By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D.
Garden City, New York
Feb. 27, 2016
E-mail: okoampaahoofe@optimum.net

This would not be the very first time that I have had to say this, but it looks as if the Catholic bishops in Africa have yet to find their calling when it comes to the question of homosexuality (See “Africa Won’t Accept Homosexuality – Catholic Bishops” Starrfmonline.com / Ghanaweb.com 2/22/16). First of all, Roman Catholic prelates like Cardinal Theodore Sarr have bought into the biologically questionable oath of celibacy, which has absolutely no place in traditional African mores and cultural praxis. The African bishops also continue to take marching orders from the Vatican, a predominantly European establishment at least about 20-percent of whose priests may be homosexual and a considerable number of whom have been hopelessly mired in child sexual abuse – or pedophilia – cases.

In other words, if these African Roman Catholic bishops were that serious about the inviolable need to preserving the integrity of traditional African cultures, whatever the latter may be legitimately perceived to entail, they would since long have declared their independence from the thoroughgoing racist clerical culture of the Vatican. It is also vacuous and hypocritical to blame the United States for the acceptance of homosexuality when, as already pointed out, a sizeable percentage – it may be very conservative – of the Catholic clergy is homosexual. Fundamentally speaking, I don’t see the difference between same-sex marriages and the tacit condonation of clerical homosexuality in the Catholic Church, except for the crass hypocrisy on the part of prelates like Cardinal Sarr.

We also know that human beings are incurably sexual in our makeup and orientation. Which means that all these bishops pooh-poohing the existence and practice of homosexuality in African societies and elsewhere must be expressing their sexuality in one form or another. As a Catholic-educated person who once seriously considered joining the Church of Rome, I know fully well about the quite riotously rampant practice of fornication, adultery and pedophilia among the membership of the Catholic priesthood, both in Ghana and abroad. What is known to be widely practiced among the Catholic priesthood but is rarely spoken about, or discussed, if at all, is the practice of masturbation, otherwise known as “Onanism,” which in the scriptures is a punishable offence.

And so Cardinal Sarr and his colleagues would do themselves and the rest of us quite a heck of great good by addressing the place and practice of Masturbation in the global Roman Catholic Church; merely focusing the brunt of their ire or resentment on the Americans, as if it was the United States that invented the pre-Biblical practice of homosexuality is patently absurd. Maybe if the pontifical likes of Cardinal Sarr joined hands with African politicians and governments to make life better for their people, we would become far less economically reliant on Western donors and aid workers and charitable organizations, and then we would not have to worry about the purportedly psycho-cultural imperialism of the Americans and their Western allies.

*Visit my blog at: kwameokoampahoofe.wordpress.com Ghanaffairs