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Africa: Church urged to continue giving hope to continent

The Church in Africa has been challenged to continue to give hope to the continent and its people within its pastoral teaching, reports CISA.

Archbishop Anselme Sanon of Bobo-Dioulasso Archdiocese, Burkina –Faso said this while officially opening a four-day pan African conference on The Church in Africa fifty years after states independence, jointly by the Association of African theologians,(AAT) and the Catholic University of Eastern Africa at the University on November 8.

The prelate said that although the African continent could count some successful cases and, in particular, in some sections of its social, economic and political arena, fifty years down its independence line, she equally faced some serious challenges to focus on.

“Fifty years down the line, we still have cases of people going hungry, illiteracy hitting hard as well as some people facing serious cases of medical attention,” he stressed as he addressed the over 200 delegates-mainly Catholic theologians, attending the Nairobi pan African conference.

In a later interview with CISA, the Burkinabe Catholic Archbishop said it was saddening that even with all the resources the African continent has been endowed with, some of its people continued to face various economic and social hardships.

While in the past, before independence the culprits of our economic saboteurs were colonialists themselves, after independence, some of our new leaders have continued to undertake the same bad “mission,” he pointed out.

He added that it was saddening that although some of the African countries were gifted with natural resources including precious minerals such as gold, uranium, diamond among others, their people continued to be hard hit by poverty.

He attributed the phenomenon to that fact that corruption and serious mismanagement of resources persisted in some of those countries.

The Burkinabe Catholic Archbishop, current president of the committee of theologians of SECAM, said one of the challenges of the African continent as she marked its fifty years of independence was to make every effort to stamp out corruption, mismanagement and other practices that went against the pastoral teaching of the Church.

“If fifty years of the Africa’s independence is not good enough today as we mark the fifty years of independence, surely we must work hard so that come another fifty years, we shall have a better story to tell,” he added.

“And the Church must continue to play its role towards this direction and more so, through its social teaching,” he added.

The four-day conference, November 8-12, being attended by scholars, mainly from the Catholic Church, is focusing its deliberations on the following topics:

Fifty years of independence: society, politics and development in Africa; Second Special Assembly of Synod for Bishops Message and the reinvention of Africa; Reinventing Africa: Development, ethics, ecclesiology and evangelization; The Church and reinventing Africa: Association of African Theologians’ research programme and free time and AAT/research in the service of Africa’s reinventing.

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TAGS: Africa Church in Africa pastoral teaching Archbishop Anselme Sanon Catholic Church

[11/15/2010]

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