African Catholics Research Articles

Being Christian in Vandal Africa: The Politics of Orthodoxy in the Post-Imperial West by Robin Whelan

Reviewed by: Being Christian in Vandal Africa: The Politics of Orthodoxy in the Post-Imperial West by Robin Whelan Roland Steinacher Robin Whelan Being Christian in Vandal Africa: The Politics of Orthodoxy in the Post-Imperial West Transformation of the Classical Heritage Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 2018 Pp. 301. $95.00. This book stems from a 2014 dissertational thesis at Corpus Christi College in Cambridge. Whelan provides an exhaustive and convincing analysis of doctrinal conflicts under Vandal rule in Roman Africa, contributing greatly to our understanding of the post-Roman West. The book is divided into two larger sections, “Contesting Orthodoxy” and “Orthodoxy and Society” (which are themselves apportioned into seven chapters), an introduction, an epilogue, and six appendices. Finally, a timeline, a map, figures and tables, a comprehensive bibliography, and an index are part of this study. Whelan pictures the two competing churches in his first chapter. Leading Nicene bishops like Quodvultdeus and Fulgentius of Ruspe had to struggle for followers, properties, and dispensations while their Homoian counterparts were privileged by the Vandal kings. Even though Victor of Vita painted blatant dissimilarities between the two institutions, they originated from a very similar background. Whelan convincingly argues that linguistic (Gothic as a liturgical language) and ethnic differences have been overemphasized in modern research. Some studies completely misunderstood Homoian Christology as a “Germanic” deployment and traces of this approach persist inside and outside scholarly studies. Homoian clerics were, however, part of a common Christian and Roman tradition. The Vandal military had attracted Arian clergymen from all over the Roman Empire. These Homoian theologians tried to build up a new African church, a heretical one in the eyes of their Nicene competitors. The second chapter focuses on how churchmen debated with one another and shows a vibrant culture of polemical Christian disputation. One of the strongest points of this book is Whelan’s discussion of a number of rarely treated or nearly ignored texts. Sermons, letters, doctrinal tractates, biblical testimonia collections, conciliar acts, psalms, poems, histories, saints’ lives, and theological treatises used in the Nicene-Homoian controversy, florilegia, and dialogues are regarded side-by-side with well-known sources like Victor of Vita’s Historia. These texts [End Page 445] have received comparably little attention in modern scholarship, partly because of their sometimes-surreal narrative structures. For example, dialogues of long-dead church fathers with famous heretics were central in debates over religious authority, doctrine, and practice in late antique Africa. Interestingly enough, Nicene as well as Homoian writers used similar literary forms. Whelan scrutinizes the available material, sometimes managing to revivify Homoian voices hidden behind the curtain of Nicene polemics. The third chapter reconstructs the self-presentation of a Homoian Christian community. Homoian writers defined themselves as members of the one true Christian church and consequently managed to put known church fathers like Athanasius and Augustine in the position of heretics. King Huneric tried to invoke the theological adjudications of the councils of Ariminum (Rimini) and Seleucia from the year 359 in the provinces under his rule. Doing this, the Homoian church appeared as the only holy, apostolic, and catholic (in the original sense of being universal) church with full legitimation. Like Emperor Constantius II’s attempt to change the results of Nicaea, the Vandal king Huneric tried this for the African provinces and in some respects also for the rest of the empire. He acted like a Roman emperor and the edicts cited by Victor of Vita use a juridical terminology known from late antique imperial chancelleries. The fourth and final chapter of the first section examines the role of historical theological controversies for the dispute in Vandal Africa. Both sides referred to the past and especially to the Donatist schism in fourth-century Africa. The goal of Homoian as well as Nicene writers was to bolster claims to orthodoxy. Nicene clerics sought to link their Homoian opponents with the Arians and other heretics of the past. Homoian writers and jurisprudents in royal service prepared a severe strike against the Nicene church. Laws that had been created by several Roman emperors to protect the Nicene church were imposed by King Huneric against the African Catholics. The second section...

