Book Review: Jean Luc Enyegue, SJ. Competing Catholicisms: The Jesuits, the Vatican, and the Making of Postcolonial French Africa

In Competing Catholicisms: The Jesuits, the Vatican, and the Making of Postcolonial French Africa, Jean Luc Enyegue, a Jesuit priest and director of the Jesuit Historical Institute in Africa in Nairobi, examines the role that the Jesuit missions played in shaping the development of Catholicism in Cameroon and Chad – a much narrower geographical scope than the book title suggests – between roughly the end of the Second World War and the end of the Second Vatican Council. Over the course of nine chapters, Enyegue shows how competition between the Vatican and Jesuits over their divergent visions for the future of Catholicism hindered the Africanization of the church in Chad and Cameroon and “secured the survival of Christianity as a missionary movement” (8). While the Vatican was actively trying to indigenize the church throughout Africa, Jesuits sought to preserve European control of the church.