Pope Extols Education, Urges Africans to Help Themselves

Midway through what he has called “the second evangelization of Africa,” Pope John Paul II continued Tuesday to emphasize his theme of the need for self-help by the people of the troubled continent.

Beginning with a three-hour Mass in the burning sun of this sultry Cameroonian seaport and ending with an address in the inland capital of Yaounde, the pontiff spent the sixth day of his 12-day African journey extolling education--both religious and secular--as the path to a better African future.

Educational achievement opens “an immense possibility for action,” he told a group of young people in Douala, while gently instructing their parents not to resent the fact that learning may make their children more capable than they themselves are.

“Young people want fraternal solidarity without restriction of race or frontiers,” the pontiff said. “They want to unite in order to overcome hunger in the world. They want a world in which there will be respect for man and for his freedom and his conscience. They want a world of truth without hypocrisy.”

High Literacy Rate

John Paul also praised Roman Catholic schools, begun by missionaries, for contributing to Cameroon’s 55% literacy rate, unusually high for Africa.

The Pope’s stress on education came against a background of both religious and secular messages in Togo, Ivory Coast and Cameroon during the last six days in which he has urged Africans to take the future of their church and of their nations into their own hands and to help themselves in spiritual, material and political matters.

As he did in Togo and Ivory Coast, he told an audience of bishops, priests and religious workers in Yaounde on Tuesday to adopt “a new-style evangelization” and move into the largely animist northern regions of Cameroon as missionaries themselves to advance the cause of what is now an African church and no longer a European-run missionary church. However, he also warned, as he has before, against the indiscriminate adoption of non-Christian practices in building an Africanized Catholic church.

On his visits, the Pope has laid heavy stress on human rights, particularly concerning South Africa, whose recent racial clashes and continued apartheid system have drawn several expressions of papal anguish during the past week.

‘Innocents Are Victims’

But at the same time, he exhorted black African nations to clean up their human rights records too. Although acknowledging that nations have legitimate security interests, he said that “beyond that necessity, it (security) is sometimes invoked without guarantees of justice and as if a divergence in political point of view constituted a crime. Too many innocents are victims.”

Acknowledging that “Christians . . . are always imperfect,” he also asked Africans to forgive the people of “Christian nations” for the African slave trade.

Speaking in Yaounde, he said Christians “must always be a force of healing and compassion, like the Good Samaritan of the Gospel. Unfortunately, in the course of history, men belonging to Christian nations did not always act that way, and we now ask our African brothers who have suffered so much--for example, because of the slave trade--for forgiveness.”