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AROUND 140,000 people crowded into St Peter’s Square to hear Pope Francis deliver Christmas mass today, Christmas day. Rome, and by extension Europe, has been the centre of Christianity ever since Emperor Constantine converted to Christianity some 300 years after, according to Christian tradition, Peter, the first pope, arrived there from the Holy Land to spread the gospel and was later crucified. Two millennia later, Christianity is the world’s most popular religion—there are 30% more self-identified Christians in the world than Muslims—and Europe is still the continent with the largest Christian population.
Nonetheless, European priests and ministers are preaching to ever-emptier pews. Just 10% of adults in France and Sweden go to church once a month or more. In Ireland, regular attendance fell from 90% in 1990 to 60% in 2009. Shrinking congregations have led the Church of England, one of Britain’s largest landowners, to close 1,900 churches since 1969, 11% of the total. Although immigration has caused the non-Christian share of Europe’s population to rise, the vast majority of the decline in churchgoing stems from creeping secularism, and a trend among the young to favour individual “spirituality” over organised religion.
Data from the European Social Survey (ESS), which polled 55,000 Europeans across 29 countries in 2012, show that around a third of Europeans who consider themselves Christian say they attend services once a month or so. Across Europe some 190m people go to church regularly from a nominal Christian population of 585m. By contrast, sub-Saharan Africans are embracing the gospel with the literal zeal of the converted. According to the Centre for the Study of Global Christianity at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary, in 1910 just 9% of the 100m people on the African continent were Christian; today the share is 55% of a population of a billion. Moreover, figures from the World Values Survey (WVS), which covers 86,000 people in 60 countries, indicate they are remarkably devout: across five sub-Saharan African countries for which data are available (Ghana, Nigeria, Rwanda, South Africa and Zimbabwe), 90% of people calling themselves Christian also said they attended church regularly.
If those nations are representative of the region as a whole, then perhaps 469m churchgoers now live in Africa. Another 335m or so churchgoing Christians live in Latin America, three-fifths more than in Europe. Why has Christianity’s centre of gravity shifted south and west? The relationships between church attendance and other survey data provided by the ESS and WVS, along with national-level statistics, offer tantalising clues. One important influence is the dominant strain of Christianity in each region. All else being equal, Orthodox Christians—who do not celebrate Christmas until January 7th—are 14 percentage points less likely to attend church than Catholics, which could be a product of historical antipathy towards religion in the ex-Communist countries where they predominate. The world’s 280m Orthodox Christians reside primarily in Europe.
By contrast, evangelicals, who are rare in Europe, are seven percentage points more likely to attend church than Catholics. Economics also plays an important role. The more affluent a country is, the less frequently its citizens attend church, and western Europe is uniformly rich. On the surface, this pattern makes the United States, in which a healthy 58% of self-identified Christians go to services monthly, hard to explain. However, religious devotion is also strongly associated with concentration of wealth. Holding other factors constant, the odds that an individual will attend church are 15 percentage points higher in the world’s 29 most unequal countries than they are in the most equal ones. And people on the lower rungs of their own country’s economic ladder tend to be more observant than those at the top. America is unusually unequal for a rich country, and its black population is both poorer than the national average and highly devout. Moreover, its immigrants come largely from staunchly Christian Latin America.
Given how improbable the geographic distribution of Christianity today would have appeared 50 or 100 years ago, no one can predict the future shape of the church with any confidence. If economic development and a more equal distribution of income decrease church attendance, then what is good for the world’s poor may be bad for Christianity—Pope Francis might want to be careful what he wishes for. Similarly, people born before 1945 tend to be far more observant than members of subsequent generations. As the elderly faithful die out and are replaced by more secular millennials, churchgoing could decline further. But demographic trends work against this “peak Christianity” hypothesis. Sub-Saharan Africa is not only home to the world’s most observant Christians; it is also the fastest-growing region on the planet by population. And its entrenched poverty means that even if it enjoys decades of rapid economic development, it is unlikely to reach the levels of wealth that tend to correspond to increased secularisation. As Christians celebrate the birth of Christ, the centre of gravity of the world’s most popular religion is shifting towards the birthplace of humanity itself.
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To encourage tolerance in Cameroon, a country recently experiencing religious-based violence by the likes of the extremist group Boko Haram, several churches have sponsored interfaith gatherings for Christmas.
At the Evangelical Lutheran Church here in this capital city, Christians traditionally have invited Muslims to help celebrate Jesus’ birth with a feast. This year, Muslim cleric Ibrahima Toukour also got five minutes to preach.
Toukour said Muslims have joined Christians at Christmas to pray for peace, security and stability in Cameroon. He said participants also are praying for God’s protection from Boko Haram, which is preaching division and hatred. Its militants kill, steal and rape while pretending to be serving God, he added.
