Pronouncing the Vatican declaration Fiducia Supplicans “in direct contradiction to the cultural ethos of African communities,” the African bishops formally issued a strong statement of protest on January 11th titled “No Blessing for Homosexual Couples in the African Churches.”
Signed by Congolese Cardinal Fridolin Ambongo Besungu, president of the Symposium of Episcopal Conferences of Africa and Madagascar (SECAM), the statement acknowledged the “shockwave” that Fiducia Supplicans has caused, declaring that “it has sown misconceptions and unrest in the minds of many lay faithful, consecrated persons and even pastors and has aroused strong reactions.”
Although the SECAM statement explicitly denied that Pope Francis was attempting to impose “any form of cultural colonization in Africa,” it is difficult to support such a statement when Fiducia Supplicans is itself has the hallmarks of cultural colonization—an attempt to impose the colonial state power of the Vatican through the cultural subordination of one conceptual framework or cultural identity over another in Africa.
And while SECAM acknowledges that the Vatican declaration on same-sex blessings “does not change church teaching about human sexuality and marriage,” the statement from the African bishops complained that “the language it uses remains too subtle for simple people to understand.”
It can be argued that the sophisticated ambiguity of Fiducia Supplicans is itself a hallmark of cultural colonialism because the declaration can be defined differently by those with the power to impose their own interpretations of the value of same-sex relationships on others with very different interpretations. That is what cultural colonialism is all about. The concept of cultural colonialism acknowledges the importance of culture as a medium for political and economic power. We have seen here in our own country that military actions are not needed to dramatically change the laws on issues like reproductive rights—including abortion—and gender transitioning. Changing the culture can be just as powerful as war in its consequences.
The Church has long warned of the consequences of the imposition of dramatic cultural change on mores, including sexual ethics and life issues. She has always advised Catholics to be “counter-cultural” on life issues and marriage by rejecting Western culture’s embrace of reproductive rights by respecting all life from conception until natural death, and to protect marriage as a union between one man and one woman. But now, in some ways, the Vatican is apparently attempting to ask us all to validate some of the most decadent of the cultural values of the mainstream culture.
Cardinal Fridolin Ambongo, president of the Symposium of Episcopal Conferences of Africa and Madagascar (SECAM), in explaining the African rejection of the blessing of homosexual couples, noted how the West has lost the meaning of marriage and culture, which he said “is in decline…” “Little by little,” he stated, “they are going to disappear. They will disappear. We wish them a good demise…” This, in essence, was a clear rebuke of cultural colonialism.
It is not only the African bishops who have rejected Fiducia Supplicans and its promotion of blessings for same-sex couples. The Hungarian Catholic Bishops Conference joined bishops in several other Eastern and Central European countries in rejecting the imposition of Western cultural colonialism in these blessings. In their statement, the Hungarian bishops wrote: “We can bless all individuals regardless of their gender identity or sexual orientation but we must always avoid giving a common blessing to couples who live together in a mere relationship, or who are not in a valid marriage or same-sex relationship.”
In some ways, the Hungarian bishops—who are not economically dependent upon the largesse of the Vatican—were even stronger than the African bishops in their rejection of the cultural colonialism that the Vatican is trying to impose. While the African bishops lauded Pope Francis and focused primarily on the “cultural ethos of African communities” in rejecting Fiducia Supplicans, the Hungarian and Eastern European bishops were clear that the idea of same-sex blessings are in direct contradiction to the Word of Christ.
Hungarian Bishop Janos Szekely of the Diocese of Szombathely pronounced that the reason that they could never implement Fiducia Supplicans is because “We would be falsifying the Gospel of Christ and failing to do what we should do as pastors toward such a couple is we were to give a blessing to the two of them in such a case.”
There are parallels between the attempted cultural colonialism imposed by the Vatican through Fiducia Supplicans to the continued cultural colonialism that the European Union and the United Nations have attempted to impose on Africa, Hungary, and other Eastern and Central European countries for several years. Most recently, the problem came to a head in the 2019, negotiations between the EU and the African, Caribbean and Pacific community (ACP) in an attempt to find a successor to a treaty that was called the Cotonou Agreement of 2000. The proposed ACP-EU treaty, which is designed to guide relations between the European Union’s 27 nations and 79 African, Caribbean and Pacific countries for the next two decades, has met strong opposition for many of the same reasons as those opposing Fiducia Supplicans.