Entrevista com a Professora Mariza Soares

Mariza de Carvalho Soares é professora de História da África, aposentada pela Universidade Federal Fluminense e ainda ativa no Programa de Pós-graduação em História. Atualmente, é pesquisadora colaboradora do Departamento de Antropologia do Museu Nacional, onde atua no setor de Etnologia e Etnografia, como curadora da exposição africana, e como consultora do projeto “Marfins Africanos no Mundo Atlântico: uma reavaliação dos marfins luso-africanos”, financiado pela Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia de Portugal, dentre outros projetos. São de sua autoria Devotos da cor. Identidade étnica, relgiosidade e escravidão. século XVIII (Civilização Brasileira, 2000), Rotas Atlânticas da Diáspora Africana: da baía do Benim ao Rio de Janeiro (Ed. UFF, 2007), People of Faith. Slavery and African Catholics in Eighteenth-Century Rio de Janeiro (Duke University Press, 2011), além de diversos outros livros, capítulos e artigos publicados no Brasil e no exterior. Nesta entrevista, contamos com um depoimento colhido antes do incêndio que destruiu grande parte do acervo do Museu Nacional. Além do seu conteúdo, de acentuado interesse para a comunidade de pesquisadores e para a sociedade, consideramos sua publicação pertinente, como forma de memória de uma coleção pouco conhecida. É momento de unir e reconstruir, pois a cultura no país resiste.

Agbonkhianmeghe E. Orobator (ed.), The Church We Want: African Catholics Look to Vatican III

Agbonkhianmeghe E. Orobator (ed.), <i>The Church We Want: African Catholics Look to Vatican III</i>

The Church We Want: African Catholics Look to Vatican III, edited by A.E. Orobator

The Church We Want: African Catholics Look to Vatican III, edited by A.E. Orobator

Book Review: The Church We Want: African Catholics Look to Vatican III. Ed. Agbonkhianmeghe E. Orobator

Book Review: <i>The Church We Want: African Catholics Look to Vatican III</i>. Ed. Agbonkhianmeghe E. Orobator

Book Review: The Church We Want: African Catholics Look to Vatican III. Edited by Agbonkhianmeghe E. Orobator

Book Review: The Church We Want: African Catholics Look to Vatican III. Edited by Agbonkhianmeghe E. Orobator

Book Review: The Church We Want: African Catholics Look to Vatican III

Book Review: The Church We Want: African Catholics Look to Vatican III

The Church We Want: African Catholics Look to Vatican III ed. by Agbonkhianmeghe E. Orobator

Orobator, Agbonkhianmeghe E., ed. The Church We Want: African Catholics Look to Vatican III. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2016. Review by Peter Admirand.

The Church We Want: African Catholics Look to Vatican III

The Church We Want: African Catholics Look to Vatican III

People of Faith: Slavery and African Catholics in Eighteenth-Century Rio de Janeiro

People of Faith: Slavery and African Catholics in Eighteenth-Century Rio de Janeiro

Mariza de Carvalho Soares, People of Faith: Slavery and African Catholics in Eighteenth-Century Rio de Janeiro (Durham, NC, and London: Duke University Press, 2012), pp. xiii+321, £66.00, £16.99 pb.

Mariza de Carvalho Soares, People of Faith: Slavery and African Catholics in Eighteenth-Century Rio de Janeiro (Durham, NC, and London: Duke University Press, 2012), pp. xiii+321, £66.00, £16.99 pb.