At the Cameroon Baptist Convention, one of the country’s oldest churches, Pastor Charlemagne Nditemen said everyone – Muslims and Christians alike – was invited to celebrate the day.
Some participated in a gift exchange, Nditemen said. "Some bring food even to the church and after service we have a common meal together…. The bottom line is that Christmas is a symbol [signifying] the love of God for humanity."
Clementine Awanga, a Lutheran congregant, said the church’s pastor has asked members to live peacefully with Muslims and to open their doors to them, as well.
A Christian, Awanga said she has welcomed not only her Christian brethren but also Muslims to her home. She said she also has honored invitations by Muslims to attend their religious events, adding that Muslim dignitaries always respect her pastor's invitations to church events.
Growing threats
Cameroon's neighbors have been suffering rising religious intolerance. Nigeria is threatened by the Islamist group Boko Haram and Central African Republic grapples with violent conflicts between the Christian anti-Balaka and the Muslim Seleka.
Irene Nguinga, a refugee from CAR, said Cameroon should preserve the peaceful cohabitation among its religious denominations to stop the type of carnage that her country has witnessed. There, she said, Christians and Muslims are "at each other’s throats," fighting and killing.
Nguinga praised the peaceful co-existence of religions in Cameroon, saying its people should do everything possible to preserve it.
Of Cameroon’s 23.7 million residents, 40 percent are Christian, 20 percent are Muslim and the rest hold indigenous beliefs.
In Cameroon, religious tolerance had been the norm until the country got caught up in violence involving Boko Haram insurgents. The extremist group, founded in neighboring northern Nigeria in 2002, aims to create an Islamic state in western and central Africa.
Boko Haram has targeted Cameroon for sending troops to support the Nigerian government’s military’s efforts to quash it.
Last year, Cameroon arrested dozens of Muslim clerics and their faithful for collaborating with the terrorist group. Boko Haram's allegiance to Islamic State has sparked fears the country may come under extremist influence.
In March this year, Cameroon hosted a conference on Islamic fundamentalism and extremism to educate Muslim clerics about the dangers espoused by extremist groups. All prominent Muslim clerics were invited to the capital and urged to reject such teachings.
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The Nigerian army has completely demolished a religious center belonging to the Islamic Movement in Nigeria (IMN) following the recent massacre of Shia Muslims in the West African country. The IMN’s website cited a local source as saying that the army bulldozed Hussainiyyah Baqeeyatullah in the northern city of Zaria in Kaduna State on Sunday. This comes nearly a week after Nigerian soldiers opened fire on the people attending a religious ceremony at the site. Local media said more than a dozen people were killed during the December 12 raid. The military accused the Shias of stopping the convoy of Nigeria’s Chief of Army Staff Lieutenant General Tukur Yusuf Buratai and attempting to assassinate him.
The IMN and its leader Ibrahim al-Zakzaky strongly rejected the assassination accusation. IMN spokesman Ibrahim Usman also rejected an accusation by local officials that the movement had “blocked roads for four days” during the religious ceremony, which marked Arba’een, the fortieth day to follow the martyrdom anniversary of Imam Hussein (PBUH), the grandson of Prophet Muhammad (PBUH) and the third Shia Imam. One day later, Zakzaky was arrested during a raid by the army on his residence and the buildings connected to the Shia community in Zaria. Local sources say hundreds of people trying to protect the cleric, including three of his sons, were killed in the raid.
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Popular Nigerian pastor and head of Believers World, Pastor Chris Oyakhilome has yet again been involved in another controversy accordiing to reports from Nigerian News Outlet Naij.com.
This time, the pastor has been accused by a member of his own church of staging miracle-healing sessions.
According to a report by South Africa’s Sowetan, followers have said that he has been hiring people to pretend to be sick and disabled and then “be healed” during his television shows and public prayer meetings.
“I was offered R10 000 to rehearse and pretend to be in a wheelchair three weeks before the all-night prayer called Night of Bliss at the Johannesburg Stadium,” the newspaper quoted a member of the church.
“The pastor told me that they were looking for people to work for the church. He said that I was going to sit in a wheelchair and be wheeled around while pretending to be physically ill. I would then stand up and walk as soon as Pastor Chris stopped praying for me.
“Even children who are healthy are whisked around in wheelchairs. Some use crutches. Everyone is allocated a person who tells the congregation about your background, your specific illness and suffering.
“The pastor then raises his hands and places them maybe on your legs if you cannot walk, and a few seconds later you get up and walk around the room,” the source said. He claimed he called the church the day after their offer and turned them down.
