Is Pope Benedict XVI a Charlatan or a Hypocrite?

In the Los Angeles diocese of the Roman Catholic Church in the United States, the New Year rang in with a sweet and fundamental truth which the Vatican has been trying to ignore for decades, and perhaps even for centuries. And that fundamental truth is that, by and large, human beings are sexual organisms whose religious fervor and/or devotion cannot be regulated by the faux-godly law of celibacy.

In the Los Angeles case, an auxiliary bishop, Mr. Gabino Zavala, of Mexican-Hispanic descent, reportedly confessed to having fathered two teenage children and tendered his resignation to Pope Benedict XVI, who promptly accepted the same (See “U.S. Catholic Bishop With Secret Family, Gabino Zavala, Quits” BBC-World News 1/4/12).

What makes the preceding case peculiarly fascinating is the fact that at about the same time that Bishop Zavala's resignation was accepted by the Vatican, Pope Benedict XVI also announced the appointment of a married Anglican priest, newly converted to Catholicism, as head of the office in charge of American Anglicans, or Episcopalians, who decided to join the Holy See as converts. The apparent hypocrisy here, of course, inheres in the fact that in deciding to father his children, Bishop Zavala, according to Roman Catholic law, stood unpardonably guilty of spiritual contamination for willfully breaching his oath of celibacy.

Ironically, however, while he is now alleged to have rendered himself unfit to continue officiating as an auxiliary bishop, nevertheless, his priestly activities, dating back to the time that he allegedly fathered the first of his two teenage children, have not been retroactively proscribed. In other words, it appears as if clerically speaking, Bishop Zavala stood on the right side of the Catholic god until he officially confessed to having put a woman to whom he was not legally engaged, or married, in the family way.

That this is not the first, or even the second, time that a Roman Catholic bishop has confessed to having fathered several children while in the active service of the Church, ought to open the eyes of the Vatican and the global Roman Catholic Church to the real and practical possibility of radically reviewing and/or revising the principles underlying the law and oath of celibacy.

The current brazen pursuit of double standards, whereby newly converted Anglican priests are fully welcome to participate in the clerical activities of the Church, while bona fide Catholic priests who “humanly” break the oath of celibacy by fathering children out of wedlock are functionally decommissioned and summarily proscribed, reeks more of “religious imperialism” or “poaching” than any admirable desire of the Vatican at reunification with Episcopalians or adherents of the principles and tenets of the Church of England and its global subsidiaries or branches.

In divulging the case of Bishop Zavala to members of the Los Angeles archdiocese and the world at large, for that matter, the Archbishop of Los Angeles, Mr. Jose Gomez, reportedly, said that his archdiocese was in the process of providing both “spiritual care” and “funding to help the children [of Bishop Zavala] with college costs.” Maybe somebody ought to inform the Vatican and the key operatives of the Los Angeles Archdiocese that it takes more than college-tuition assistance to raise children, unless, of course, it could be proven that while fully employed as an auxiliary bishop, and even before that, Bishop Zavala earned adequate income with which to support his two children and their mother.

As for the alleged “spiritual care” which Archbishop Gomez claims the Church has been providing the Zavala children, the least said about the same, the better.

In March 2010, Pope Benedict XVI, it may be recalled, affirmed his utter disinclination to seeing to either the scrapping, altogether, of the clerical practice of celibacy or having the same radically reviewed and revised. At the time, the “Holy father's” grounds for such ultraconservative intransigence was predicated on his firm belief in the theoretical implication of celibacy affording priests the temporal opportunity of fully devoting themselves and their activities to “the Lord's business.” The latter belief may well contain some iota of validity. The practical reality, as has been widely and globally witnessed in the criminal form of pedophilia and other forms of priestly abuse of authority and influence, however, tells quite a wholly different story. To be certain, it at least partially appears as if in being sworn to the oath of celibacy, a remarkable percentage of Catholic priests have been afforded too much of idle time which has enabled them to criminally involve themselves in such ungodly activities as pedophilia and extramarital affairs, quite a remarkable number of which have resulted in the fathering of children.

And while not much has been discussed about the negative impact of celibacy on nuns and their sister superiors, nonetheless, it would be quite edifying if adequate attention got spotlighted on the number of nuns who may have been impregnated by either celibate male priests, or who may have been sexually involved with some male members of their congregations. We have since long, of course, known of instances in which pregnant nuns were forced to abort their fetuses. We also know that the oath of celibacy, largely a product of 11th century Europe, is not divinely ordained.

What all the preceding means, of course, is the viscerally unsavory fact that the Catholic Church has evidently been willfully presiding over a humanly insensitive culture of abject hypocrisy for decades now, if not centuries. And also that the obstinate and dogged pursuit of such hypocrisy, if not purposefully stanched in the highly enlightened global culture of the twenty-first century, may seriously and, perhaps, even irreparably, damage the faith of global humanity not only in the Christian religion, but also in religion as a morally moderating influence on human behavior at large.

*Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D., is Associate Professor of English, Journalism and Creative Writing at Nassau Community College of the State University of New York, Garden City. He is Director of The Sintim-Aboagye Center for Politics and Culture and author of “Nananom: Foremothers” (iUniverse.com, 2005). E-mail: [email protected].