Invisible Empire in Flannery O’Connor’s “The Displaced Person”: Southern Dynamics of Race, Miscegenation and Anti-Catholicism

Flannery O’Connor’s stories have garnered critical attention for her religious views. Thus, the interpretation of violence in her fiction has been mainly associated with salvation in her characters. Nonetheless, O’Connor was aware of the historical facts surrounding white supremacist activities in the American South. In its revenge narrative, O’Connor’s story “The Displaced Person” (1955) unveils subtle layers of politics from the Ku Klux Klan as well as her white characters’ views of race and immigrants. O’Connor used a voice of reserve due to her minority position as woman and Catholic. Although she was a white female, she lived within repressive Southern religiosity. Racism prevailed beneath Southern chauvinism and patriotism. The conflicts in the South display the violent aspects of the “Invisible White Supreme Empire.” After the World Wars, devalued whiteness elicited atrocities against socially upward mobile African Americans, foreigners and Catholics. This article explores the convoluted issues of racial hierarchy, miscegenation, and xenophobic reactions in the South.

People of faith. Slavery and African Catholics in eighteenth-century Rio de Janeiro. By Mawriza de Carvalho Soares (translated by Jerry D. Metz). (Latin America in Translation.) Pp. xiii+322 incl. 21 tables and 10 ills. Durham, NC–London: Duke University Press, 2011. £66 (cloth), £16.99 (paper). 978 0 8223 5023 1; 978 0 8223 5040 8

People of faith. Slavery and African Catholics in eighteenth-century Rio de Janeiro. By Mawriza de Carvalho Soares (translated by Jerry D. Metz). (Latin America in Translation.) Pp. xiii+322 incl. 21 tables and 10 ills. Durham, NC–London: Duke University Press, 2011. £66 (cloth), £16.99 (paper). 978 0 8223 5023 1; 978 0 8223 5040 8

People of Faith: Slavery and African Catholics in Eighteenth-Century Rio de Janeiro by Mariza de Carvalho Soares (review)

People of Faith: Slavery and African Catholics in Eighteenth-Century Rio de Janeiro by Mariza de Carvalho Soares (review)

People of Faith: Slavery and African Catholics in Eighteenth-Century Rio de Janeiro by Mariza De Carvalho Soares (review)

People of Faith: Slavery and African Catholics in Eighteenth-Century Rio de Janeiro by Mariza De Carvalho Soares (review)

People of Faith: Slavery and African Catholics in Eighteenth-Century Rio de Janeiro

