does not square with available data and descriptions, as we discover in the late George Neumayr's reportage on Ivory Coast, a Nigerian Catholic's analysis of harmful inculturation inflicted on Africans by racially stereotyping European liturgists, Claudio Salvucci's questioning of the Zaire Use on the basis of Congolese history, and Peter Kwasniewski's evaluation of the evangelical potency of preconciliar faith, life, and worship. In Africa as elsewhere, traditional Catholicism conquered whole populations and fostered immense cultural creativity. Under the new ecclesiology, new ecumenism, and new liturgy of progressive Western intellectuals, ever-larger numbers are falling away to Protestant sects and deracinating secularism.