Drums Herald Start of Pope’s 3rd African Visit

Pope John Paul II arrived in this tiny West African country Thursday to the sound of drums and joyous singing--and promptly addressed one of the Vatican’s most nettlesome problems, the mixing of tribal religious and social practices with prescribed Roman Catholic beliefs.

Beginning his 27th papal trip abroad, the third to Africa, the pontiff took up gently the question of the “Africanization” of Catholic practices. Such traditional African practices as ancestor worship and animist sorcery have crept into Christian worship in recent years, troubling the Vatican.

“I am encountering a great number of people who express their religious sentiments in the manner of traditional religion here; I salute them with a full heart,” John Paul told thousands of Togolese who greeted him at Lome’s international airport. He praised “the wisdom of your ancestral culture.”

But a few hours later, in an open-air Mass that police said drew the largest crowd ever seen in Lome, the Pope warned that ancestral practices must be made “compatible with the faith in one God.”

Among the practices he implicitly criticized were polygamy and such animist beliefs as voodoo, which are common throughout Africa despite the rapid growth of Christianity and Islam. Togo has long been a voodoo stronghold.

Praising the sanctity of Christian family values and marriage, the pontiff noted that the shift from ancient to Christian practices in tradition-bound Africa “is a delicate and difficult area because these customs often correspond with long social experience.”

He said that some of the old tribal practices are positive, and urged that each be “examined prudently, with discernment, and without prematurely throwing out the good grain with the chaff.”

“It is a question of being authentically African and authentically Christian, without separating one from the other and without fear of giving witness in public to one’s convictions,” he said.

Lome, a humid coastal city that is the capital of one of Africa’s most stable countries, took on a carnival atmosphere as an estimated 200,000 people jammed the streets, many of them from nearby Ghana, Benin and Nigeria. Many danced and sang, and dozens of tribal languages could be heard.

More than a score of Togolese tribal chiefs, most of them in colorful robes and gold-decorated crowns, were among the thousands in the reception line at the airport. They heard the country’s longtime president, Gen. Gnassingbe Eyadema, a Protestant, welcome John Paul as “a symbol of hope for the oppressed and disinherited.”

To the surprise of many, North Korea’s ambassador to Togo and the first secretary of the Chinese Embassy here were in the reception line. It was the first time that an official of either country had taken part in any papal event.

“How wonderful,” said Cardinal Agostino Casaroli, the Vatican secretary of state, when he saw the North Korean ambassador, Kim Yang Sang.

The Vatican has no diplomatic relations with either country.