This work is a timely posthumous collection of Richard Gray's previously published articles. The anthology provides a balanced and enlightening perspective on the history of papal engagement with the African Christian mission beginning in the early fifteenth century. In an apt introduction, the editor, Lamin Sanneh, describes the text as Gray's perennial contribution to World Christianity, especially African Christianity.
The book's central thesis is revolutionary. Hitherto, an institutional perspective had solely credited Catholic Europe and its missionaries with the initiatives for the African mission. Contrarily, Gray's meticulous findings surprisingly reveal that critical initiatives came from African Christians. Ethiopia, whose Christian tradition predates those of many parts of northern Europe, had appealed several times to Rome to send missionaries to the country and to other parts of Africa. Moreover, the initiatives equally came from Kongo, the first African Christian kingdom, and, finally, from freed African slaves. These African initiatives, Gray consistently argues, not only aroused papal interest in sub-Saharan Africa and laid the foundation of the Portuguese maritime endeavor in Africa, but also largely engendered the founding of the Congregation of Propaganda Fide in 1622. This thesis unfolds over the course of eleven chapters, each of which ends with a synthesis of key points.
Well researched, with an elaborate bibliography, this volume exhibits a very impressive command of the sources and their connectedness. Gray shows why the Ethiopian overtures largely caught the attention of the papacy and Europe. The period in question coincided with the rise of the Ottoman power in the Mediterranean world and with the Protestant Reformation. It was in the interest of Catholic Europe and the papacy to overcome the ascendancy of these twin challenges through a strong Catholic Ethiopia and Africa.
Certain factors, however, undermined the papal strategies in the African mission: the threat of Portuguese patronal rights; the tying of mission to the colonial process; inadequately prepared clergy whose priority seemed to be personal aggrandizement rather than salvation of souls and encouragement of indigenous clergy; inability of missionaries to appropriate African cosmology via inculturation; and finally, colonial exploitation and missionary involvement in the Atlantic slave trade. Rome had condemned the slave trade in 1686 but could not stop it, because Rome's foreign mission was inextricably tied to the Portuguese Padroado. At that time, Europe was Christianity, and Christianity was Europe.
While the overall work is engaging, it would have benefited if Gray had mentioned even cursorily certain papal bulls, particularly Nicholas V's Romanus Pontifex (1454). Such bulls bestowed absolute power and patronal rights on European kings over all so-called non-Christian peoples to invade, conquer, and dispossess them of their lands, declared terra nullius, and when necessary to subjugate the people in perpetual slavery. Mention of such bulls, which invariably paved the way for full-blown colonial exploitation and the Atlantic slave trade, would have provided an illuminating context for students. This book would be useful in courses dealing with World Christianity, ecclesiology, missiology, inculturation theology, and in particular, the reception of Christianity in Africa.
