VATICAN CITY (RNS) By many measures, the Catholic Church today is nowhere healthier than it is in Africa.

Over the course of the 20th century, the Catholic population of sub-Saharan Africa grew from less than 2 million to nearly 140 million. Earlier this year, the Vatican reported that the continent was producing priests at a higher rate than any other part of the world, with ordinations rising by 27.6 percent in 2007.

Yet African Catholics suffer no less than others from their continent’s widespread poverty, disease, corruption and violence. And the church’s very success poses special difficulties, as its leaders strive to harmonize a historically Western religion with local traditions, while maintaining the integrity of official doctrine.

Such challenges will be prominent on the agenda at the Synod for Africa, a three-week long gathering of bishops from around the world that Pope Benedict XVI will inaugurate on Sunday (Oct. 4). (Among the participants will be Archbishop Wilton Gregory of Atlanta, the highest-ranking African-American prelate in the U.S. church.)

The official theme of the meeting, whose proceedings will eventually serve as the basis for an authoritative papal document, is “The Church in Africa in Service to Reconciliation, Justice and Peace.”

A need for reconciliation is most obvious in the many cases of armed conflict, particularly in the Democratic Republic of Congo, where a decade-long civil war has left an estimated 5.4 million people dead.

Benedict ended a weeklong trip to Africa in March by calling on Angolans, who are still recovering from a 27-year civil war that ended in 2002, to continue “promoting peace, making gestures of forgiveness and working for national reconciliation, so that violence may never prevail over dialogue.”

African Catholics must also work for reconciliation within the church itself, said the Rev. Tatah Humphrey Mbuy, a Cameroonian priest and former consultant to the Vatican’s Pontifical Council for Inter-religious Dialogue.

He described the church in Africa as still transitioning from a colonial institution run by missionaries to one in which Africans themselves take the lead, and in which lay people, as well as priests, play an active role.

“So far the church in Africa has come from top down,” Mbuy said. “Now the new way of being church is from down up, and it’s meeting with a lot of difficulty.”

Tensions within the church also arise over differing approaches to “inculturation,” or the expression of Catholic belief in the terms that are accessible to local cultures.

True inculturation requires understanding of the deep affinities between Christianity and traditional African religions, Mbuy said, though knowledge of Catholic doctrine is equally necessary to avoid the danger of syncretism, or the melding of different faiths.

According to Mbuy, such translation is urgently needed to compete with Africa’s other fast-growing faith, Islam.

“In Africa, Islam is more akin to the culture of the people than Christianity,” Mbuy said, noting, for example, that both Islam and traditional African religions permit polygamy.

“If we do not take inculturation as the only way to evangelization, I’m afraid that Islam might find more roots in Africa,” he said.

Relations between the two religions will be a focus of discussions at the Synod, as reflected in the meeting’s official “working document.”

Mbuy said the bishops will also stress the essential links between peace and justice, underscoring that Africa cannot resolve its conflicts without redress for the misery inflicted on its people by their own leaders and by richer nations, now and in the past.

Even the continent’s HIV/AIDS epidemic, with infection rates as high as 30 percent in some southern African countries, is largely a matter of social justice, Mbuy said.

Benedict provoked an international furor last March when he told reporters on his flight to Cameroon that “one cannot overcome the problems (of AIDS) with the distribution of condoms. On the contrary, they increase the problem.”

Mbuy said that critics of the pope’s statement ignored the realities of a “male-dominated” African culture in which men typically refuse to use condoms or be tested for HIV, and assume that sex is simply their right.

A remedy for AIDS in Africa lies not in the distribution of prophylactics, he suggested, but in an end to the economic and social conditions that promote sexual exploitation of women.