SUPPORTERS of Vatican II, when faced with its shocking fruits in the West, sometimes point to growth and success in Africa as a hopeful contrast to disastrous decline. The numbers are up by many millions in Africa, they say. Some even argue the “reform” was all necessary because the Church needed to be de-Westernized. Africans and Asians being incapable — so they say — of appreciating the solemn and ancient liturgies, only the great watering down and “evolution” of Vatican II could have accomplished that de-Europeanization.

The writer George Neumayr visited Africa in 2022 and 2023, hoping to write a book on this very subject. What he found was contrary to this idea of a “vibrant” Africa.

Writing in American Spectator, he described his visits to Côte d’Ivoire, the former French colony where the faith was robust and growing in the first half of the 20th century. His observations are collected in a new book published by Os Justi Press, Is African Catholicism a “Vatican II Success Story?”  with co-authors Peter Kwasniewski, Claudio Slavucci and an “African seminarian.” While I cannot recommend these authors on the general meaning of Vatican II, this book is a perceptive glance at Africa since the robber council.

Neumayr wrote:

But all that momentum is now gone and the Church in Côte d’Ivoire is a shadow of its former self. Today’s Catholic priests offer not unvarnished Catholicism but its pitiful “social justice” variant, a blend of socialist politics, modernist theology, and ecumenical babble.

Every parish I have visited looks like a ghost town, including St. Paul’s Cathedral, a modernist monstrosity in downtown Abidjan. Built in the 1980s at huge cost, the architecturally lame cathedral is difficult to describe, featuring a shapeless “African man,” an allegory of some sort lost on me and many others. I walked into the vast structure — the second largest cathedral on the African continent — and not a single person was inside praying. True, one doesn’t expect a huge number of Catholics inside a church on a week day. But nobody? In the second largest cathedral in Africa?

Needless to say, St. Paul would find St. Paul’s Cathedral unimpressive. St. Paul preached Jesus Christ crucified, not humanist dreck. The message of hte Cathedral, which looks like it belongs more to the tradition of UNESCO than Catholicism, is depressingly confused and amounts to a Christianity without Christ. Who would bother to join  such a feeble quasi-religion? Who would bother to keep practicing it?

As you can see in the above video, St. Paul’s is a typical example of Vatican II, brutalist architecture. A grass hut could be perhaps more artful.

Neumayr later visited the largest cathedral, Notre Dame Basilica in Yamoussoukro, also in the Ivory Coast — an African’s billionaire’s gift and a relatively inspiring, classical structure with a great dome, said to be larger than that of St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome.

“It’s a Church first and a tourist attraction second,” said my tour guide. The reverse looked true to me. I saw no Catholics praying in it.

Sadly in January 2023, Neumayr, days after visiting Notre Dame Basilica, died suddenly of malaria in Africa at the age of 50. His dream of writing more about the legacy of Vatican II ended there.

But he and the other authors together make several important contentions in this short book:

— The rate of growth in the Catholic population of Africa is caused primarily by population increases not conversions and is smaller than the dramatic growth from 1900-1970, when European missionaries worked to bring the faith to the contient.

— Many African Catholics are defecting to Protestantism perhaps, well, because Protestants do Protestant-style liturgies better than the Novus Ordo Church.

— Islam has bypassed Catholicism as the largest professed faith in the world and draws many adherents in Africa.

— The moral relativism and religious indifferentism of Vatican II has led to a syncretistic mixing of anti-Christian African traditions such as polygamy and ancestor worship with Catholic beliefs

— Vatican II “inculturation” has largely inculturated the worst of Western secular culture in Africa, ignoring the pre-Vatican II African devotions and traditions of reverence

— Contrary to what apparently many modernist theological experts believe, Africans do not necessarily prefer dance  and wild clapping to solemn prayer. True “inculturation” does not proceed from committees of experts but in the long ages of the Church happened organically under guidance from the hierarchy over long periods of time.

The unnamed African seminarian writes from Nigeria, where he sees an “abysmal decline in Catholic vigour.”

…[T]he alleged hostility of the Church to non-European cultures before Vatican II, has many troubling and distorted sides to it, not the least its uncharitable generalization and ingratitude for the missionaries who left all they cherished and gave all and themselves for the salvation of strangers.

The missionaries, though not always saints by any means, often followed Pope Pius XII exhortation, similar to those of other popes, to love the land where they toiled as “a second fatherland.”

There is reason to believe that had the great apostasy not come to the Church in the form of the “heresy of all heresies,” the pre-Vatican II missions would not have been derailed and — who knows? — Africa might not have been the scene of so many murderous Marxist revolutions and the resurgence of its ancient Islamic ways. Indeed, Vatican II, motivated in large part by the sinful pride of intellectuals, was a major force in delivering Africa into the outstretched hands of Islam and Marxism, as it delivered Latin America and Russia.

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