Many of us have become conditioned because of our history to think of Christianity as essentially European. “Europe is the Faith and the Faith is Europe,” as Belloc once declared. That modern Europe is the fruit of Christianity is a historical fact difficult to deny, despite the deliberate omission of that heritage in the EU’s 2004 Constitution for Europe.
With many parishes both in Western Europe and the United States being staffed by priests and religious from Africa, it is a familiar theme that “just as we gave them the Faith, they are giving it back to us”. Unfortunately, that has little connection with reality. While it is true that much of the growth of Catholicism in certain parts of Africa was due to missionary efforts undertaken in the last 200 years, the transmission of the faith was actually a gift from the East and the South to the pagan countries of the West. As the historian Philip Jenkins has written, from the earliest times, certainly from the period of the Acts of the Apostles, just as the faith was moving towards the West, it was also heading East.
