I stood among the concelebrating priests at Pope Leo’s Palm Sunday Mass in St. Peter’s Square. There, I watched the choreography of solemn ritual, spiritual power, and papal presence unfold. What caught my attention, as a Black Catholic priest, was the quieter symbolism at the altar.
Two African priests were among the principal masters of ceremony at the Mass, which marks the beginning of Holy Week, the most sacred time in the Christian calendar. One sat at the Pope’s right hand, directing the rhythm of the liturgy. Another coordinated the concelebrating cardinals, bishops, and priests. These were positions of trust, proximity, and visibility. For me, this was not a passing detail—it was something I had never witnessed in any previous papacy.
At many papal audiences now, an African priest also sits beside the Pope as one of his closest collaborators. These signs may seem small. But they are not small for African Catholics. They suggest a shift. They point to what I can only describe as the early contours of an Africa-first sensibility in the young papacy of Pope Leo.
Despite what was often said about Pope Francis’s love for Africa, it remains striking that by the time he died, no African cardinal headed a dicastery in Rome. Africans made up barely 12 percent of the College of Cardinals, and key commissions often lacked African representation. Pope Leo has already begun to address this imbalance by appointing Africans to positions of real influence, including Monsignor Anthony Ekpo as assessor in the Secretariat of State and Father Edward Daleng, O.S.A., as Vice Regent of the Prefecture of the Pontifical Household, as well as other appointments across dicasteries and consultative bodies.
It is, therefore, no surprise that Pope Leo’s longest and most consequential journey so far begins in Africa. The question is not only where he is going, but why and what it reveals about Africa’s place in the Church and in a world increasingly defined by fracture and violence.
We live at a time when global attention is once again fixed on the Middle East, where fragile ceasefires conceal deeper and expanding conflicts. In such a moment, Africa risks being pushed to the margins of the world’s moral imagination, even as its own wars continue to displace millions and devastate communities. Pope Leo’s decision to begin his most ambitious journey on the continent is thus not accidental. It is a statement.
Africa is not peripheral to Christianity—it is one of its birthplaces.”
First, Pope Leo recognizes that Africa is not peripheral to Christianity—it is one of its birthplaces. Long before Christianity took root in Europe, North Africa was already one of its great theological laboratories. In Algeria, he will walk in the footsteps of Augustine of Hippo, whose reflections on grace, freedom, unity, and the ethics of war helped shape the Church’s intellectual architecture. The debates that defined early Christianity were forged on African soil, in societies grappling with division, violence, and competing visions of the good life.
Algeria itself tells a complex story. Once a center of vibrant Christian life, it is now a place where Christianity is a minority. This is a sobering reminder that demographic growth does not guarantee enduring presence. Europe, once the heartland of Christianity, now faces a different reality: empty pews, declining vocations, and widespread disaffiliation, especially among younger generations. Cultural Catholicism remains but often detached from institutional belonging.
Many African Catholics, encountering this reality for the first time in Europe, are stunned. In Rome, even on Sundays, parishes are often sparsely filled. In Africa, by contrast, churches overflow. Seminaries and convents struggle to accommodate the growing number of candidates for the priesthood and religious life. But the question remains: will Africa’s current growth endure, or will it follow Europe’s trajectory?
Secondly, by choosing to visit Africa at this moment, Pope Leo is making a bold claim: Africa matters. Not only for the Church, but for the future of the world. With its demographic expansion and youthful population, Africa holds a key place in global development. African Christianity itself embodies immense cultural diversity, youthful energy, and the world’s fastest-growing Catholic population, with 8.3 million new African Catholics recorded in the 2025 Church Book of Statistics.
When Pope Paul VI visited Africa in 1969, he spoke of the continent’s deep spirituality and declared that the time had come for “an African Christianity.” That moment marked a turning point: an invitation for Africans not merely to receive the faith, but to shape it. Subsequent popes reinforced this call, urging African Christians to become missionaries to their own continent and to the wider world.
Today, that vision is bearing fruit. African churches are now major sources of missionary vitality. Countries such as Nigeria, South Africa, and the Democratic Republic of Congo rank among the leading missionary-sending nations worldwide according to the State of the Great Commission’s Report. The faith that was once received from Western missionaries in Africa is now being reciprocated by African missionaries to Europe and North America. As Archbishop Fortunatus Nwachukwu of the Vatican’s Dicastery for Evangelization has described it, this is a “Church of the Sheaves,” a form of gift exchange and reverse mission in which the fruits of earlier missionary efforts sustain Christianity in regions where it is declining.
And yet, this remarkable growth conceals a deeper paradox.
