10 April 2005
analysis
Nairobi — Because the Roman Church is a worldwide institution with a multi-racial following, it should be totally "colour-blind". Yet the issue of race continues to dog the election of its leader.
One encounters the "caution" that many "people" will leave the church if it elects an African into John Paul's berth. By "many people" is meant, of course, white members.
Some time ago, CBS's "60 Minutes" programme, discussing the possibility of Nigeria's Arinze succeeding John Paul, asked whether this would force white Catholics to quit en masse.
Randall Robinson tells this story in The Debt: What Europe Owes Blacks. Yet the church did not always harbour such chauvinism.
Racism invaded it much more recently. It was a product of the ethico-intellectual night in which Europe hibernated for a whole millennium after the Goths invaded Rome in the fifth century AD.
Before that - as would happen to London, Paris and Amsterdam (and for the same reason) - Rome attracted and was inundated by people from all nations, races and tribes.
The Mediterranean basin, the hub of the empire, became a melting pot of all human types - all, however, united mainly by the extreme cruelties of imperial officials.
That was why, when the Gnostics of Alexandria began preaching the doctrine of salvation - goaded by these worldly injustices - the message caught on like bushfire throughout the empire.
In Acts of the Apostles, Dr Lucas Cornelius (reputed to have authored also the gospel called Luke) depicts a scene - the Pentecost - in which converts of all races, although speaking different languages, can understand one another perfectly.
In such a situation, a leader's skin colour cannot matter. And one of the merits of the New Testament is that there is not even a whiff of racial prejudice in it.
It is not surprising, therefore, that, even after it repaired to Europe, the early church was often shepherded by black individuals. We know of at least two black popes before Constantine and a third soon afterwards.
Robinson writes that, during the first millennium, "...the Catholic Church had three popes who were either from Africa or of African descent; Saint Victor I (189-99), Saint Miltiades (311-14) and Saint Gelasius (492-96)..."
The literature singles Gelasius out for superlatives. Both Oxford Dictionary of Popes and P. G. Maxwell-Stuart's Chronicle of the Popes affirm that, though born in Rome, he was an "African by nationality" or "by descent".
They comment that he was "great even among the saints". And in Popes Through the Ages, James Brusher writes: "Although a great writer, Gelasius made his strongest impression as a man of holiness ... outstanding for his sense of justice and above all for his charity to the poor..."
So where did "60 Minutes" get the information that Arinze would have been "...the first black pope ever..."?
Robinson remarks that either (1) they did not see the myriad of references to the fact or (2) they saw but misread them or (3) they read them aright but ignored them as unlikely.
If (1) and (2), it is a manifestation of that international information structure whose hopeless injustice Europe continues to deny. If (3), there can be no clearer case of racism.
If (3), indeed, "60 Minutes" was just continuing a long tradition of what American historian C. Woodson called a "whitening" of all black history makers.
However, the probable original reason that history does not record these three by their race is that such a parochial issue never arose. There was nothing controversial in a black person becoming a pope.
Of the huge literature on the papacies of the three Africans, there is not a single remark on their racial identity. In Robinson's words, "The three popes were selected ... served with distinction, and that was that."
That was because they served when Christianity was still a religion of the polloi, unaware that skin colour made any difference to one's heavenly calling and one's ability to serve fellow humans.
Based in Europe, they were selected by voters who were overwhelmingly white but who put no premium whatsoever on colour. They were selected, that is, before religion was polluted with the curse of racism.
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