Pope Benedict: Western world ‘is exporting its spiritual toxic waste’ to Africa

Robert Mickens
10 October 2009

Pope Benedict XVI has opened a three-week Synod for Africa at the Vatican by comparing the continent to an “enormous spiritual lung” in the midst of a faithless and hope-deprived world.

But during Mass in St Peter’s Basilica on Sunday he warned that “practical materialism” and religious fundamentalism were like “two dangerous pathologies” that were infecting the continent where the Catholic Church is experiencing its greatest growth.

The Catholic population of Africa has shot up from 1.9 million in 1900 to almost 165 million today, and more than 40 per cent of all adult baptisms in the world take place in Africa.

During the synod’s opening liturgy, which featured more Latin and Gregorian chant than African languages and hymns, the Pope blamed the “so-called First World” for continuing to “export its spiritual toxic waste” to the continent.

“In this sense, colonialism, which is over at a political level, has never really entirely come to an end,” he said in a lengthy homily delivered entirely in Italian. the rest