When my brother, Father Peter Ryan, recently visited me at the mission parish in Togo, West Africa, where I have worked for seventeen years as a priest on loan from the Archdiocese of Washington, I don't think he expected to smash idols with a sledgehammer and burn the remains. But life has its surprises, and that is exactly what he did.
Here is how it happened.
During Peter's visit, a delegation from one of the most important families in this large rural village where our mission is located came to see me to announce the great news that they had decided to renounce their ancestral idol. And they asked me to destroy it. Upon hearing this, a few other neighboring families decided to do the same with theirs. The excitement began to build, a Saturday morning was chosen, and plans were made quickly.
When the big day arrived, we began with a Mass, followed by a procession of hundreds of people from the church to the houses, with our large parish choir leading the way with songs, drums, and trumpets. My tall young Togolese associate pastor, Father Jonathan Togbe, and I blessed bags of salt and buckets of holy water, and our altar servers carried a crucifix and the image of Our Lady of Guadalupe, the patroness of our parish. We knew we needed the extra protection of these sacramentals.
I decided to delegate most of the destruction of the idols to Peter, who carried out this task with enthusiasm, amidst the tumultuous, joyful cries of our faithful singing Yesu enye dzidula! (Jesus is the victor!). The idols fell one after another. Everything culminated with the demolition of the main pagan shrine, once the last idol was removed and destroyed, and the placement of a large cross amidst the rubble to claim the site for Christ.
At one point during the festivities, Peter turned to me and confided that it was "the coolest thing I have ever done in my life." I don't doubt it, Peter. Good job and thank you for your help.
Here are some reflections on this adventure.
Scripture tells us on the one hand that an idol is nothing, that it has "no real existence" (1 Cor. 8:4). This is certainly true regarding the lack of personality of the physical object itself. Idols are "gods of wood and stone, the work of human hands, that neither see, nor hear, nor eat, nor smell" (Deut. 4:28).
On the other hand, Scripture also teaches that there is a relationship between the physical object and demonic forces. The Psalmist laments that the unfaithful ancestors of the Israelites "served their idols, which became a snare to them. They sacrificed their sons and their daughters to demons" (Ps 106:36-37). Saint Paul warns the Corinthians that, while he does not imply "that food offered to idols is anything, or that an idol is anything," nevertheless "what pagans sacrifice [to idols], they offer to demons and not to God. I do not want you to be partners with demons" (1 Cor. 10:20).
Therefore, one must be very careful with anything involving demons. In recent years, there has been a worrying resurgence of interest in Satanism in the United States. I sometimes wonder if the renunciation of false worship and superstitions, which is an optional part of some ceremonies in the Rite of Christian Initiation of Adults, and which is often omitted in our country, should not be made mandatory by the American bishops, as it is here in Africa.
People need to understand that Satan and other evil spirits are real and that they are far more powerful than we are. Africans know this. Americans should know it. It is not for nothing that Jesus called Satan the "ruler of this world" (Jn. 14:30).
However, in that same passage, Jesus goes on to say that Satan "has no power over me." Demons know who Jesus is and are terrified of him (Lk 8:28), and every Christian should be certain that as long as they are united to Jesus by sanctifying grace and the sacraments, there is absolutely nothing to fear.
During his trip to Africa in 2009, Pope Benedict XVI urged Catholics in Angola to "offer the risen Christ to your fellow citizens. So many of them live in fear of spirits, of evil and threatening powers […]. Who can go and tell them that Christ has triumphed over death and all these occult powers?"
Indeed, during our adventure in the village, while the large crowd of Christians rejoiced triumphantly, others stood behind them, not singing or shouting for joy, but watching with fear. They wondered, I was told later, when the demonic punishment for this insult to the spirits would come, and what form it would take. When weeks passed and nothing serious happened, it had an impact. Jesus is truly the victor.
Pagans and all others have the right to know that the one who possesses all power, who created and sustains the entire universe, is also infinitely good and loves them beyond measure. They have the right to know that he gave proof of this love by sending us his Son, who shed the last drop of his blood and rose again to save us from the misery of sin, suffering, and death.
They have the right to know the joy of liberation from all the forces of evil. They have the right to learn and share in Jesus' victory, to hear about and enter by faith into the new life he offers them here and now, with the unshakable hope of eternal life in God's glorious kingdom.
And so, yes, they have a right to baptism. One of the organizers of the Vatican's 2019 Amazon Synod, an Austrian bishop whom I will charitably describe as having been very confused for a very long time, made the astonishing statement that in over forty years of missionary work in Brazil, he had not baptized a single person and had no intention of ever doing so.
Apparently, this bishop thinks that baptizing indigenous peoples would be some kind of unjustified cultural imposition. Apparently, Jesus does not share this view. The last words he spoke to his apostles were: "Go, therefore, and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you" (Mt. 28:19-20).
But what about cultural differences?
Here in Togo, after farmers remove the corn kernels from the cobs and gather them in shallow pans, they clean the kernels by tossing the pans up and down, catching the kernels and letting the breeze carry away the chaff. I tell them that this is what Christians all over the world must do with all the customs and attitudes they encounter. Every culture is a mixture of bad things that must be rejected and good things that must be preserved. Saint Paul exhorts us to "hate what is evil and hold fast to what is good" (Rom. 12:9).
Therefore, idol worship must end. Africans must freely choose to renounce it, without reservation. (I recall a lady from back home asking me if the people here couldn't have kept their idols as a souvenir of how they used to worship them! Uh… no). But there are many admirable aspects of African culture that Africans should preserve and cherish, and from which we Westerners can draw inspiration.
One of them is that Africans value the elderly precisely because they are old. In the United States, as a rule, the older a person is, the fewer people will attend their funeral. Here, it is exactly the opposite. The elderly are considered repositories of wisdom and their death is seen as a great loss.
There is also the simple, commonsense awareness of Africans that a man is a man and a woman is a woman, and that's all. The West is currently in a real crisis of confusion about "gender identity" and the givenness of being male or female. I suppose that in Africa there are examples of this confusion, but here in Togo and during my travels to other African countries, I have yet to encounter any.
I have no doubt that if I called a general village assembly and asked the inhabitants if they think a boy can decide to be a girl – and if, by so deciding, he would truly be a girl – the entire population would look at me as if I came from another solar system. There isn't much worry about pronouns here.
Our pastoral approach here in Togo is a bit different from that of the Austrian bishop in Brazil. Sister Noella Lucie, our parish secretary, is one of three Togolese religious sisters working at the mission. Recently, I asked her to go through all our baptismal registers and count the baptisms we have performed since the mission began in 2006. She came back to me about half an hour later with a smile and the total: 3,155 adults, children, and infants.
Of course, we are aware that numbers are not everything and that baptism is a beginning, not an end. But numbers are something, and they are something important. We give thanks to God because, by his grace and goodness, more than three thousand souls from the three dozen villages in our parish have been washed of original and personal sin, they have passed from darkness into the kingdom of light, they have been created anew and incorporated into the Lord Jesus.
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I pray that many more people will be baptized in the years to come and that, whatever the final number, each one of them arrives safely in heaven after a life of heroic Christian discipleship on earth, having courageously carried their cross and faithfully followed Jesus, who guarantees victory to those who love him to the end.
This article was originally published in English by Catholic World Report (Article link). It is republished and translated with the author's permission.