Nairobi, 26 August, 2023 / 9:20 pm (ACI Africa).
The spread of Christianity in Africa has been fast owing to its people’s inherent structures of community life as well as the “bonding together” of community members, an American Catholic Bishop has said.
Bishop John Patrick Dolan of the Catholic Diocese of Phoenix in the United States weighed in on the ease of the spread of Christianity among Africans, noting that faith “naturally happens” where there are existing structures of communion.
“Faith begins where there are strong families and communities bonding together and they are not living behind their phones. In such a setting, faith naturally happens and grows. I think in the United States we have lost a lot of that,” Bishop Dolan told ACI Africa in an interview.
The Catholic Bishop who serves on the subcommittee for Solidarity Fund for the Church in Africa, an initiative of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB), said that in the U.S., “people have become very individualistic.”
“In some ways, we have lost our faith,” he further said, adding, “The numbers show it… It gives me hope when I see Africa and parts of Central America or Latin America and South Korea where people are naturally gathered responding to faith together as a community. It gives me a challenge to go back to the United States and build that community first of all, because I don't know if faith can be built one person at a time. It has to be built in a communal sense.”
