The Pope and many of his predecessors have done more evil to the people of this world than just about any other force of evil, including wars. How many wars were part of the Papal Crusades? The Spanish Inquisition? The Reformation? The list of murders and crimes of the Popes would take hundreds of books to document. > Pope Bernadict himself and the former pope, John Paul 11, both come from the era where all these Priests were blatantly molesting children, and you have to wonder why they covered it up so much and hired Bernard Law. As the Proverbs say: “Tell me who your friends are, and I will tell you who you are.” The Pope made his bed with the Child Molesters, and he has no right to tell Africans about condoms and its use. I doubt that he will be going to Heaven.
The Catholics should re-examine these popes and cardinals and what they preach to us, Africans. This current pope was in Washington last year and he made a speech about human rights and how he wants all countries to respect human rights. But let’s examine which human rights the Pope and clergy are allowed to deny followers:
1. The right of women to control their own reproductive functions
2.The right of women to hold any ruling posts within the Church
3.The right of poor families to the knowledge or tools needed to keep their family’s size within sustainable limits. (This is especially troubling now that the earth has entered a period of food scarcity and recession.)
4. The right of priests to have loving life partners who are not made out of cold marble.
5. The right of nuns to marry. (In the 50s nuns wore wedding rings because they were “married to Christ.” How creepy is that?)
6.The right to use condoms, not just to prevent unwanted pregnancy, but to protect against AIDS, even on continents like Africa where AIDs has already nearly wiped out one entire generation and is working on the next.
One would think that at least one of those “journalists” in Africa gushing all over the Pope during his visit might just have asked him a few probing questions about all that. And asked him how he jives his stated support for human rights with his Church’s own rules against some of mankind’s most fundamental human rights, like controlling how many kids they have.
I have to wonder if a few thousand poor Catholic families in Africa who, thanks to the Church’s rules against artificial birth control, had unwanted children, children that suffered or even died of starvation, sued the Church and won. I wonder if that’s what it would take to spur the Pope to change the rules against birth control and, of course, spark a Papal apology tour of Africa.
William Bogere
