By David Gibson
Visiting Angola and Cameroon in March 2009, Pope Benedict XVI released the working paper for the upcoming second special assembly of the Synod of Bishops for Africa. Based on that paper, we can predict that the effects of globalization on Africa will rank among the October 2009 assembly’s key concerns.

The forces of globalization — international trade, the Internet, TV, rapid travel, patterns of human migration — are shrinking the planet. Distant people have become each other’s neighbours.

Thus, the working paper acknowledges that globalization increasingly unifies the human family. Unfortunately, however, globalization often does not increase respect for those it impacts. Globalization tends “to marginalize Africa,” the paper comments.

The working paper suggests that positive African values and traditions need safeguarding as the world grows smaller. After all, forces of globalization representing other continents have ways of imposing their own cultural values on Africa.

Pope Benedict’s Africa visit was itself a sign that our planet is shrinking. We’ve grown accustomed in recent decades to travelling popes who visit every corner of the globe — something popes did not do, say, in 1940.

Pope Benedict commented during an in-flight interview enroute to Africa, “The church is Catholic, that is to say, universal, open to all cultures and all continents.” Universality is a great trait of the church. Catholics always have noted with pride that virtually anywhere they journeyed they could locate a Catholic Mass on Sunday; this accented the church’s oneness.

Of course, universality always represented more than an admirable trait of the church. But Catholics today have grown acutely aware that universality actually represents a call to action — a call shaped in various ways by globalization. First, it is a call to serve people everywhere. Pope Benedict put this call in context in his first encyclical, God Is Love. He wrote:

“Today the means of mass communication have made our planet smaller, rapidly narrowing the distance between different peoples and cultures. ... Our ability to know almost instantly about the needs of others challenges us to share their situation and their difficulties.”

The encyclical advised Catholics that within the church, “no member should suffer through being in need.” Second, the church’s universality is a call to respect cultural differences throughout the world, a respect not fostered automatically by globalization. Catholic leaders encourage awareness that while the church is one, it is culturally diverse too.

We hear frequently these days about inculturation of the faith, meaning that positive customs and means of expression found among the people of differing cultures are finding a place in the church’s life and worship. Third, the church’s universality is a call to enter into solidarity with people everywhere. People are making themselves better known in today’s smaller world. As a result, along with the new value placed on cultural diversity, the common humanity of the planet’s citizens is gaining renewed recognition.

For the church and its people, a heightened respect for the valuable diversities among people of faith is accompanied by a deepened appreciation of their unity.

That is why the universal church speaks almost habitually today of the need for solidarity in the world — solidarity within and among nations; solidarity among the Catholics of differing nations.

In comments as he prepared to leave Angola for Rome on March 23, Pope Benedict called upon his hearers to respond to their world’s needs by “building solidarity” between generations, nations and continents. Solidarity grows from a commitment people make to listen to each other and to accompany each other in their struggles. Solidarity is a virtue for a world grown smaller.

The universal church of the 21st century functions on a global, universal stage. The church makes its own the concerns of the citizens of a shrinking planet increasingly shaped by globalization. —