Cardinal Fridolin Ambongo, Archbishop of Kinshasa, Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) is undoubtedly one of the most outstanding personalities on the African ecclesiastical scene. Since October 2020 a member of the C9 – the Council of Cardinals set up by Pope Francis in September 2013 with the task of helping him in the governance of the universal Church and studying a project to revise the Roman Curia – and reconfirmed in 2023, Ambongo is one of the cardinals most listened to by Pope Francis and among the most authoritative proponents of an idea of the Church that puts Africa and the global South at the centre not only in the sense of evangelisation and pastoral and social care, but also on a political and geopolitical dimension
Born on January 24, 1960 in Boto, northern Diocese of Molegbe right on the border with the Central African Republic, Fridolin Ambongo Besunga is a Capuchin friar ordained a priest in 1988. In the same year, he graduated in Moral Theology at the Alphonsian Academy in Rome. First a parish priest, then lecturer in moral theology at the Catholic University of Kinshasa, he was made a bishop by Benedict XVI in late 2004 and a cardinal by Pope Francis in March 2016. He has been Archbishop of Kinshasa since November 2018 and President of the Symposium of the Episcopal Conferences of Africa and Madagascar (Secam) since February 2023
From a very young age and even more so since he began holding episcopal positions, in addition to the pastoral dimension, Ambongo has taken up positions of political prominence both for his country battered since independence from Belgium in 1960, by political instability, conflict, progressive impoverishment and environmental disasters, and for the African continent.
In an interview to France’s Catholic La Croix, one of his fellow students, Fr Clement Makiobo, told that Ambongo had been “passionate about justice and law issues” as a young man, while also expressing “direct opposition” to the Mobutu Sese Seko, who ruled from 1965 to 1997. 2016 can be considered the year of Fridolin Ambongo’s ‘political’ consecration. At first, after taking a stand against the warlords, he was called to testify at the International Criminal Court in The Hague about the activities of the many Congolese conflict proponents. Throughout the year, he was the main mediator in the path leading to the New Year’s Eve agreement reached by the Church on December 31, 2016 which foresaw the end of Joseph Kabila’s presidential term and the calling of elections. Kabila, did not want to grant a date for elections and, in violation of the agreement itself, continued to wield power for months. During 2016 and 2017, the Catholic Church denounced abuses and organised mass demonstrations that were often stifled in blood by Kabila.
Condemnation
Ambongo with the entire Church, not just the Catholic component, sided with the protesters and condemned the police violence. When he was appointed Archbishop of Kinshasa in November 2018, the weekly Jeune Afrique wrote that the appointment of ‘a man of the Church who does not mince words’ to the ‘strategic post (Kinshasa, ed.) could be seen as a message of firmness on the part of the Pope’ towards the Congo’s rulers. Who in fact did not take the choice very well.
He repeteadly referred to the modus operandi of influential Western powers towards the Democratic Republic of Congo and other African nations”
But beyond his activities at home, Ambongo stands out as a representative of an entire continent. From his own country to the whole of Africa, he has often raised his voice against the ‘greed of the West’ and has never been afraid to name and shame Western states or entities at the root of the perpetrated colonial-printed exploitation of Africa that creates conflicts (as in eastern DRC) and leaves populations in misery. In a Conference on ‘Mission and Interreligious dialogue in Africa’ at the Pontifical Antonianum University in Rome, March 2024 he repeteadly referred to the modus operandi of influential Western powers towards the Democratic Republic of Congo and other African nations and spoke of a ‘colonialist mentality”.
Embodiment
In this sense, Ambongo is undoubtedly the clergyman who best embodies the political thought enunciated by the Pope in Kinshasa on the occasion of his trip to South Sudan and the DRC at the beginning of 2023. In that ‘Hands off Africa, Stop suffocating Africa: it is not a mine to be exploited or a soil to be plundered. … Let the world remember the disasters committed throughout the centuries to the detriment of the local populations’ shouted by the Pope on January 31 in Kinshasa, there is the political credo of Ambongo and of an important slice of the African church towards the continent and the whole world. In the conference “Modern martyrs, victims of the exploitation of mineral resources in Africa: Realities and perspectives of the outgoing Church”, held in October 2024 in Rome, which he organised, the Cardinal lifted the veil on the numerous and difficult situations experienced by “modern martyrs”, especially “people who suffer and die because of the exploitation of mineral resources in Africa”. Indeed, “the extraction and transport of these minerals dispossess and displace families from their lands”. “The Church cannot remain silent” he concluded.
In some cases his anti-Western streak even goes so far as to align himself with Vladimir Putin: naming him, the cardinal insists that Africa refuses the ‘decadent morals of the West’”
Ambongo, therefore, embodies a certain type of new Pan-Africanism, growing exponentially among the continent’s youth but also among the Church, which is becoming increasingly aware of the role Africa can and must play in the Church and the world. His, however, is a Pan-Africanism tinged with conservatism. His idea of Church and society is antithetical to the West, not only because it is the inventor and perpetuator of slavery, colonialism and neo-colonialism and the main protagonist of the grave situation in which so many African countries still find themselves, but also because it is the spreader of relativism, moral debauchery, and a departure from Christian ethics. ‘As the West does not like children, they [Westerners] want to attack the basic cell of humanity, which is the family,’ states Cardinal Fridolin Ambongo, in January 2024 at a gathering of the Famille Chrétienne (Christian Family) movement in Kinshasa. ‘Little by little, they will disappear,’ he concludes. In some cases his anti-Western streak even goes so far as to align himself with Vladimir Putin: naming him, the cardinal insists that Africa refuses the “decadent morals of the West.” “It is a decadent culture, it is the cultural and moral decadence of a society; a society in decline.” And as La Croix International writes in a January article 2024, while Cardinal Ambongo admits that “many things can be reproached in Africa,” “homosexuality is not one of them.” Except in some “isolated” cases, he believes, “this practice does not exist with us [in Africa].”
Mediation
He was the mediator between the African episcopates and the Pope in the aftermath of the publication of the statement of the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith Fiducia Supplicans. When practically all the bishops’ conferences staged an uprising against the document and, in some cases, evoked a possible schism, Cardinal Ambongo took the first plane to Rome and met the Pope personally. He was the one who represented the demands of the African Church that entrusted his mediation skills with the mission of convincing the Pope to recede from the blessings to gay couples. But his closeness to the Pope and willingness to mediate certainly did not conceal his clear-cut conservative positions. It is no coincidence that, on that occasion, Ambongo had words of clear rejection and aligned himself with the representative of the African episcopate considered by all to be among the most conservative, Cardinal Robert Sarah. “I followed Cardinal Sarah’s speech very carefully,’ Ambongo said at the meeting in preparation for the October 2024 synod of African delegates, ’and I think what he said is true. Fiducia supplicans is not primarily a cultural issue; it would have been preferable to approach it from the perspective of theology, morality, the Bible and the Magisterium”.
Ambongo stands out as a representative of an entire continent. From his own country to the whole of Africa, he has often raised his voice against the ‘greed of the West’ and has never been afraid to name and shame Western states or entities at the root of the perpetrated colonial-printed exploitation of Africa”