Fiducia Supplicans’ Geography of Sin

[Michie]

In the forty-some years since the BBC launched the political satire Yes, Minister – said to have been Margaret Thatcher’s favorite show – its relevance has only grown. Anyone who watches Sir Humphrey describe the Church of England (“The Bishop’s Gambit”) may think he is watching a historical documentary, not a comedy. There are laughs aplenty, but there was – and is – a sting in it for Anglican leaders.

“It’s interesting, isn’t it, that nowadays politicians want to talk about moral issues, and bishops want to talk politics,” observes Sir Humphrey, cynically adding that “theology is a device for allowing agnostics to remain with the church.”

Jim Hacker, the cabinet minister (and later prime minister) who is Sir Humphrey’s ostensible political master, tries to be less cynical – at least until political forces overwhelm his weak will and confused conscience. In another episode (“The Moral Dimension”), Hacker protests overseas corruption, while Humphrey justifies it as simply how business is conducted abroad.

“Sin is not a branch of geography,” Hacker sternly replies, reproving Humphrey.

These days, for Catholics, sin is very much a branch of geography in 2024.

Continued below.

Fiducia Supplicans’ Geography of Sin - The Catholic Thing

Fr. Raymond J. de Souza: Most bishops have remained quiet on same-sex blessings, and some have been vocally opposed – especially in Africa.

www.thecatholicthing.org

 

[Bob Crowley]

I suspect that one of the reasons the African Bishops are taking a hardline on this issue is the prevalence of AIDS in sub-Saharan Africa.

HIV/AIDS in Africa - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

AIDS damages businesses by squeezing productivity, adding costs, diverting productive resources, and depleting skills. ... Also, as the impact of the epidemic on households grows more severe, market demand for products and services can fall. ...
In many countries of sub-Saharan Africa, AIDS is erasing decades of progress in extending life expectancy. ... The biggest increase in deaths ... has been among adults aged between 20 and 49 years. This group now accounts for 60% of all deaths in sub-Saharan Africa.... AIDS is hitting adults in their most economically productive years and removing the very people who could be responding to the crisis. ...

 

[Michie]

I Stand With the Africans

We are seeing the fruit of generations of missionaries, with Catholic Africa acting to save the Church.

the-american-catholic.com

 

[Michie]

Some people in our Church seem to be embarrassed by their fellow Catholics in Africa. The white man’s burden, it seems, is not yet to be laid down. In Kipling’s time, it meant bringing the faith to people who had never heard of Christ, along with the telephone and telegraph, the locomotive, engines for carving great holes in the ground in search of gems and precious metals, harvesters and threshers and reapers, the order and beauty of settled law, several millennia of human learning, and all the wonders of city life. In short, Christianity and western civilization.

In our time, he has another sort of burden on his back. It is not to teach black men how to dam up streams for irrigating an arid land. It is to teach them how to use little plastic devices so that they can practice septic paraphilias without getting hepatitis or the clap. It is not to teach them how to apply antiseptics and how to prescribe antibiotics so that women in childbirth or their children do not die. It is to teach them how to introduce carcinogenic chemicals – synthetic growth hormones, for example – into their systems so that they can enjoy freedom from children, those messy and annoying things.

It is not to bring to a civilization aborning the glories of the West. It is to bring to a civilization in its youth the exhaustion and the shame of the West. Joseph Conrad wrote his terrible fable Heart of Darkness about how Africa’s darkness overwhelmed, in the erstwhile missionary Mr. Kurtz, the all too frail Christian faith of the Western man.

But now, if you want darkness, grim silence, suspicion, dispiritedness, go to New York, not Nairobi; go to London, not Lagos. The roles are reversed. Nigeria sends her missionaries to England and the United States, and these brave pioneers of Christ must call upon His might and His protection, lest they be drawn in to the morbid and the moribund, and fall down before hideous idols, and become like the witless beasts.

Continued below.

Africa’s Rational ‘Prejudice’ - The Catholic Thing

Anthony Esolen: Africans, they say, have yet to progress as far as we in the West have. Africans have prejudices, they say. Thank God they do!

www.thecatholicthing.org