The Church Developing Africa

An article in Chiesa comments on the extraordinary work being done by the Church in the training and education of future diplomats who live in Africa, which is also the continent with very productive Catholic missionary activity, and the missionary’s are armed with the great encyclicals of social development.

Here is an excerpt:

“In presenting the course, the director of the Gregorian Foundation, Jesuit Fr. Franco Imoda, responded in this way to three connected questions:

"Why Africa? Because, except for a few exceptions, these are countries where millions and millions of disinherited human beings live, where globalization has not yet brought any benefits, but instead has brought only negative effects, where the looming worldwide food crisis will have the greatest repercussions in terms of death, disease, social violence.

"Why the Catholic Church? For more than one reason: first of all, because the Church is by its nature on the side of the dispossessed; then because the Holy See has for some time identified the African continent as the 'preferred' object of its foreign policy activity, and finally because today, at the fortieth anniversary of Paul VI's encyclical 'Populorum Progressio', [On the Development of Peoples] the Magna Carta of development from the Church's viewpoint, the selection of this theme seems more appropriate than ever”