Catholicism as a lived religion in Africa

Abstract

There is abundance of literature on African Catholicism, but it is unevenly distributed across disciplines in humanities and social sciences. Theology as indicated in the first section of this study takes the lion's share followed by historical and social sciences. African Christian studies, of which African Catholic studies are a sub-field, have been dominated by three main topics: the missionary encounter and local appropriations of Christianity, African Independent Churches and Pentecostalism. Overall, Catholicism has been the poor relative of African Christian studies, especially with regard to social sciences which seem better equipped than theology to explore lived Catholicism. But recent developments in scholarship on the anthropology of global Christianity are stimulating a growing interest in the anthropology of global Catholicism which in turn should lead to more research and publications on lived Catholicism in Africa. As Catholicism continue to grow in Africa and as Africans continue to take over from Western missionaries, more studies, especially from social scientists, are needed to answer the question: what does it mean to be a Catholic in Africa? 1 | INTRODUCTION From the outset, I locate the study of 'Catholicism as lived religion' within the wider framework of African Christian Studies which began to take shape towards the end of the 1950s. Lived religion refers here to the many ways in which a religion is enacted in the daily lives of the faithful. In this sense, lived religion is distinguished from taught religion because between what is taught to Catholics in catechism classes and what is actually lived, there is the momentum of reappraisal through individual or collective agency (Mbembe, 1988). This is particularly true of Catholicism which values normative processes in the transmission of faith. The focus on lived religion makes it possible to capture the gap between the norm and the practice.