“I just told myself that using the word of God to lie to desperate people is immoral, so I refused to take up their offer.”
Also speaking about the pay-for-miracle, another worshiper of the church, said: “When he started healing people, I did not see him call anyone from the audience. The people that he ‘healed’ came from a certain section of the audience and it looked like he came with them especially for the event.
“I saw a lot of people in wheelchairs leaving the venue who had not been healed. It was very sad.”
Recall that pastor Chris and his wife Anita publicly filed for divorce, citing irreconcilable differences.
(Naij.com)
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Two and a half years ago, 115 cardinals elected the Argentine Jorge Mario Bergoglio to be the next pope. The outcome of this pontificate turns out to be mixed; while Francis receives much praise in the realm of politics and the media, the current atmosphere in the Vatican is as bad as it has ever been. Employees complain that the pope enjoys his role as Francis Superstar and that he does not care about the Church’s teaching. They also complain that he is a populist and an authoritarian and that he only takes counsel with those people who share his own opinions. There is talk about a “climate of fear.” A former, long-standing member of the Curia sums up the critique in his own open Advent Letter to the Pope – which is itself a grave form of dissonance, because the servants of the Church owe to the pope a complete obedience.
Holy Father,
On the occasion of your Christmas Allocution in 2014, you called on your curial employees to make first an examination of conscience. Indeed, Advent is an occasion to reflect upon the promises of God and what He expects from us. You claimed that your employees had to be an example for the whole Church, and you then listed a several “illnesses” from which, in your view, the Curia is now suffering. At the time, I had considered this statement to be rather harsh – yes, even unjust – against so many in the Vatican whom I know personally – while you were talking, instead, as if you knew the Vatican, but either only from the outside or only from above. Nevertheless, this speech of yours has actually inspired me to write this letter to you. Following your own example, I shall omit to speak about all the good that you are doing and are speaking and I shall thus only list those aspects of your exercise of the papal office which seem to me to be problematic:
1. An emotional and anti-intellectual attitude of yours which is often tangible and which has difficulties in dealing with theories and doctrines
The alternative to the Teaching Church is the Arbitrary Church, and not the Merciful Church. Among not a few of your own chosen employees and close counselors, there is to be found a true lack of competence, both in teaching and in theology; these men often have behind them a career within the Church’s government or in a university’s administration, and they think rather all too often in pragmatic and political terms. You, as the Supreme Teacher of the Church, thus have to make clearer the primacy of the Faith – for your own sake, and for the sake of all Catholics. Faith without doctrine does not exist.
2. Authoritarianism
You are distancing yourself from the wisdom which is preserved in the Church’s traditional discipline, in Canon Law, and also in the historical practices of the Curia. Together with your disdain for (supposedly) theoretical teaching, this propensity leads to an authoritarianism of which even the founder of your Order of Jesuits, St. Ignatius himself, would not approve. Do you really accept those admonitory voices who say what you, personally, do not immediately see nor understand? What would happen if you were now to know my own name? It would be helpful to act in a less authoritarian way in order to change the current climate of fear.
3. A populism of change Today, it is popular to call for change. However, especially the Successor of Peter has to remind himself and others of that which changes only slowly, and even more so of that which does not change at all. Do you really believe that the approval which you receive from the opinion-makers in the realm of politics and of the media is a good sign? Christ did not promise or prophesy to Peter popularity in the media and status in a star cult (John 21:18). A great many of your statements awaken wrong expectations and give the harmful impression that the teaching and discipline of the Church could and should be adapted to the changing opinions of the majority. The Apostle Paul is here of another opinion (Rom. 12:2; Eph. 4:14)
4. Your own conduct is seen as a critique of how your (often canonized) predecessors have lived, talked, and acted I cannot recognize how this attitude comports with the humility which you have so many times invoked and demanded. Such humility is indeed needed, especially when it is about continuing the tradition which goes back to the Apostle Peter. Your conduct implicitly proposes the idea that you intend to re-invent somehow the Petrine Office. Instead of preserving faithfully the heritage of your predecessors, you want to acquire it [the heritage]in a quite creative way. But, did Saint John not say: “He (Christ) must increase, but I must decrease” (John 3:30)?
5. Pastoralism Only recently, you said that you especially like those parts of the papacy where you can act like a pastor. Of course, neither a pope nor a pastor should raise any doubts as to whether the Church is following the teaching of Christ in everything she currently does (Pastoral Care, Sacraments, Liturgy, Catechesis, Theology, Caritas); finally, everything depends upon the revealed Faith as it comes to us in Holy Scripture and Sacred Tradition, and which is thus binding upon the consciences of the faithful. We cannot even live the Faith and pass it on to others, if we do not know it. Without a good theory, we are – in the long run – not able to act in a good manner. Without teaching in the field of pastoral care, we shall only have emotional and largely adventitious successes.
