We can learn about sacred space and time from our
fellow Catholics in Togo who shame us
with their spiritual wealth and material poverty.

The Togolese Advantage:
Bringing religion to church
By James F. O’Callaghan

A Foreign Service career has placed me in Latin America, Italy, Washington and now Togo over the past twenty-five years, and therefore at Masses in Spanish and Italian as well as English and, presently, in the local Ewe language and in French. But whereas the experience elsewhere ranged from acceptable to banal to hideous, in Togo I feel that I am in a sacred space at a sacred time. I think the difference points up something liturgists ought to have known: you can’t create religious experience in secular terms. You can do so in Ewe or Mina or Kabye or other West African dialects because those are languages of a deeply religious world populated by ancestors and spirits as well as saints and Christ; but the Western languages long ago became those of rationalism and modernism, and have since degenerated into vehicles for egoism and alienation. The respective Masses reflect this.

Thirty years ago one heard that the Latin Mass was too specifically European for Third World ears, and the absence of local music, dance, or vestment was both an insult and a barrier to belief. One may doubt: Matteo Ricci did well enough in China centuries ago (for all that he learned to speak to the Mandarins in their own terms); or, the Indians of Ecuador and Peru had long since made the Roman liturgy their own and insofar as syncretism was needed or inevitable they supplied it. The Church was growing rapidly in Africa before the change and the Archbishop here told me Latin was not a problem and, indeed, emphasized that he had introduced the required changes only very gradually so as not to alienate people from the liturgy they loved. Nonetheless, one may allow that Latin as the “European language of prayer,” introduced by colonialists, was perhaps not the best for Togo which has other languages of prayer. But when the European peoples abandoned it they were left with only the idioms of cultures hostile or indifferent to, or simply ignorant of, liturgy.

Everyone I have met in Togo is a practicing believer—Catholic, Protestant, Moslem, or animist. Especially the latter: they say Togo’s population is about 40% Christian, 30% Moslem, and 100% animist, and one sees it at funerals where dancers perform a locally-ancient ritual next to the grave over which the priest is praying. I do not, however, see it much in church: if there is a great deal of music, and if people dance or sway in place, the order of the Mass is followed scrupulously and the Eucharist absolutely the central point, experienced in silence and awe. Such syncretism as exists includes the old rite: the Kyrie is still in Greek, and at the Preface the people respond to the priest’s Dominus vobiscum with Et cum spiritu tuo. Throughout the Mass the people follow with rapt attention and when they sing they do so with—so far as I can tell—real joy and a total absence of self-consciousness. And while I cannot comment on the content of sermons in Ewe, I know that the sermons in French (or in English, at the Cathedral Mass for the local Ghanaian population) are thoroughly orthodox and focused on the theological and moral lessons contained in the Scripture readings as explicated by the Church. There is not much talk of “community” because communal ties of kinship or ancestral village or neighborhood define people here; there is no need to urge such ties, or to pretend they exist.

The good nuns long ago did their best to teach us that what you bring to the Mass determines what you get out of it. A sincere repentance for sin, and a desire to thank God for his blessings and to attain a greater union with him, enable us better to receive the grace offered. Indifference or sullenness or impatience, on the other hand, ensure that we are pretty much wasting our time and God’s. The Togolese know what to bring.

Many taxis in Lomé (the capital) carry bumper stickers like “Christ the Savior” or “Wonderful Jesus” and the reported appearances of the Virgin Mary last year in Tsevié (30 miles north) drew thousands. Near my house is a backyard “Evangelical Church of the Spirit” which seems to operate seven days a week (and sometimes 24 hours a day) with singing and “possession by the spirit” like the possessions in animist rites. (An anthropologist said such rites allow the spirits of slaves from the north, especially, to enjoy a body for a time and that pious people allow their bodies to be so used in reparation for the sins their own ancestors committed against these slaves.) President Eyadema, in office since 1967 (and in power since 1963) has repeatedly asserted that God saved him from an assassin’s attempt and from an airplane crash so that he might continue serving his people. One would dismiss this as cynical politics, and many Togolese do so. But the President himself (reportedly a Protestant, and his wives too) seems really to believe it and, more to the point, it is the sort of thing Togolese believe eminently possible and, for his supporters, self-evident. God, and/or gods and spirits, are present in a thousand ways here, warning people of what is to come by the color of a stone brought from a sacred forest each year, helping them in their need, demanding their attention. Superstition? Yes, some of it. Paganism? Of course. In part. But people who live amid such customs are attuned to the reality of a spiritual world and receptive to authentic teaching. And hearing it, they return to Mass with a sincere repentance for sin and a desire to thank God for his blessings and attain greater union with Him. They also bring faith in the Church and in the special status of priests and bishops who, for all their personal failings, possess power for our good. This is not America, maybe not even South America anymore. Nor even all of Africa.

