ROME – When Pope Leo XIV embarks on his 11-day visit to Africa on Monday, it will be a potent voyage that reconnects him with his Augustinian roots, but it will also highlight several challenges in diverse nations where the faith is growing yet crippled by corruption and injustice.

Pope Leo, an Augustinian, will kick off his April 13-23 voyage by becoming the first pope to visit Algeria, a nation still grappling with the scars of war and the birthplace of Saint Augustine of Hippo, founder of Leo’s Augustinian Order.

While in Algeria, the pope will visit the archeological site of Hippo, where Augustine served as bishop, and celebrate Mass in the Basilica of Saint Augustine.

Though Leo has gone to the sites twice before as prior general of the Augustinian Order, his visit as history’s first Augustinian pope making the first-ever papal visit to the land of Augustine is highly symbolic and will set the spiritual tone for the rest of the trip.

Pope Leo while in Algeria will also visit the Great Mosque of Algiers to promote interfaith dialogue following Algeria’s brutal civil war during the 1990s, known as the “Black Decade” in which some 250,000 people were killed as the national army fought against Islamist insurgency.

Algerian authorities reportedly denied a Vatican request for Leo to visit Médéa, located some 30 miles south of Algiers, to pray at the Tibhirine monastery, where seven French Trappist monks were kidnapped and killed by Islamic fighters May 21, 1996.

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Instead, Leo will pray at the Maqam Echahid Martyrs’ Monument after landing in Algiers and will later visit a center for dialogue run by Augustinian nuns in the city.

As a former missionary himself who faced violent threats by the Shining Path terrorist group in Peru, his commemoration of the martyrs of Algeria will likely also hold special significance for Leo.

After his two days in Alegria, the pope will then travel to Sub-Saharan Africa, making stops in Cameroon, Angola and Equatorial Guinea, where he will wade into the juxtaposition of a rapidly growing flock living against a backdrop of authoritarianism, poverty, and corruption.

Dialogue and growth

Pope Leo’s visit to Africa will take him to the region where the Catholic Church is growing most rapidly.

There are roughly 1.4 billion baptized Catholics in the world today, over two-thirds of whom live in the global south, especially Latin America, Africa and Asia.

Nearly half of Catholics live in Latin America, with Brazil and Mexico the two largest Catholic countries in the world. Sub-Saharan Africa, where Leo will visit next week, is area of the Church’s fastest growth, with a total Catholic population shooting up by almost 7,000 percent from 1975 to 2000 alone.

As of 2023, there were some 280 million Catholics in Sub-Saharan Africa, representing roughly 20 percent of the global Catholic population. That year, according to Vatican statistics, some 15.8 million new Catholics were baptized in Africa alone. Projections estimate that by 2050, some 30 percent of the world’s Catholics will live on the African continent.

Cameroon, Angola, and Equatorial Guinea are all majority-Christian nations, with Roman Catholicism being the predominant practice.

In Muslim-majority Algeria, where 99 percent of the population adheres to Sunni Islam, the pope will likely launch a firm message of peace and dialogue, especially in light of the 1990 civil war.

For the rest of his tour, however, he will likely be affirming the growth of the church on a continent that has become the largest new exporter of missionaries to Europe and throughout the West.

Bishop Fortunatus Nwachukwu, secretary of the Section of First Evangelization of the Dicastery for Evangelization, who is from Nigeria, told journalists at a roundtable ahead of the papal trip that African missionaries “do not come to evangelize the West.”

“The West is already evangelized,” he said, saying missionaries from Africa come mainly “to support the mother who is weak in her age.”

He described the flourishing church in Africa as rapidly expanding, with some growing pains, saying the Church there is still dependent on external support, despite its large numbers, and must learn “to grow autonomously and independently,” while still receiving Western support when needed, but with local churches supporting one another.

Nwachukwu also addressed the notion that the Catholic Church in Africa is “traditionalist” or “conservative,” saying he believes the right descriptor is “faithful.”

“We have associated values, people are ready to give their lives for that Church and those values. Many people have given their lives for that,” he said, noting that there is often pressure on African nations to abandon their traditional values and embrace “a fantasy, but a fantasy that is not yet proved.”