The expansion of Christianity in Africa has not consistently translated into spiritual and cultural renewal and integral human development. Many African countries remain marked by fragile institutions, corruption, economic exclusion, and persistent insecurity. Across refugee settlements from East to West Africa, millions live in prolonged uncertainty, suspended between survival and hope.
Religious life reflects this tension. Many Africans move between churches and other religious traditions, seeking healing, meaning, prosperity, and stability. The rise of Pentecostal and charismatic movements speaks to this hunger. They offer what has been described as a “factory of hope” for those abandoned by both state and society. This is not simply a challenge for the Catholic Church; it is a sign of the times. It calls for a deeper witness, a more contextual engagement with the daily struggles of the people, and a more convincing embodiment of the Gospel within the concrete realities of African life. The church must go beyond charitable outreach to address the root causes of poverty in Africa and become a church of the poor, for and with the poor in Africa.
Pope Leo’s journey will also bring him into direct contact with some of the continent’s most difficult political realities. In Cameroon, conflict continues to tear apart Anglophone regions. In Equatorial Guinea, entrenched rule has produced deep inequality in a resource-rich nation. A papal visit in such contexts is never neutral. It risks being interpreted as an endorsement. Yet it also creates a rare moral platform: an opportunity to speak truth to power and stand with those whose voices are often silenced.
Representation matters, but it is not enough.”
If the symbolism of African presence near the Pope signals a new beginning, it must now be matched by a deeper transformation. Representation matters. But it is not enough. The future of the Church in Africa and perhaps of global Catholicism depends on how it confronts several interrelated challenges.
The first is racism. During preparations for the Synod on Synodality, a question emerged: Is Africa ready to lead the global Church? One African bishop reframed the issue: the real question is whether the rest of the Church is ready to accept African leadership. His response exposed a deeper truth. Even within ecclesial structures, blackness is too often viewed through a deficit lens. Stereotypes persist: Africa as conservative, superstitious, dependent, and immature. Such assumptions undermine the possibility of genuine shared leadership and respect for African agency and contributions to the world church.
The real question is whether the global Church is ready for African leadership.”
The second challenge is dependency. For more than a century, many African churches have relied on financial support from Europe and North America. While this support has sustained vital institutions, it has also created asymmetrical relationships. A Church dependent on external funding will struggle to exercise full pastoral and moral agency and will be unable to develop the assets of its own people. Dependency can weaken local initiative and erode credibility and seems to me to be the biggest challenge facing the Catholic Church in Africa today.
The third is the unfinished task of decolonization. Christianity in Africa must move beyond inherited frameworks that do not fully engage African cultures, epistemologies, histories, and spiritual imagination. A mature African Christianity must not only receive Christian tradition but also shape it. This includes confronting colonial legacies, including the weaponization of ethnicity that contributed to tragedies such as the genocide in Rwanda and ongoing conflicts like that in Cameroon.
At the same time, there are signs of hope. Angola, one of the countries on the Pope’s itinerary, offers an example of post-conflict transformation, where collaboration between the Church, the state, and civil society has yielded gradual but meaningful progress. Angola also stands as a reminder of one of humanity’s darkest chapters: the transatlantic slave trade, now recognized by the United Nations as one of the greatest crimes against humanity. Remembering this history is necessary. But we must go beyond memory to ritualizing that sad chapter in African and human history in the Church’s liturgy, particularly given the shameful role of Christians and churches in the enslaving of African persons. The task now is healing, justice, and the renewal of human dignity. Africa today is not only a site of suffering. It is a moral voice for humanity’s future.
Third, leadership. The crisis of leadership in Africa’s political life is mirrored within the Church. Too often, ecclesial structures remain overly centralized and insufficiently participatory. A restorationist approach that prioritizes the revival of older liturgical forms, clerical habits, and hierarchical power dynamics rooted in a fading Western Christendom imagination cannot address Africa’s present challenges or inspire genuine renewal. What is needed is a reimagining of leadership grounded in accountability, transparency, and shared responsibility. Such a vision must include the laity and, critically, women, whose contributions remain indispensable yet underrecognized.
As I think back to that Palm Sunday Mass, to the quiet but unmistakable presence of African priests at the center of the Church’s most visible liturgy, I am struck by how much was contained in that moment. It was a sign of recognition. But it was also a sign of possibility. Africa is a place from which the Church must now learn. And perhaps, in this wounded world, is it from Africa that a more credible, more just, and more hopeful future for the Church and for our common life may yet emerge? Is Pope Leo’s Africa-first papacy sustainable, or will it soon meet with internal resistance in some quarters in the Vatican and the wider Church who would rather Africa remain a token to make up the number?