In People of Faith: Slavery and African Catholics in Eighteenth-Century Rio de Janeiro, Mariza de Carvalho Soares introduces readers to two fascinating 1786 documents describing the history, activities, and regulations of a congregation of African freedmen and women based in the Rio de Janeiro Church of Santo Elesbão and Santa Efigênia. These documents, written by a church leader, offer a unique perspective on the construction of identity and ethnicity among Africans in Brazil. The organization was led by Mahis originating from the Mina Coast, but Soares emphasizes that this kind of ethnic label, generally thought of as a nação or nation, only had a specific meaning in the context of the Atlantic slave trade. To highlight her efforts to complicate this ethnic/linguistic/cultural shorthand as well as “the social conditions and geographic routes of the dis placement,” she employs the term provenience (p. 85). Provenience groups might re-form themselves in surprising ways in the New World. She views them as flexible and mutable depending on local conditions, not fixed upon geographic places of origin. Unlike some scholars who have written on Afro-Brazilian religion, Soares is not in search of the “purest” possible manifestation of africanidade or wedded to the unlikely presupposition that displacement did not strongly affect African religion. She is instead very sensitive to the goal of those who composed the brotherhood records: that is, to prove that their strong Catholic faith extended back to Africa.Soares strives to contextualize the African slave experience through a deeper study of African history. To achieve this end, the book begins with a broad Atlantic perspective, stretching back to fifteenth-century Portuguese naval voyages and very gradually focusing in more closely on the Mahi social and religious experience in Brazil. Soares criticizes the older Afro-Bahian-centered scholarship, proposing to redirect the historical focus onto Rio and its seventeenth- and eighteenth-century interactions with the Mina Coast, especially the fact that the first few decades of the Minas Gerais mining boom coincided with “years of intense conflict along the Slave Coast” (p. 53). Because no documents relating to religious organizations survive this era, Soares scoured thousands of infant and adult baptism records from Rio parishes to establish that many Mahis came to Brazil in the 1720s. While Central Africans organized brotherhoods and even founded their own independent churches several decades earlier (not without conflict with clerics), Mina Catholic devotions only grew to popularity and Minas began to build their own chapels in the mid-eighteenth century.The book becomes more engaging when Soares turns to Rio life and brotherhood processions, celebrations, and disputes, which she interprets as “meaningful religious activity” (p. 12). As seen in the documents generated by Mahi leaders, public piety sparked passions and tensions, especially in the planning and carrying out of the folia or revelry done in the name of the brotherhood’s patron saints. Street festivals manifested Afro-Brazilian efforts to speak in a Portuguese hierarchical terminology through the well-known practice of electing kings, queens, and courts representing various ethnic groups, while at the same time promoting their own leadership style and cultural choices. As was also the case in seventeenth-century New Spain, African and Afro-descended women played a powerful, dynamic role as festival organizers, alms collectors, and financial backers. In both colonial settings, these matriarchal traditions led to internal conflicts as male leaders sought to formalize, strengthen, and control the brotherhoods. Soares vibrantly describes Rio city geography and the parade of street life, from the opulence of women’s attire to the elaborate gradations of slave owner retinues, and finally the morose scenes of disposing slaves into mass graves. Her sections on death and burial intersect effectively with A. J. R. Russell-Wood’s classic scholarship on the Salvador Santa Casa de Misericórdia and João José Reis’s studies of death and cemeteries in nineteenth-century Brazil.The author readily acknowledges that this book (published in Brazil in 2000) derives from a 1997 dissertation and thus is not in dialogue with excellent scholarship on Afro-Brazilian brotherhoods or other studies of Africana religiosity published in the last 15 years. The Portuguese version, entitled Devotos da Cor, was a popular success in Brazil and the English edition merits a prominent place in both the literature of Afro-Latin American religious history and the ongoing study of the subtle and changeable meanings of ethnicity in Africa and the Americas. While it is essential reading for scholars of Spanish American confraternities and Afro-Brazilian brotherhoods, its writing style, involving a great deal of very specific detail derived from archival documentation, may offer a significant challenge to many undergraduates in US universities.

Generations of Catholics in Eastern Africa: A Practice‐Centered Analysis of Religious Change

This article considers how well Martin Riesebrodt's practice‐centered theory of religion addresses religious change among Catholics in eastern Africa. Two arguments are advanced using a generational change scheme. First, Riesebrodt's focus on religious practices assists in understanding many changes that African Catholics and their communities have experienced over time. It acknowledges believers’ perspectives and the impact of missionaries, and it generates comparative insights across different cases. However, Riesebrodt's approach has limitations when developing a comparative perspective on historical transformation in these communities. Therefore, his focus on the objective meaning of interventionist religious practices needs supplementing: (1) capturing religious change within a given religion requires attention both to practices and their subjective appropriation by believers, and (2) in the forging of collective identities, theological reflection by elites helped connect Catholic practices to preexisting worldviews and Catholic practices marked generational change by distinguishing Catholics from other African Christians.

Domesticating a Religious Import: The Jesuits and the Inculturation of the Catholic Church in Zimbabwe, 1879–1980 (review)

