https://www.economist.com/international/2026/04/01/how-africa-is-changing-catholicism (A)
In a poor neighbourhood of Congo’s capital, Kinshasa, the bell tower of a neat whitewashed church rises high above grey walls and tin roofs. Just after dawn on a Sunday morning, the sound of tom-tom drums, electric guitars and lively choral music draws in hundreds of people, who sing and dance through the mass. This is the “Zairean rite”: Catholic liturgical services adapted to Congolese culture. Emmanuel Lamamba, a priest at the church, argues that the unique combination brings the local faithful closer to God.
It seems to be working. Whereas Catholic pews across the faith’s European and American heartlands are often empty, in Congo and much of Africa they are heaving. At the current pace, as many as half the world’s Catholics could be in Africa by 2066, a shift so seismic for the church that it has been compared to the upheaval of the Protestant Reformation.
Africa’s rapid population growth partly explains the shift. But the growth in believers also reflects what Emmanuel Katongole, a Ugandan priest and theologian, identifies as the “vitality, energy and dynamism” of Catholic churches on the continent. As the faith’s centre of gravity moves steadily south, they are set to play a pivotal role in shaping the morals and politics of global Catholicism—and perhaps of African societies as well.
It is with such considerations in mind that Leo XIV will visit Africa on April 13th, his first big foreign tour since his election last year. The world’s youngest continent should be an obvious priority for the new pope. Despite its close early links to colonialism, the Catholic church in Africa today is widely seen as a politically independent institution: a champion of democracy and clean government. Its reputation is relatively untainted by the sexual-abuse scandals which have dogged the church in the West. Many in Africa also associate Catholicism with a concern for the poor.
Starting in Algeria, then travelling to Cameroon, Angola and Equatorial Guinea, Leo will thus find receptive audiences. But it will not all be plain sailing. His liberal predecessor, Pope Francis, had fraught relations with the leaders of Africa’s Catholics. On both occasions when the late pontiff’s authority was openly challenged it was by African cardinals pushing for more conservative guidelines on liturgy and regarding gay couples.
Keeping the faith
Leo, who unlike Francis spent plenty of time in Africa before becoming pope, has already allayed some of the fears of the continent’s traditionalists. Last year he reaffirmed the church’s existing teachings on marriage and the family in a statement which “calmed things down”, says Norbert Litoing, a Cameroonian priest and director of the Centre for Interfaith Studies in Africa in Kenya. Even so, the restiveness—and clout—of the African church is clear.The transformative potential of Africa’s Catholics begins with the numbers. A century or so ago, Africans made up barely 1% of the world’s Catholics, with scant influence to match. No Roman pontiff set foot below the Sahara until 1969. By 2025, according to the World Christian Database, the continent was home to roughly 270m baptised Catholics (see chart), a 140-fold increase. Roughly a fifth of the church’s flock can now be found there (Latin America still has the lion’s share with two-fifths).
Africa has become a vital source of the church’s human capital. The number of priests declined in most of the world in 2023; in Africa it grew by nearly 3%. The same was true of seminarians (men studying to become priests). “We have more candidates applying to join the seminaries than there are facilities to accommodate them,” says Don Bosco Onyalla of ACI-Africa, a Catholic news service. The Society of Jesuits has begun relocating parts of its archives from Europe to Africa to meet demand from scholars and seminarians.
African missionaries are fanning out across the globe. There are about 455,000 Christian missionaries worldwide, of whom about 30% are Catholic and a steadily rising share African, says Todd Johnson at the Centre for the Study of Global Christianity in Massachusetts. Many more Africans are what he calls “bi-vocational” missionaries: economic migrants who evangelise, including by setting up churches, in their spare time. As long as the African diaspora keeps on expanding, so should the influence of African Catholics. “The rest of the universal Catholic church will depend on Africa for continued evangelisation,” argues Mr Onyalla.
So far this has not translated into proportionate clout in Rome. Africans still account for only 12% of cardinals below the age of 80, who select the pope. Although Leo’s inner circle includes a Nigerian priest, for the most part “Africans are missing from the central command in Rome”, argues Mario Aguilar, a papal adviser and scholar at the University of St Andrews.
This may not be the case for much longer. Big Catholic congregations such as the Salesians of Don Bosco are actively pushing what Sahaya Selvam, a Salesian priest in Nairobi, calls “affirmative action towards Africa in the leadership”. A Vatican diplomat says greater African representation in Rome is “inevitable”. Many observers think the next pope will be an African.
The continent’s Catholic leaders are among the most conservative in the global flock. This became evident in 2023, when the Vatican department responsible for enforcing doctrinal orthodoxy permitted priests to bless same-sex couples (while also making it clear that this was neither a holy rite like marriage nor an endorsement of homosexuality). So vehement was the outcry from African bishops that Francis in effect granted them an opt-out—a rare practice for the church.
Interventions in doctrinal matters are matched by increasingly forceful engagements in Africa’s public debates on sexuality and gender. Catholic leaders in recent years have been at the forefront of efforts across the continent to promote “family values”, restrict abortion rights and promote laws against homosexuality. This has sometimes had the uncomfortable effect of bringing them into conflict with the Vatican, and into alliances with rival denominations, such as Pentecostals or Mormons.
A visit to the Holy Cross Catholic Church in Nairobi, a branch of the ultra-traditionalist Society of Saint Pius X, offers a glimpse of this more conservative vision for African Catholicism. Its liturgy—delivered in Latin, shorn of Kenyan cultural expressions—runs sharply counter to the trajectory of the church since the 1960s. Its international school, run on-site by foreign and local priests, offers a traditional Catholic curriculum eschewing, among other things, sex education.
This mix is proving popular. Holy Cross’s services are so packed that another, bigger chapel needs to be built. “Africa is going to be the place where traditional Catholic faith is safeguarded,” says Esther Kamau, a congregant. Cardinal Robert Sarah, who led the other African revolt against Pope Francis, for a more conservative liturgy, would agree.
But Africa has doctrinal controversies of its own. On the question of polygamy, for example, many African Catholics are more relaxed than their brethren elsewhere. A conference of African bishops last year proposed welcoming more people in polygamous marriages into the church—an assault of their own on the conventional understanding of one of the seven sacraments of Catholicism.
A Catholic church in which Africans have more say will be more “socially engaged”, reckons Agbonkhianmeghe Orobator of the Jesuit School of Theology of Santa Clara University in California. In many African countries the church is associated with the provision of education and health care: one in nine pupils in primary education in Africa attends a Catholic school. In much of Congo, where there is a nationwide network of Catholic schools, universities and hospitals, the church is, in effect, a surrogate for the state.
In Africa “the church is political”, says Mr Katongole, the Ugandan theologian. In Congo its bishops have long helped mediate between the country’s warring factions, monitor elections and back pro-democracy movements. At a time when democracy in much of Africa is faltering, the Catholic church is an important bulwark.
Divine interventions
As it grows, the Catholic church in Africa will encounter problems familiar elsewhere. Many congregants complain about a lack of financial transparency. Although relatively few cases of sexual abuse have been reported on the continent, a large and growing flock will draw scrutiny. Its political interventions will make enemies. In countries with authoritarian leaders, such as Equatorial Guinea, critics say it has not intervened enough.But the more the church in Africa grows the harder it will be to control. For those who wish to see the faith thrive, that may be no bad thing. Mr Orobator envisages a future church which resembles less an empire centred on Rome than a “constellation of peripheries”, where “each geography has something to contribute but doesn’t dominate the whole”. For centuries, such a vision would have been fanciful. Now, it is beginning to seem inevitable.