Thirty-five ACP countries, along with Hungary and Poland, refused to sign the agreement. Describing them as “holdouts,” media reports have concluded that the treaty’s language promoting reproductive rights—including abortion—as well as LGBT rights and comprehensive sex education for children: “A handful of African states previously indicated their reluctance to ratify the treaty over its provisions on non-discrimination which they say, promotes homosexuality.”
Those who refused to sign the new EU agreement—including Nigeria, Rwanda, and Senegal—will lose access to loans from the European Investment Bank, which relies on the agreement for its legal operating mandate outside the EU. This is a blatant form of cultural colonialism because it uses economic force to change the culture. President Obama attempted a similar kind of cultural colonialism in Africa during his presidency when aid began to be tied to acceptance of same-sex relationships and abortion. The Obama presidency was the zenith of cultural colonialism from the United States in Africa, but it seems to have been revived under the Biden administration. Politico reported that President Biden not only condemned Uganda’s anti-sodomy laws last May, he also suggested the possibility of implementing economic sanctions.
One cannot miss the parallels between the perceived pressure from the Vatican on blessing same-sex couples and the very real financial pressure from the EU on those states which refuse to change their culture on life issues and marriage to conform to the progressive Western values of the EU. Still, it is difficult to predict how the ACP governments and the other “holdouts” will respond to the economic pressure to conform to the EU and United Nations mandates on reproductive health including abortion, same-sex relationships, and comprehensive sexuality education for children. But whether it is a handful of progressive but powerful bureaucrats at the Vatican or the elites in the European Union or the United Nations which are attempting to impose a new cultural ideology, it is important that the assault on the culture and national sovereignty of all states and countries be strongly rejected.
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Amen, sister!
And then there’s the “cultural colonization” of all post-Christian society by the homosexual lifestyle….Having ANNEXED the machinery of the modern secular states, now has the lifestyle also annexed the perennial Catholic Church?
But, says the myopic Cardinal Fernandez: “what, me worry? We’ll just invent a new category for “blessing” ‘irregular’ couples and call it an internal ‘development’ of doctrine!” After all, and as Cardinal Kasper so famously said in 2014, “Africans should not tell us too much what to do.” https://www.firstthings.com/blogs/firstthoughts/2014/10/dont-listen-to-the-africans-says-catholic-cardinal
So, when Cardinal Ambongo recently and unambiguously makes his point in Rome, the response is a signed statement applicable to Africa, but then carefully filed. A quarantine? https://www.catholicworldreport.com/2024/01/22/cardinal-explains-how-african-rejection-of-fiducia-supplicans-was-handled/
Meanwhile, the polyhedral, synodally multi-continental, and polyglot Church of self-contradiction blindly “walks together,” ever forward! Said Winston Churchill of such double-speak: “’Men occasionally stumble over the truth, but most of them pick themselves up and hurry off as if nothing ever happened.”
These forms of pressure have long been in play. When the Vatican delegation attended the 1990’s UN conferences in Egypt (Population and Development) and Beijing (Women) they coordinated the battle against policies designed tie development dollars to the number of IUD’s implanted, the corruption of education to implant feminist ideals in impressionable young women, or the establishment of abortion “clinics.” While pro-life and pro-family organisations are still fighting the good fight in international arenas, I cannot vouch for the support of the Vatican (with such mixed signals of late).
The hue and cry against cultural imperialism is always selectively applied, with the outrage against the “West” silenced when it brings “liberation” from traditional sexual morality or parental oversight. There is slavery, and then there is slavery…
If we use the conditional ‘cultural’ colonization as does Card Ambongo he’s speaking directly to what he calls the imposition of the cultural values of a technically alien culture on the African. There was a time in recent history when that imposition, at times welcome, influence was beneficial to the technical, intellectual, moral growth of an otherwise less developed continent. Development however has its variables and benevolent limits. FS is one such presumed benevolent Western religious ideology that is morally alien to the faith of indigenous Africans. Card Kasper, President emeritus of the Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity held the Africans were a backward lot and shouldn’t be listened to.
While ethical progress occurred in the West, the African Church, newly formed by missionaries, at the time when they were men who risked their lives for Christ and the salvation of the African taught the perennial brand of Christianity conveyed by the Apostles, true to the revelation of the Word.
