Cardinal-designate Radcliffe links African bishops’ opposition to homosexuality to pressure from evangelicals, Moscow, and Muslims
October 15, 2024
In an article published in the Italian daily edition of the Vatican newspaper, Cardinal-designate Timothy Radcliffe, OP, one of the synod session’s two spiritual assistants, took repeated issue with statements made by Cardinal Fridolin Ambongo Besungu, OFM Cap, the cardinal who leads the Symposium of Episcopal Conferences of Africa and Madagascar.
Cardinal-designate Radcliffe also linked African bishops’ qualms about homosexuality to “intense” pressure from American evangelicals, from Moscow, and from Muslims.
The October 2023 synod session’s synthesis report, wrote Cardinal-designate Radcliffe, “seemed to backtrack on the preparatory document on openness to LGBT people. The word is not even mentioned. Many saw this as a failure.”
“The Synod anticipated this misunderstanding,” he continued. “When seeds fall into the ground, not much seems to happen. They germinate quietly until spring.”
As he discussed the ways in which he sees the Spirit at work in the Synod, Radcliffe wrote that “the Holy Spirit invites us to leave our comfort zones as Westerners.”
“When the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, many said we had entered a new era, the triumph of Western liberal democracy,” he explained. “Every nation was destined to ‘evolve’ towards our way of life. If some countries, especially in the South, did not agree with us, for example, on welcoming gay people, sooner or later they would have to adapt. We were wrong. We are entering a multipolar world.”
Referring to Fiducia Supplicans—the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith’s December 2023 declaration on the pastoral meaning of blessings—Radcliffe continued:
Pope Francis also asks us to open the Church to everyone, whoever they are. Todos, todos, todos (All, all, all): the divorced and remarried, gays, transgenders.
But in some parts of the world, welcoming gays is seen as scandalous. Many Catholic bishops in Africa see it as an attempt to impose a decadent Western ideology on the rest of the world. Cardinal Fridolin Ambongo of Kinshasa, president of the organization that represents all the Catholic bishops of Africa, sees it as the symptom of a decadent Western culture. A few weeks ago he declared: “Little by little, they [Westerners] will disappear. We wish them a happy disappearance.”
How can we reconcile the two imperatives of Francis’ papacy: to be outward-looking to bring the Gospel to the ends of the earth, to all cultures, and to be open to all human beings, whatever their condition and whoever they are? The dilemma exploded with Fiducia supplicans, the declaration of the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith that grants priests permission, especially in very specific situations, to bless couples in “irregular” relationships, including same-sex couples.
Cardinal Ambongo went to Rome to present the African bishops’ firm rejection of the proposal. Never before had all the bishops of a continent repudiated a Vatican document. Every attempt was made to calm the crisis. The Pope had approved the declaration. Cardinal Ambongo confirmed that African exceptionalism is an example of synodality. And he pointed out that unity does not mean uniformity. The Gospel is inculturated differently in different parts of the world.
Cardinal-designate Radcliffe then repeated his claim, made in an address in May, that the Gospel challenges the Church in Africa to welcome homosexuality.
“True, the Gospel is always inculturated in different cultures, but it also challenges every culture,” Radcliffe wrote in the Vatican newspaper. “Jesus was Jewish, yet he challenged the religion of his ancestors. Is the refusal to bless gays in Africa an example of inculturation or a refusal to be a nonconformist? Inculturation for one person is another person’s rejection of the nonconformist Gospel.”
Cardinal-designate Radcliffe then linked African bishops’ qualms about homosexuality to “intense” external pressures:
Another concern raised by Fiducia supplicans is that there appears to have been no consultation—even with bishops or other Vatican offices—before its release; not exactly, perhaps, a good example of synodality. African bishops are under intense pressure from Evangelicals, with American money; from Russian Orthodox, with Russian money; and from Muslims, with money from the rich Gulf countries. There should have been a discussion with them before, not after, the statement was released. Whatever we think about the statement, when we face tensions, and to overcome them, we all need to think and engage with one another on a deep level.
The Vatican newspaper posted Radcliffe’s article without any explanation. On page 10 of its daily edition, the article appeared under the heading “The Synod of Bishops”; in a sidebar, the newspaper’s editors introduced 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 magazine 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.
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