UNITED STATES
The New Yorker
Posted by Naunihal Singh
According to the smart money, the odds favor the election of Ghana’s Cardinal Peter Turkson as the next Pope, the first from Africa since Pope Gelasius I over fifteen hundred years ago. In the intervening years, several African candidates have attracted interest (Benin’s Cardinal Gantin, in 1978, and Nigeria’s Cardinal Arinze, in 2005), but none has ever been a front-runner among the papabile. In fact, the term “black pope” traditionally refers to the head of the Jesuits, revealing how unlikely the prospect of an actual black pope was for most of the Church’s history.
This time around, the demographic argument in favor of a non-European pope is hard to ignore. In the eight years of Benedict’s papacy alone, the number of Catholics in Africa grew by twenty-one per cent and the number of priests by sixteen per cent. In Europe, on the other hand, the number of Catholics has plummeted to such an extent that it is no longer the most Catholic region in the world, both in terms of the number of faithful and percentage of the population. The election of Turkson by the College of Cardinals, most of whom still come from Europe, would be clear acknowledgment that the leadership of the Church has to reflect this shifting center of gravity. The past of the Catholic Church is in Europe, and its future is in Africa and Asia.
For me, as a (non-Catholic) professor teaching African politics at the University of Notre Dame, this is an immensely teachable moment. Once, Pope Alexander VI used his authority to help divide the world for colonial conquest. Now the Church is considering a man for the papacy who was born a subject of the British colony of the Gold Coast. There is a clear sense of the wheel turning around.
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