Has the Catholic Church in Ghana Dealt with Its Own Rampant Cases of Fornication, Pedophilia and Homosexuality?

I just finished reading the media release that was signed and published by the Most Reverend Philip Naameh, the Metropolitan Archbishop of Tamale and President of the Ghana Bishops’ Conference, dated Friday, February 19, 2021, and cannot but question the mental and psychological balance of the exclusively male society and organization that is the Ghana Catholic Bishops’ Conference and, indeed, the entire global Romantic Catholic Bishopric or Prelacy (See “Shut Down Office of LGBTQI Ghana and State Your Unambiguous Position – Catholic Bishop[sic] to Akufo-Addo” Modernghana.com 2/20/21).

I have often unabashedly maintained, even as the fictional protagonist of Continental Africa’s foremost and immortalized novelist, Prof. Chinua Achebe’s classic novel “Things Fall Apart” (1958), Chief Obi Okonkwo, disdainfully observed about the veritably Homosexual and Patriarchal Roman Catholic Theology of the so-called “Trinity” or “Holy Trinity,” which was that there was everything psychologically unhinged or unbalanced about the very concept of the procreative existence of “The Father, The Son and The Holy Spirit” in the deafeningly clear absence of a “Mother,” or the sort of sexually complementary principle that these same Roman Catholic Prelates self-righteously claim to be scandalously and flagrantly absent from the culture and existence of the members of the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transsexual and Intersexual (LGBTQI) community around the globe.

Even so, what I find to be inexcusably condemnable about the ultimatum issued by the membership of the Ghana Catholic Bishops’ Conference to President Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo and the country’s National Assembly of Representatives or Members of Parliament, is the very inescapably illogical notion that, somehow, Homosexuals were also created in the image of God or Divine Providence but, nevertheless, the integral cultural praxis of Homosexuality is one that is fundamentally execrable or immutably detestable in the very eyes of the same God who created LGBTQI+ people in His own image and yet is also virulently hateful of the behavior of the same creation of His own brain and hands! In other words, what the leaders of the Ghanaian and Global Roman Catholic Church are telling the rest of us earthlings is that the Christocentric God of the Holy Roman Catholic Church is a SELF-HATING GOD or DIVINE GODHEAD.

For, there can be absolutely no gainsaying the fact that a theology that promotes and propagates the inviolable acceptance of Homosexuality but, nevertheless, vehemently and unreservedly rejects the moral and cultural expression of the same Homoerotic Identity must be emanating from a very miserable and clinically confused God or Deity, indeed. But, of course, we all know that such apparently neurotic confusion of the Vatican-created Divine Godhead is an inescapable figment of the clinically unhinged imagination of the earthbound creators of the same. It is also interesting to highlight the fact that the two Pauline scriptures upon which the members of the Ghana Catholic Bishops’ Conference predicate their pontifical proscription of LGBTQI+ cultural practice and, in effect, mode of existence, which are First Corinthians, Chapter Six Verses Nine and Ten, and First Timothy, Chapter One and Verse One, actually condemns a whole class category of criminal acts and activities that are considered to be detestable and morally unacceptable in the sight and presence of the Divine Godhead, and not Homosexual Expression per se.

Well, in First Corinthians, Chapter Nine, Verses Nine and Ten, this is what Apostle Paul had to say to the Christian inhabitants of Corinth, wherever the latter may be geographically located today: “Do you not know that the unrighteous will not inherit the Kingdom of God? Do not be deceived; neither the immoral, nor idolators, nor adulterers, nor sexual perverts nor thieves, nor the greedy, nor drunkards, nor revilers nor robbers will inherit the Kingdom of God.” I do not believe for even a split-second here that the phrase of “sexual perverts,” as is being invidiously made to seem by the Most Reverend Philip Naameh, that is, the President of the Ghana Catholic Bishops’ Conference, necessarily refers to the specific putative practice of Homosexual Coition/Coitus or intercourse, that is, sodomy.

All that the aforementioned scriptural passage tells us is that the leaders of the Ghana Catholic Bishops’ Conference would be better off taking advantage of Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo’s Fee-Free Senior High School System and not pretend that, somehow, the members of Ghana’s Christian Community are damn too stolid to understand the Holy Scriptures, at least the Pauline Scriptures. Again, the second Pauline scripture that Archbishop Naameh and his Gang of Ghana Roman Catholic Church Bullies cite has absolutely nothing exclusively gay-specific about it. This is what First Timothy, Chapter One, Verse Ten has to say about human immorality, among other things: “immoral persons, sodomites, kidnappers, liars, perjurers, and whatever else is contrary to sound doctrine.” And then, predictably, a Foh-Amoaning-backing Ghana Conference of Catholic Bishops singles out the term “sexual perverts” and rather acrobatically or falsely claims the latter to be exclusively referring to homosexuality in the Greek language.

Now, Dear Reader, it ought to have become crystal clear to you, by now, why my dear, late maternal grandfather, The Rev. TH Sintim (1896-1982), of the Presbyterian Church of Ghana, expressly forbade yours truly from becoming a Roman Catholic Priest. Then, there is also this neocolonial mentality which asserts that since the European Human Rights Court expressly says that Homosexual Acts are not protected under the Global Human Rights Convention, perforce, the Ghana Government and the Ghanaian Judiciary ought to passively fall in line or follow suit. What kind of “Holy Asininity” or “Holy Crap” is this? But, of course, it is also significant to note that in calling for the Executive and Legislative branches of the Ghana Government to clamp down on homosexuality and homosexual activities in the country, the Naameh Gang does not include the Judiciary.

On a marginal note: By the way, there is absolutely no such expression as “cowed down,” perhaps “cow dung,” as used in the following penultimate sentence of Archbishop Naameh’s press release: “Finally, we also urge the Executive and the Legislature never to be cowed down or to succumb to the pressure to legalize the rights of LGBTQIs in Ghana.” You see, when God or Divine Providence is clearly not on your side – ICHABOD – this is the kind of silly rhetorical blunders that one makes in the process of presumptuously attempting to pass oneself off as the sole representative of Divine Providence right here on Earth. It was also, personally, heart-wrenching to see Nana Akufo-Addo, that is, “The Little Man from Kyebi,” in the jaundiced words of a Tamale “suuya”-selling vagabond, kowtow before these cassock-wearing charlatans in a Cain-like prayer conclave, almost as if the politically visionary grandson of Osagyefo Nana Ofori-Atta, I, was guilty of the very natural human presence of homosexuals and homosexuality in the Sovereign Democratic Republic of Ghana.

But, of course, I am equally aware of how the downright dirty political game is routinely played in a morally Stone-Age Stuck Ghana these days.

*Visit my blog at: KwameOkoampaAhoofeJr

By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., PhD

English Department, SUNY-Nassau

Garden City, New York

March 2, 2021

E-mail: [email protected]