6. Exaggerated display of the simplicity of your own way of life
Of course, you want to set an example – but is it better for you yourself to take care of all kinds of daily chores? In ascetical questions, the left hand should not know what the right hand is doing (Mt 6:3); otherwise, the whole thing appears somehow to be insincere. If you really want to drive cars that are ecological, you have to invest, by the way, much more, or to ask someone to give you as a gift the more expensive technology that is thus needed: for. ecology has its price.
7. A particularism which often subjugates the goals and purposes of the Universal Church under the viewpoints of only a part of the Church
This attitude appears nearly comical with regard to a pope. Additionally, our world is now much more interconnected, more mobile, and more proximate than ever. Especially today, it is a treasure that the Catholic Church is throughout the whole world always the same. It corresponds to the global life realities that Catholics in all countries live, pray, and think in a similar vein (and with each other together).
8. An urge for constant spontaneity A lack of professionalism is not a sign for the working of the Holy Ghost. Expressions like “to breed like rabbits,” or “Who am I to judge…?” might possibly impress some kinds of people, but, in reality, they lead to grave misunderstandings. Constantly, others have to explain what you really meant to say. To act without a plan and outside of the protocol has its time and place – but it should not become the standard. You owe this respect to your employees (in Rome and in the whole world). The measure of spontaneity is much smaller among popes than among pastors.
9. Lack of clarity about the interconnectedness of religious, political, and economic freedom
Many of your statements indicate that the state should rule more, control more, and be responsible for more areas, especially in the economic and social field. We in Europe are used to very strong states. However, history has proven wrong the idea that the state can take care of everything. The Church has to defend non-governmental institutions which can provide things that the state could not provide (in that way). Against the tendency to expect everything from the state, the Church has to help people to take care of their own lives. The welfare state can also become too powerful, and with it, too paternalistic, authoritarian, and illiberal.
10. Meta-Clericalism
On the one hand, you show very little interest in the clergy, on the other hand, you criticize a clericalism which is more of a phantom than something that is real. One cannot compensate for this lack of interest with a good intention or with statements in front of smaller groups. The bishops and priests have to know again that the pope stands behind them when they defend the Gospels “in season and out of season,” even if it is done in a way that does not personally please the pope. It is not good that some think that the pope sees many things quite differently from the Catechism, and that others then imitate him in order to make a career under this pontificate. As a pope, you of necessity have to serve the continuity and Tradition of the Church – even non-Catholic Christians are of this opinion. It may well be better for you to cut back on your innovations and provocations; we anyway already have many people who do that. Your Magisterium, as such, is already in itself the ultimate provocation and innovation – after all, you are the Representative of Christ and the supreme teacher of our supernatural Faith. “Grace, Mercy, and Peace” are coming “from God, the Father, and from Jesus Christ, the Son of the Father, in Truth and Love” (2 John 1:3); and they only come together in a complete package. If, during this coming Year of Mercy, you are now preparing yourself for Christmas, please take this occasion as an incentive to find out for yourself what you have yourself neglected in the recent past. Let yourself be helped by your own employees who will only learn from you if you are willing to learn something from them. Like me, many others have difficulties with the way you sometimes talk and act. But that can be fixed, if it becomes clear that you listen to what others have to tell you. Unfortunately, I know that you are not yet capable of dealing well with such criticism – that is why I do not put my name on this letter. I want to protect my superiors against your wrath, especially the priests and bishops with whom I have worked for many years in Rome and from whom I have learned so much. You might want to work on taking away such fears – from me and from others – or, even better, to make such letters as this one superfluous, namely, by learning something from others.
In this spirit, may you have a blessed and contemplative Season of Advent!
A Chaplain of Your Holiness
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A Nigerian preacher was asked to get off a bus in London for preaching on the bus.
From the few seconds captured on video, the Nigerian preacher who didn’t see anything wrong in preaching in the moving bus told his fellow passengers to hear him out “because I am preaching the word of life.”
However, one of the passengers who could not deal with the Nigerian preacher’s refusal to get off the bus said “Idiot!”. From the video, the driver of the bus obviously stopped, with the aim of not moving till the unidentified Nigerian preacher got off.
The preacher did not get off the bus and his fellow passengers threatened to call the police. But the Man of God surprised everyone with his reply.
“Well, it’s up to you. I have not injured anybody, I’m preaching Jesus Christ,” he replied.
Preaching on a moving bus and advertising local herbs and other petite products are norms in West Africa. This might have been the propelling force for the Nigerian preacher who thought the crowd in the bus was same as what he sees everyday in Nigeria.
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