While serving as the Holy See’s representative to the United Nations in Geneva, Nwachukwu said, he faced this pressure, but his response was, “Why should I believe in you, who are telling me this? I believe in what this missionary who died for this.”

“That is not conservative,” he said, but rather, it means “being faithful. We are faithful. We are not conservative.”

One major challenge for the African church, generally, is polygamy, which is such a prominent issue that last year the Vatican issued a doctoral document on the value of monogamous marriage, and created a study group to explore the issue.

Nwachukwu said the church’s longstanding teaching on marriage, a lifelong union between one man and one woman, is a cultural challenge for many parts of Africa, especially in sparse nomadic areas where multiple wives who could have multiple children were deemed necessary for survival, as many children were needed to tend fields and farm.

Wealthier families with more expansive lands tended to have more children to tend the land, and while modern technology means this is no longer necessary, the cultural custom remains and is something the church is working to change, Nwachukwu said.

Papal visits to the continent have often come packaged with calls for clergy to adhere to their vows of celibacy. Pope Benedict XVI visited both Angola and Cameroon in 2009, infamously commenting en route that condoms could make the continent’s AIDS crisis worse, which led to a cascade of condemnation from healthcare officials and experts.

Ethnic diversity has also proven a challenge, Nwachukwu said, noting that episcopal nominations are often difficult, as those whose territories include various ethnic groups are not always welcomed.

This is known as the “son of the soil syndrome,” he said, whereas the Holy See insists “the church should speak of the ‘son of the church.’”

Poverty, peace, and corruption

In spite of the church’s rapid growth on the African continent, each country that Pope Leo will visit carries a series of critical challenges that he will undoubtedly address.

These include problems related to migration and injustice, with the exploitation of both natural and human resources in a region that produces high quantities of oil, yet vast swaths of the population live in poverty.

Corruption will also be a major theme, a Vatican spokesman said, as the Sub-Saharan countries Leo will visit are governed by authoritarian regimes and two presidents who have ruled for decades.

Father Giulio Albanese, a member of the Comboni missionary order, stressed the vast differences in the countries Pope Leo will visit, saying the pope “is preparing to visit four African countries characterized by complex social and political contexts, but very different from one another.”

Head of the office of communications for the Vicariate of Rome and a member of the Council of the Section for Relations with States and International Organizations of the Vatican’s Secretariat of State, Albanese said that, however, a connecting thread between the nations is the increased involvement of China in their economic and infrastructural development.

There are also similarities as each of the countries are grappling with global tensions over the U.S.-Israeli war in Iran, as well as the impact of the ongoing war in Ukraine.

Despite these factors, a Vatican spokesman said no extra security measures are being planned.

When looking at the trip, Nwachukwu urged outsiders not to “throw Africa into a small chest…Let’s not lump the countries of Africa together indiscriminately,” as each of them, though all former European colonies, is different.

He also highlighted the problems of extraction industries and corruption in countries that are among the world’s leading oil and mineral producers, including gold, diamonds, and iron.

The extraction of which has transformed the economies of these nations in recent years, yet Francis often, in his visits to the continent, condemned the exploitation of Africa’s resources, benefiting a few while harming the environment and leaving the vast majority of the population in poverty.

Especially in Cameroon, where a violent conflict has lacerated the nation’s French and English-speaking contingents, the pope “will certainly call for peace,” Nwachukwu said, lamenting that oftentimes, “we are builders of violence.”

“If we have a change of heart, violence can be overcome,” he said, saying Equatorial Guinea, due to its lush lands and oil reserves, “can become the Switzerland of Africa.”

However, this would require “a conversion, not only of the people, but also politicians,” as the current president, Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo, has been in power since 1982 and is widely accused of corruption.

In Cameroon, President Paul Biya, 93, has served since 1979, making him the world’s longest-serving ruler, presiding over a nation with a reputation for systemic and endemic corruption across all sectors of public life.

Likewise, Nwachukwu said oil-rich Angola has the natural resources to be a global powerhouse, yet a majority of the population lives in poverty, so there is a need for leaders who “put the common good, human dignity, in first place.”

“Certainly, the pope will speak about these issues,” he said.

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