Theology and Developing Countries

Extract

I took advantage of updating sessions in Zambia last summer to put the following question to Zambian and missionary priests that I met: ‘Has your training really prepared you for your ministry?’

The question was deliberately ambiguous; training could be interpreted as spiritual, pastoral or theological. The question was put to eighty-eight priests, and it is revealing that nearly all of them singled out the theological side of their training for criticism. This criticism was certainly not ambiguous : forty regarded their theological formation as mostly irrelevant to their ministry, compared with eleven who considered it useful preparation; the other thirtyseven refrained from making any clear-cut statement, but suggested drastic modifications.

The quasi-unanimous reproach was that their theology had been one-sidedly academic and intellectual, aimed at furnishing their minds with answers to out-dated European questions, rather than at making them messengers of a living Gospel that would be Good News to the people they were sent to.

This sentiment of frustration is a symptom of a much wider problem. A young missionary or African priest, on the completion of a six- or seven-year course of study from which he rightly expected some sort of competence, complains that he has nothing effective to tell his community in his homily, no compelling News to announce to the school children in the period of Religion, no direction to offer to a people puzzled by a rapid social change, no contribution to make to the development of the country.