Abongo and compatriots found FS clearly contrary to what they know is the truth because it is the truth. Homosexuality is a grave sin antithetical to family and the transmission of human life. He’s correct in chiding the West as a dying culture imbued with heretical priorities seeking to impose their death dealing moral disease on Africa. A wonderful and remarkable reality in the Church, that the once physically colonized unlettered native has become by God’s mysterious providence the pillars of the faith.
“Before Christ’s second coming the Church must pass through a final trial that will shake the faith of many believers. The persecution that accompanies her pilgrimage on earth will unveil the “mystery of iniquity” in the form of a religious deception offering men an apparent solution to their problems at the price of apostasy from the truth. The supreme religious deception is that of the Antichrist, a pseudo-messianism by which man glorifies himself in place of God and of his Messiah come in the flesh.” –Catechism 675
When my conversion process from atheism to Catholicism was complete, which took a few years, there was joy for many reasons, but the intellectual liberation involved a full acceptance of what I always suspected intuitively. Because sin is a reality, human vanity infects every aspect of human culture, which is why Catholic witness is called to be paradoxical and countercultural in its witness to culture. I enjoyed reading Chesterton and every Catholic apologist since him who understood the need to be paradoxical.
Countercultural witness was self-evident to me not only as a convert, it was self-evident to me prior to conversion. And it is self-evident to every Catholic with common sense and common decency. How do high prelates manage to go through their whole lives not being able to figure out this essential reality of witness towards the human condition? Why don’t everyday lay Catholics they encounter in their lives admonish these prelates for being shallow as men for not understanding the self-evident?
Despite the best of intentions, there is always a significant danger in using cultural or societal arguments to either affirm or reject various statements regarding whether or not something is true or false, good or bad, and so on.
In its worst form, claiming that a statement or teaching is Eastern or Western or from some other region and is to be rejected or accepted, at least in part, because of this heritage is a form of cultural relativism, but like any relativism, objective universal truth is downplayed or completely ignored.
While the Bishops of Africa and elsewhere are to be commended for their rejection of Fiducia Supplicans, their rejection should be based solely on the fact that it violates universal Church teaching norms that are applicable and operative everywhere throughout the world. As such, the Western flavor of the document should not even be a consideration in its rejection or acceptance any more than if a document promulgated in the future has an Eastern or Southern or Northern flavor to it. The sole criterion in judging whether a document is to be accepted or rejected is its fidelity to objective truth even if it is written in the Klingon dialect that offends a particular group of people by that fact alone.
First, Catholics are morally obligated to condemn the murder of homosexuals in African countries. Whether it is perpetrated by governments or citizens, it is the murder of Jesus.
Sadly, it is harder to take seriously Western conservatives finding common cause with African Bishop because, not too long ago, conservatives, colonizers, and imperialists were exploiting African people, culture, resources and, in some cases, supporting morals evils in Africa, like apartheid.
Your comment is so silly it’s almost an insult to stupid to call it “stupid.” The article doesn’t mention “Western conservatives”; it’s about orthodox Catholics. In America, historically and in principle, it was mostly conservatives who fought against slavery; the GOP, of course, was founded in 1854 by anti-slavery activists. Conservatives were also very much opposed to National Socialism (Naziism), unlike Hendrik Verwoerd, founder of apartheid in South Africa, who openly supported Hitler and Co. Try again.
First, Catholics are morally obligated to condemn the murder of homosexuals in African countries. Whether it is perpetrated by governments or citizens, it is the murder of Jesus.
Sadly, it is harder to take seriously Western conservatives finding common cause with African Bishop because, not too long ago, conservatives, colonizers, and imperialists were exploiting African people, culture, resources and, in some cases, supporting morals evils in Africa, like apartheid.
Hugh!
What about a pope who teaches heresy? What does your cartoon-level thinking make of that?
The Africans’ statement clearly states that African resistance to homosexuality is not merely a culturally African repugnance, but is in accord with natural law. The Pope and Fernandez desperately want us to think it’s just a problem over African quirks. Also, the Dutch bishops reject FS. So do the Scandanavians. The Pope is being rebuked. It’s a big moment in Church history.
Sfiducia Supplicans says to Africans: Receive your exception, since you are not progressive enough to “bless” sin.
All are welcome to repent. With pardon comes God’s healing and peace.