It may be beset with tribal conflict, corrupt politicians, and disease-fuelled poverty, but the religious zeal of Africa has much to offer Europe in revitalising the Church, as Ghana's Cardinal Peter Turkson told James Roberts
The question of what the West can do for Africa has become one of the urgent moral questions of our time. Western leaders must all have something to say on the matter, if they are to be seen as possessing statesmanlike credentials.
"What Africa Offers the West", on the other hand - the title of a lecture given by Cardinal Peter Turkson, Archbishop of Cape Coast, Ghana, in Cambridge last month - is hardly seen as an urgent moral question at all. The idea that the West might be deprived and underdeveloped in important respects, and that Africa might be able to guide it on to a more profitable path, is well below the radar of public discourse.
Yet these were precisely the ideas considered by the cardinal in an address given at the invitation of the Von Hügel Institute. And in conversation with me at the London headquarters of the Bishops' Conference of England and Wales, he developed his position in a particularly pointed way.
In quiet grey suit and clerical collar, the cardinal's unassuming manner and elegant but easy style of delivery at times belied the more radical nature of what he was saying. He took as his founding reference points the statement of Pope John Paul II that "no one is too poor to give, and no one is too rich to receive", and the concept of the Church as the family of God.
For a start, Africa could offer the West some help in answering one of the earliest questions God asked of man - "Where is your brother?" - the cardinal suggested. The clear implication was that the West is sometimes a little confused on this question.
The African model of the Church as the family of God means "we must now begin to think about living a world Church", the cardinal added, implying again that anyone who thinks we have started to do that already is insufficiently engaged with reality.
The "most desired help" the West wants from Africa, he explained, is in the provision of raw materials. There was more than a touch of irony in the terms in which he couched the economic relationship. What was needed, he said, was a "conversion" of methods and practice for the acquisition of wealth. If that sounds like he was advocating fairer terms of trade, well he was. But his accusation was expressed in the most elegant form. What Zacchaeus was given after Jesus came to his house was, in the cardinal's words, "a healed vision of relationship ... he saw that the people he had cheated were his brothers". Precisely whose vision of relationship was in need of healing the cardinal then left to the audience to decide.
He acknowledged the darkness of Africa - from "wretched starvelings" to terrible disease, to tribal conflict, to equally wretched greed and bad governance on the part of leaders - but did not allow that any of this undermined his thesis that in the affairs of Africa and the West there had to be an equal give and take.
Born in western Ghana in 1948, Peter Kodwo Appiah Turkson studied for the priesthood at St Teresa's Minor Seminary, Amisano, and St Peter's Regional Seminary, Pedu, before being ordained as priest in July 1975. He studied for a licentiate at the Pontifical Biblical Institute in Rome (1976-80) and for a doctorate at the same institute (1987-92). He was made Archbishop of Cape Coast in 1993 and 10 years later Pope John Paul II made him Ghana's first-ever cardinal. He speaks six languages, and is a member of the Pontifical Council for Christian Unity and the Pontifical Congregation for Divine Worship, as well as sitting on the supreme committee of the Pontifical Missions Society.
He was certainly not complacent about the picture of the global Church that is now almost a commonplace - a picture of inexorable expansion in Africa and decline in Europe.
"It is true that the Church there is growing," he said. "But first, the situation is patchy. West Africa is doing far better than southern Africa, for example. Secondly, there is something we are not providing. It would be great if we could describe the growth after baptism, after confirmation, but on that we don't have very reliable statistics."
There was a disparity, he said, between what the registers say, and the numbers who come to church regularly. This had to do with the whole issue of evangelisation, Cardinal Turkson argued. It was wrong to make catechesis rather than evangelisation a point of entry into the Church.
"In my humble opinion, the same caution I express for Africa I see in Europe. Christianity in Europe started on an evangelistic base then developed a catechetics base. And it never found its way back to being evangelical. The early years of the Church were all based on evangelisation. When the structures began to evolve and develop it became catechetical, notional - you teach people certain things, they can repeat them, then you baptise them. The emphasis on the thrust of evangelisation - provoking conversion in people - and helping people find a real relationship with a personal God - that gradually was missed out."
Cardinal Turkson's explanation of why Africa, despite its manifest needs, should be sending some of its priests to help out in Europe, is testimony, perhaps, to an emphasis on the gifts of the Holy Spirit. Ghana, for example, has one priest for every 2,400 Catholics. Britain has one for every 890. But Britain has a vocations crisis, and Africa doesn't.
"In Africa, we recognise that Europe needs help," the cardinal told me. "We should be driven to help just because that's the way of being a Church, emphasising the fact that we are a Church together."
If, in the fullness of time, the world sees its first African Pope since Gelasius I (492-496), and if that man were to be Cardinal Peter Turkson, we could expect a number of new trends: a renewal of missionary vigour, a drive for social justice, and a renewed openness to the promptings of the Holy Spirit.
"I think the basis of any Christian spiritual growth is prayer and the Word of God. When these two things are not there, we are not connected to Jesus, and without him we can do nothing," Cardinal Turkson insisted. "In the Mass, Jesus comes to the people and speaks the Word to them, then there is the breaking of bread. The Word always comes to reveal God and entrust us with a mission. You cannot carry out this mission with your own native and natural energies, as the Lord said. You need to be supported. So ‘I give you the nourishment. I break the bread for you.' Every celebration of the Mass then becomes an encounter with the Lord, from which we are all supposed to go on a mission."