French politicos and journalists are hot under the collar because of a new book with the provocative title The Vatican Against France. Its author: Protestant François Mejan, onetime (1946-50) head of the French Interior Ministry's Direction des Cultes (which keeps a discreet watch on the activities of all religious groups in France). The book's thesis: the Roman Catholic Church is undermining France's prestige and power in her colonies, especially Africa, by setting up a native clergy instead of depending on French missionaries.
The cross and the flag were once good partners, Mejan maintains, but the Vatican dramatically switched its policy in 1951 with the publication of the encyclical Evangelii praecones (Heralds of the Gospel). In this encyclical the Pope specifically urged "a network of native priests" to protect the church in the event of nationalistic revolts in colonies. The Vatican's reply to Mejan's book: native clergy has been the church's aim for centuries, but only recently has it become possible on an important scale, thanks to modern communications between Rome and the world's missionary reaches, plus growing education among the natives.
Mejan's militant indignation spotlights a remarkable achievement of the Roman Catholic Church in Africa's 219 mission territories, where 19 black bishops and 1,690 black priests (up from three bishops and 1,254 priests in 1951) work smoothly with their white fellow churchmen. Notable among the native church leaders:
BISHOP ALOYSIUS BIGIRUMWANI, Apostolic Vicar of Ruanda Urundi (bordering on the Belgian Congo), is a descendant of the kings of the famed Watutsi tribe of giants. From a mountaintop mission at Nyundo, overlooking Lake Kivu and the flaring volcanoes of Nyiragongo and Nya-mulagira. tall (6 ft. 3 in.) Bishop Bigi-rumwani, 53, directs five white bishops and 471 priests, both white and Negro. Since his consecration in 1952, 20,000 converts have joined the church in his own diocese, but two-thirds of the half-million tribesmen in the territory he administers as senior bishop are still pagan. The bishop considers their conversion more a matter of manpower than of time. "With enough priests to station one every ten kilometers, it would not take too long," he says. The first step in that direction is a new seminary with an enrollment of , more than 100 students on a 15-year course. One of his biggest problems: witchcraft, which he lets alone as long as it sticks to medicine, but attacks with a combination of logic and ridicule when it spills over into prophecy and sympathetic magic. Last year Bishop Bigirumwani consecrated Swiss Bishop Andre Perraudin at Kabgaye, Ruanda—the first white bishop ever to be consecrated by a Negro bishop on the African continent.