A lot of us are waiting for the African missionaries to cross the Atlantic, set up outside some of our churches some Sunday morning and preach the Gospel to the good liberal white folks walking in.
Now that would be a sight to see!
I remember a few years back that JP2 said that the future of Christianity in Europe might come from Missionaries from Africa.
Food for thought 
25 years ago, while still an Anglican, I attended a conference at USC. One of the presenters was a priest from Kenya who showed slides of the small rural mission he and his wife had founded. He talked simply of his approach, going from person to person and asking them "To come meet my friend Jesus." It worked both in Kenya and in that room -- I have rarely felt the winds of the spirit blow so through a place.
I have had little doubt about where the spiritual center of gravity was in the Anglican church since then. This can only be a hopeful sign.
Heck, the Africans are already here.
We, my wife, sons and I, went to Pittsburgh last summer to visit my mother. We went to Mass at the parish of my childhood, the one at which I have received all of the Sacraments, including marriage. The celebrant was a Nigerian priest who commuted in from Franciscan University of Steubenville where he was working on a Masters in Theology. What a refreshing dose of reverence for the Mass, and for the Consecration in particular! And his preaching was filled with wonderful, inspiring fervor. This, at a parish that has been in desperate need of good priests for years.
Unfortunately, most the people I spoke with after Mass were like my mom, "It's so difficult to understand him, his accent is so heavy." The underlying sentiment seemed to be that they had dismissed him as some quaint yokel from a far off land that is filled with uneducated "natives."
Despite knowing that the parish (and the diocese, for that matter) has been crying out for a boost from the Holy Spirit for the past couple of decades, the parishioners seemed to miss what a gift they had been given. Instead, they merely resented the fact that someone from the outside -- from Africa, no less -- had to be sent to them instead of being a hometown boy. Tragic.
What's makes it doubly tragic is that Father Edward has since moved on to California to complete a PhD.
Well, I just can't help but hope that these "lions" just cross the Tiber. We could do with a few more sisters and brothers in the mold of Francis Cardinal Arnize. How beautiful it would be to see millions of Africans find solace in the in the arms of St. Peter.
And once here, surely they would strengthen us by their faithfulness even more so than now.
The same thing is already happening in the Catholic Church. The majority of Catholics in the world live in Africa, Asia, Mexico, Central and South America; and from what I've read, the majority of them are orthodox. AmChurch seems to think that when Pope John Paul finally goes to God, the next Pope will make all of their dreams come true. Women priests, homosexual unions... you name it. Europe and AmChurch are in for the same rude awakening. We are no longer the power in the Church. We never really were, but very soon that lesson is going to come home to us in a very clear and unambiguous manner.
Few of those African bishops will go to Rome; they mostly snake-belly low evangelicals except for a few in East Africa. The Anglican traddys who might swim the Tiber in the future are in the Carribean and in (of all places) Papau New Guinea.
Interestingly, the traddy Anglo-Catholics in England are not terribly upset about the private life of Jeffrey John, the celibate liberal gay priest in England who has been appointed in Reading. His private life is in fact not that much different from some public Courage spokesmen though his ideological world-view is indeed quite different. If Jeffrey John's appointment is nixed (which is extremely unlikely) there are some Anglo-Catholic clergy (both liberal and traddy) who might pick up and go to Rome out of annoyance with the evangelical complaints against John. The traditionalist Bishop of Fulham recently complained that those who are making the most noise against Jeffrey John had no trouble supporting the recent changes in divorce and re-marriage practices.
In short, the priests who might come over (in England) would not always be the ones that conservative Catholics may want. Nevertheless, in the unlikely event that anyone does over the Jeffrey John flap, then I say "welcome home."
I got into a conversation with an Ethiopian cab driver recently.
I asked him about the crucifix on his mirror and he said, "Oh, you Europeans, you can never believe that an African is a Christian of his own will."
He went on to say, "My people have been Christian for 2000 years. We don't need to be converted to Christianity."
clio
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