I read, in The New York Times, that the Church in Brazil is presently confronting a serious challenge of syncretism. While descendants of the African slaves have always mixed old gods and new saints, today some priests and even prelates insist upon their right to do so and reject the Church authority which would force such practices into hiding. That curious and much-invoked entity, the spirit of Vatican II, seems to have arrived: the People of God in Bahia claim at least as much authority as a Pole in distant Rome. There are recent reports of similar controversies in South Africa, and the massacre of cult members in Uganda in early 2000 reminded us again of the horrible potential of perverted religion. There’s a reason the Church Fathers fought so vigorously against heresy. But while insane cultism is also a danger in the West (witness Jonestown), a more pervasive perversion—and one which may well encourage cults—is that which tries to join secularism and Catholicism.

American bishops built an extensive parochial school system and fostered organizations like the Knights of Columbus and much more to protect the faith of immigrants from the surrounding Protestant culture—a particular historical embodiment of the eternal war which Christians wage against the world. It was never easy and there were casualties enough, but a Catholic space remained and you knew who and what belonged within or without. At least, you did so until the “Spirit of Vatican II” arrived: as American culture became more secular (less ostensibly but more radically Protestant), the bishops abandoned the barricades and invited the world in. Suddenly it was thought we could become better Catholicism—more joyful, more committed, more charitable—by adopting secular languages. Not just English for Latin, because of course you can pray in English. But in 1969 we did not simply begin reciting the English translation of the Latin (available in all missals) but brought in American idioms and attitudes of the day: “participation” for authority, “sincerity” for doctrine, and “rights” in place of obligations. In very short order Church governance was judged by the standards of American democracy and found wanting; Church doctrine was measured by individual judgment or feelings and found irrelevant. And the liturgy, its authority woefully diminished, now had to compete as entertainment with movies and talk shows and a thousand other attractions. The liturgy lost. We are hardly more joyful or charitable, and as for commitment, there are nearly 100,000 fewer nuns while more nominal Catholics probably watch The NFL Today on October Sundays rather than assist at Mass.

And the rest of Sunday, and the rest of the week? We watch The Simpsons and the NBA and Titanic, follow the news about Bill Gates and Alan Greenspan and new model cars, and listen to talk radio debate “issues” like AIDS, the trade deficit, global warming and wars in the Balkans—all problems to be solved with technical or economic or political means. Of course Bart Simpson and Alan Greenspan are of interest, and medicine is a proper means to address disease. But in a secular society these subjects and these means crowd out everything else. They, and not saints or spirits, constitute the world we inhabit—notwithstanding the “Jesus Saves” bumper stickers you see on American freeways or the blessings routinely pronounced by American politicians who could teach President Eyadema something about cynicism. Religion is just another issue, subject to the rules of secular debate on Larry King Live.

So what do American Catholics bring from that world into church? Secular values and expectations. Neither language nor comportment nor architecture asks them to check those things at the door and so, judging from repeated comments I’ve heard over the years, they enter with expectations of entertainment or therapy—to be made to feel good in the secular terms they brought with them. And they expect Father Ryan and his cast of lectors and readers and musicians to make it happen. The actions of many priests persuade me that Father Ryan feels the same way; the resulting banal music and saccharine sermons by clownish priests are well known and need no repetition here. The point is that even in church the music and the language and the cast encourage us to continue to think like the secularists the world insists we must be.1 Most people seem to do so: surveys tell us that a majority of American Catholics no longer believe in the Real Presence; as good secularists, they must find the idea unthinkable.2

The Togolese, who are not secularists, seek and expect to find the sacred in any language and under any form. Modern Europeans and Americans do not do so, and in abandoning our sacred language and ritual we are left to seek God through language that will allow him to exist only on the world’s terms. Little wonder that we seldom find him or that so many have stopped looking.

The Togolese who had no problems with the old liturgy could—for that reason and others—make the new liturgy vibrantly spiritual. But, it now seems clear, the Westerners who complained that the Latin Mass didn’t “speak to our age” were already losing the ability to hear God’s word at all and by substituting the language of the world they have made hearing it more difficult for all of us. When this unhappy situation changes, as it must in God’s good time, it may well result from the efforts of African priests, some of whom are already working in Europe.3 But while we wait for the next Augustine from somewhere south of Hippo, we could learn anew about sacred space and time from our fellow Catholics who shame us at once with their spiritual wealth and their material poverty. And we could reclaim the language which, for so long, tied us to God and His universal Church.