Reviewed by: Domesticating a Religious Import: The Jesuits and the Inculturation of the Catholic Church in Zimbabwe, 1879–1980 Frederick Klaits Domesticating a Religious Import: The Jesuits and the Inculturation of the Catholic Church in Zimbabwe, 1879–1980. By Nicholas M. Creary. (New York: Fordham University Press. 2011. Pp. xviii, 339. $45.00. ISBN 978-0-823-23334-2.) Nicholas Creary’s book on the Jesuit mission during Zimbabwe’s colonial period addresses an ecclesiastical audience as much as an audience of historians. An Africanist historian with a background of two years as a Jesuit novice, Creary writes with a strong belief in the potential of the Church to become inculturated—that is, adapted to the particularities of local cultures. The term inculturation was popularized by Pedro Arrupe, the superior general of the Jesuit Order from 1965 to 1983. Drawing upon Arrupe’s language, Creary writes with the conviction that “catholicity . . . allows for local cultures to influence the church universal by taking elements of broader Christian culture and incorporating them into their respective cultural contexts, while simultaneously offering their respective symbols to enrich the Christian context” (pp. 248–49). While documenting the popularity of Catholicism among the VaShona people of Zimbabwe, Creary writes with disappointment about the attitudes of Jesuit leaders, who tended to be suspicious of grassroots religious innovations. Such innovations included the incorporation of marriage payments into church practices; the adaptation of ancestral veneration into Catholic ritual; and the use of Mwari, a deity with shrines throughout the region, as a legitimate name for God within Catholic liturgy. For Jesuits, problems of inculturation were crucially shaped by canon lawmaking. The book concentrates on debates among the Jesuit leadership of Chishawasha Mission, the oldest Catholic mission in Zimbabwe, about the legitimacy of religious innovations under terms of canon law. In addition, Creary incorporates perspectives of [End Page 618] members of the lay Catholic Association as well as of Mariannhill missionaries who established convents for women during the 1920s, a time when the colonial government was making efforts to uphold local patriarchal authority. Creary’s intent to study “the efforts of African Christians to shed the European influences of an imported Christianity and transform it into an African religious experience” (p. 17) is carried out most effectively in a chapter concerning controversies over kurova guva, rites of honoring ancestors. These rites were banned for Catholic adherents in the 1890s by Jesuit missionaries, whose collective memory had been shaped by controversies during the eighteenth century between Jesuits and Dominicans over comparable Chinese rituals. Creary documents ongoing debates among Zimbabwean Catholics over the value and significance of ancestral veneration. In the aftermath of the Second Vatican Council, African Catholic priests argued that kurova guva fulfills the commandment to honor one’s father and mother, and received permission from Rome to incorporate the rite into liturgy under the term kuchenura munhu (to purify the person). Yet in 2007, the Southern African Catholics Bishops’ Conference issued statements opposing the rite on grounds that it is performed out of fear of ancestral curses. Creary disputes this latter position, arguing that it overlooks commonalities between kuchenura munhu and prayers to saints, and represents a step backward from inculturation. Local ambivalence about ancestral demands is clearly a significant component of popular Catholicism in Zimbabwe; yet the implications of this issue are obscured by the text’s emphasis on the degree to which the Church has been inculturated. Owing to the atmosphere of fear associated with political violence in Zimbabwe since 2000, Creary was unable to conduct oral interviews that might have enriched descriptions of popular religious practices such as pilgrimages to the shrine of Bernard Mizeki, an Anglican martyr revered by Zimbabwean Christians of many denominations. In addition, the focus on inculturation glosses over Catholic responses to colonial and postcolonial violence. What this book has to offer instead is a detailed account of how the Jesuits’ own commitments to defining church law shaped their assessments of the cultural practices of their parishioners. Frederick Klaits Northern Kentucky University Copyright © 2012 The Catholic University of America Press

Dos arquivos da perseguição às histórias dos mártires: hagiografia, memória e propaganda na África romana

A passagem dos atos e das paixões dos mártires, escritos no calor das perseguições, às narrativas martirológicas mais legendárias e épicas, que se difundem a partir do final do século IV e do início do século V, foi muitas vezes vista, pelos historiadores, como uma das mais marcantes transformações da hagiografia na Antiguidade Tardia. Contudo, o uso dos registros dos processos judiciais para a redação tanto das tradicionais atas dos mártires como para essas novas narrativas mais extensas e épicas continuou sendo altamente valorizado pelos cristãos do Norte da África, tanto católicos como donatistas, ao menos até o começo do século V. O objetivo deste artigo é investigar as razões desse apreço pelos documentos de arquivo, sobretudo oficiais, e os diferentes usos práticos que deles fizeram os cristãos africanos, do século III ao início do século V.