The demand by the United Nations Secretary General that African countries abolish all legal prohibitions against homosexual activity has met with anger from one African Vatican prelate who said that it was “not our culture; it’s against our faith” to endorse homosexuality.At a Vatican meeting on Africa earlier this month, Cardinal Robert Sarah, the President of the Pontifical Council Cor Unum for Human and Christian Development, told the National Catholic Register, (NCR) “African bishops must react” to the demand.
He described the secretary general’s comments as “stupid” and added that the “Catholic bishops of America must help us in Africa, by reacting themselves.”
“It’s not possible to impose on the poor this kind of European mentality,” he added.
UN General Secretary Ban Ki-Moon had told an assembly in Addis Ababa that what he called discrimination against homosexuals “has been ignored or even sanctioned by many states for far too long.”
Cardinal Sarah has been one of the Vatican’s most outspoken critics of the internationalist agenda in Africa.
In his address last month on the Pope’s Lenten message for 2012, Cardinal Sarah said that the Church, as “part of its prophetic mission,” is motivated by “fraternal correction in truth and charity” when it opposes “certain fashionable ideas.”
“Charity teaches us that we are responsible not only for the material well being of others, but also for their moral and spiritual good,” he said.
“We cannot overlook the fact that a certain ideology which exalts the rights of the individual can have the consequence of creating isolation and solitude… Therefore we can help one another by discovering our reciprocal responsibility the one for the other.”
“Sometimes it is thought that the Church’s concerns, her tenacious resistance to certain fashionable ideas, are moved by thirst or nostalgia for power. This is not the case.”
The cardinal said that the Church is “moved by a sincere concern for mankind and for the world” and not “by a desire to condemn or recriminate.”
“Justice and mercy” he said, require “the courage to call things by their name.”
The cardinal’s remarks to NCR echo one of the most prominent themes running through the discourse of 2009’s African Synod in Rome, where 300 bishops of the continent repeatedly warned against the imposition of an alien, anti-human creed on an unwilling African people.
In dozens of interventions, voice after voice at the Synod used the strongest terms to denounce this “hidden agenda” by UN-based international aid organisations.
The bishops described it as the “ferocious onslaught” of an “insidious ideology” opposed to traditional African values, a “malevolent and shortsighted” form of “cultural imperialism” being pushed by UN groups like the UNICEF, the World Health Organisation and the UNFPA, as well as the World Bank, the IMF, and even by the European Union.
Presenting the Synod’s final document, John Olorunfemi Onaiyekan, archbishop of Abuja, Nigeria, said, “We urge the countries of Africa to carefully scrutinise the services being offered to our people, to ensure they are good for us.”
The Synod “denounces all surreptitious attempts to destroy and undermine the precious African values of family and human life.”
Concluding his address, Cardinal Sarah said, “Our secularized society lives and organizes itself without reference to God because it is affected by a poverty more tragic even than material want; a poverty represented by the rejection and complete exclusion of God from social and economic life, by the revolt against divine and natural laws.”