Cardinal Fridolin Ambongo Besungu, OFM Cap, the president of the Symposium of Episcopal Conferences of Africa and Madagascar (SECAM), recounted Cardinal-designate Radcliffe’s surprising denial at the synod briefing on October 22 (video).
In an article published on October 12 in L’Osservatore Romano (CWN coverage), Father Radcliffe took repeated issue with statements made by Cardinal Ambongo and linked African bishops’ qualms about homosexuality to “intense” financial pressure from American evangelicals, from Moscow, and from Muslims.
On page 10 of the newspaper’s daily edition, the article appeared under the red-colored heading “The Synod of Bishops.” In a sidebar, the newspaper’s editors explained the article’s previous publication history, introducing the article with these words:
Being open to new and unexpected friendships, leaving clericalism and one’s own comfort zone and opening oneself to all cultures in the name of Christian universalism. These are the ways in which the Holy Spirit works in the Synod, “and each of these invites us to a kind of death so that we can live.” These are the thoughts of the Dominican biblical scholar and theologian Timothy Peter Joseph Radcliffe—whom Pope Francis will create cardinal in the next consistory—on the three-year process of the Synod on Synodality, expressed during a conference held last Good Friday at Stonyhurst College, in the United Kingdom ...
The text, adapted, appeared in the English periodical The Tablet in April 2024 and was reprinted by Vita e Pensiero, a bimonthly periodical of the Catholic University of the Sacred Heart, in issue 4 of July/August in an Italian translation—edited by Simona Plessi—which we publish in our pages.
At the October 22 press conference, journalist Michael Haynes asked Cardinal Ambongo about the article—prompting a mild rebuke from the deputy director of the Holy See Press Office, who claimed that the article had no bearing on the synod, even though the Vatican newspaper, in its headline and sidebar, had explicitly linked Cardinal-designate Radcliffe’s article to the synod.
“This is not the theme of our briefing today, because we are talking about the synod,” said Cristiane Murray (video, 0:53), before permitting Cardinal Ambongo to answer Haynes’s question.
Cardinal Ambongo responded:
I think it’s important to clarify things; otherwise, people may think we are hiding something. We have also read this article in which we are accused of having taken money from Russia, from the Gulf countries, and from the United States, through the Pentecostal churches. So we read that article ourselves.
But we are at the synod, and we follow the teachings of Father Radcliffe, and I do not recognize at all what Father Radcliffe said in the article you are mentioning, and I can tell you that today Father Radcliffe came to me before we’d begun because he also read the article only yesterday, and he is shocked that such things may have been written attributing these things to him. And I think that it is your duty as journalists to clarify things.
Father Radcliffe has never said these things, and this does not correspond at all to his personality, if he had said so, or these things somewhere else—but he was there with us, and nobody felt accused, and I can assure you that this is something that is totally untrue. This has got nothing to do with what Father Radcliffe has said, I don’t know who wrote this article, but I think that the intention of this article was to create sort of an incident, but fortunately, this did not happen.
In its subsequent article on the October 22 press conference, L’Osservatore Romano briefly summarized Cardinal Ambongo’s remarks and repeated the publication history of the article published three times under Cardinal-designate Radcliffe’s name. Lorena Leonardi and Edoardo Giribaldi reported:
Another question then concerned the thought of theologian Timothy Radcliffe, published in The Tablet in April, translated into Italian in the July issue of the periodical Vita e pensiero and reprinted in our newspaper last October 12, in which he cited a “strong pressure from the evangelicals, with American money; from the Russian Orthodox, with Russian money; and Muslims, with money from the rich Gulf countries” to which the “African bishops” would be subjected.
“I do not recognize Father Radcliffe at all in what has been written,” said Cardinal Ambongo Besungu, reporting on a meeting in which the theologian said he was “shocked” by the publication of “things of this type attributed to him. Father Radcliffe never said this,” the African cardinal reiterated.
Vatican News, the news agency of the Dicastery for Communication, republished in English most of the L’Osservatore Romano article on the press conference, but omitted the paragraph devoted to Cardinal Ambongo’s remarks about Cardinal-designate Radcliffe—suggesting a possible attempt at damage control.
Vatican News also deleted the paragraph in its German and Portuguese coverage of the press conference, but retained it in its French, Italian, and Spanish coverage.