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An immense task awaits your pastoral afforts, in particular the work of training those
Christians called to the apostolate-the Clergy, the Men and Women Religious, the
Catechists, the active Lay Men and Women. For, on the training and preparation of these
local elements, these choice workers of People of God, will depend the vitality, the
development, and the future of the African Church. This is quite clear. It is the plan
selected by Christ, that brother must save brother. But to achieve this evangelical purpose,
may truly qualified brothers be the ministers, the servants, who will themselves be called in
turn to co-operate in the common work of building up the Church. All of this you know.
We have therefore only to encourage and bless your resolution. A burning and much-
discussed question arises concerning your evangelizing work, and it is that of adaptation of
the Gospel and of the Church to African culture. Must the Church be European, Latin,
Oriental ... or must she be African? This seems a difficult problem, and in practice may be
so, indeed. But the solution is rapid, with two replies. First, your Church must be first of all
Catholic. That is, it must be entirely founded upon the identical, essential, constitutional
patrimony of the self-same teaching of Christ, as professed by the authentic and
indisputable. We must, all of us, be both jealous and proud of that Faith of which the
Apostles were the heralds, of which the Martyrs, that is, the Witnesses, were the
champions, of which the Missionaries were scrupulous teachers. You know that the Church
is particularly tenacious, we may even say conservative, in this regard. To make sure that
the message of revealed doctrine cannot be altered, the Church has even set down her
treasure of truth in certain conceptual and verbal formulas. Even when these formulas are
difficult, at times, she obliges us to preserve them textually. We are not the inventors of
our Faith; we are its custodians. Not every religious feeling is good; but only that religious
sentiment which interprets the thought of God, according to the apostolic teaching
authority established by the sole Master, Jesus Christ. Granted this first reply, however, we
now come to the second. The expression, that is the language and mode of manifesting this
one Faith, may be manifold; hence, it may be original, suited to the tongue, the style, the
character, the genius, and the culture, of the one who professes this one Faith. From this
point of view, a certain pluralism is not only legitimate, but desirable. An adaptation of the
Christian life in the fields of pastoral, ritual, didactic and spiritual activities is not only
possible, it is even favoured by the Church. The liturgical renewal is a living example of
this. And in this sense you may, and you must, have an African Christianity. Indeed, you
possess human values and characteristic forms of culture which can rise up to perfection
such as to find in Christianity, and for Christianity, a true superior fulness, and prove to be
capable of a richness of expression all its own, and genuinely African. This may take time.
It will require that your African soul become imbued to its depths with the secret charisms
of Christianisty, so that these charisms may then overflow freely, in beauty and wisdom,
but rather eagerly desire, to draw, from the patrimony your culture that it should not refuse,
but rather eagerly desire, to draw, from the patrimony of the patristic, exegetical, and
theological tradition of the Catholic Church, those treasures of wisdom which can rightly
be considered universal, above all, those which can be most assimilated by African mind.
The Church of the West did not hesitate to make use of the resources of African writers,
such as Tertulian, Optatus of Milevis, Origin, Cyprian and Augustine (cf. Optatam totius,
n. 16). Such an exchange of the highest expressions of Cccchristian thought nourishes,
without altering the originality, of any particular culture. It will require an incubation of the
Christian “mystery” in the genius of your people in order that its native voice, more clearly