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Kenya: Catholic expert says church is guilty of fanning tribalism

A former Catholic missionary to Kenya has accused local church authorities and the Vatican of fostering negative ethnicity which erupted into political violence after the December 27 election, reports CISA News.

The views of Fr Mark Faulkner, who worked in Ngong Catholic Diocese in the 1980s, come amidst growing debate on the church’s role in Kenya’s political crisis that has claimed more than a thousand lives and rendered some 350,000 people homeless.

Fr Faulkner writes in America’s National Catholic Reporter that “church leaders wring their hands and pastoral letters are hurriedly written condemning the violence and calling for peace”, without much thought to how “the pastoral policies of the church in Kenya, the legacy of the missionary enterprise and the interference of Rome contributed to the current crisis.”

From the colonial days the church “took to heart” the rigid and often antagonistic tribal identities constructed by colonialists in their ‘divide and rule’ strategy, says Fr Faulkner, a lecturer at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London.

Missionaries were appointed to a given tribe, where they worked for years, learnt and wrote down the local language and the tribe’s history, “introducing a regional flavor into their religious practice.”

Dioceses were created corresponding to the tribal boundaries established by secular authorities. Diocesan priests and the bishop were recruited from the local ethnic community, except in the remote dioceses where missionary bishops were still appointed since these were expected to have access to financial support from their home countries.

“The dreams of a local church had been unwittingly reduced to a tribal church. As people became more mobile, they abandoned the reserves of the colonial era and settled elsewhere in the country, but the Catholic Church they encountered was one in which they felt themselves to be outsiders, not able to understand the language and idiom of the liturgy.”

Fr Faulkner adds that Catholic clergy actively propagated tribal ideology. “Local priests and bishops frequently assumed a mantle of cultural as well as religious leadership, often having been installed as chiefs at the time of their ordination. They became champions of local issues, enjoying a respect that was not accorded to politicians.”

The Catholic social teaching is frequently subverted to articulate ethnic interests. “This thinking has penetrated even the hierarchy in Kenya, with the Kenya Bishops’ Conference giving way to a body fractured along ethnic lines.”

Matters have not been helped by the Holy See “policy of establishing dioceses that are contiguous with ethnic boundaries,” Fr Faulkner adds. The Vatican should “reconsider the appropriateness of appointing bishops who readily assume the position of tribal chiefs.”

The post-election crisis should serve as a wake-up call to the church in Kenya and, perhaps, to other local churches in Africa, the missionary writes. “While respecting and preserving local culture and language is laudable, it can also have the effect of bolstering narrow local self-interest over and against the national good.”

[02/28/2008]

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