A Response to Nicholas Kristof from an American Catholic Priest Serving in South Sudan

Nicholas Kristof is a prestigious op-ed columnist for The New York Times who has written extensively on Sudan. He can be credited with helping to focus the attention of the United States and the world on the genocidal conflict in Darfur, for which newly reelected Sudanese president Omar al Bashir has been charged with war crimes and crimes against humanity. He has also written about the difficult and complex situation in South Sudan, often overshadowed by higher profile coverage of Darfur. Twice in the past three weeks (“A Church Mary Can Love” on April 18, and “Who Can Mock This Church” on May 2) though, Kristof has written pieces which express a seriously flawed understanding of the Catholic Church. Since the second one was posted from Juba (the capital of South Sudan) and referred to the Church here, I felt I should offer some kind of response.

Basically, Kristof alleges that there are really two Catholic Churches: “the old boys’ club of the Vatican and the grass-roots network of humble priests, nuns and laity.” Ostensibly he makes this distinction to praise the “side” of the Church he admires and defend it from generalized attacks against Catholics that would lump everyone together, the good, the bad and the ugly. But his assertion really amounts to a torpedo aimed at the unity of the Church, and at least implicitly a wedge to try to divide it.

What saddened me most in Kristof’s second piece was his exploitation of the situation in Sudan to further his hypothesis of "the two Churches." I’ve met some of the people Kristof cites in his article. I know many others who serve in the trenches here, too: the majority are Sudanese and other Africans whose mention was conspicuously missing from the article. That’s probably because if you want a poster-person for a divided church you’d better look for an American or a European. That agenda is not part of the African  awareness of the unified reality of the Church; it’s an ideological import, a specimen of theological colonialism. It’s really the whole Church, the one Church, the institutional Church that has been so heroic here through the war years and now in the difficult and uncertain period of rebuilding and self-determination: bishops, priests, sisters, brothers, catechists, lay women and lay men suffering, struggling and working together, united in the love of Christ, the sole source of compassion and mercy we all so desperately need and the one thing that can sustain us through times of unbearable darkness and pain. 

The enthusiastic response to Pope Benedict’s visit to Cameroon and Angola a year ago, the positive and energizing participation of the variety of delegates in the Special Synod on Africa in Rome last October, and the encouraging encounter of Sudanese bishops with the Holy Father during their ad limina visit in March of this year: all attest to the joyful communion with the Successor of Peter the entire Church on this continent has lived from the beginning.

It was inaccurate and inappropriate for Kristof to misuse the experience of the Catholic Church in Sudan – a Church that has lived such an exceptional degree of unity and solidarity in Christ throughout a prolonged period of intense suffering that included religious persecution – to bolster his own questionable claims.

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