While almost every Eurocentric suggestion of interference is treated with contempt by Africans, this deadly one couched in a defunct, outdated moral code is lovingly respected. Irony does not come thicker than that.
Commentators are still finding things to say about Herr Ratzinger’s facile views on condom use, and the passage above is from a blog called Thought Leader, brought to us by the South African newspaper Mail and Guardian. (It’s a few days old now, but I stumbled across it and wanted to share it.)
It’s written by one Grant Walliser in a column called “High Voltage” – and it’s one of the best and clearest arguments I’ve read on the Pope’s ridiculous recent ramblings about AIDS and handy bits of stretchy latex, and how the latter are thought to prevent the former.
Walliser pulls no punches. It’s worth reading, whether you agree with Ratzinger’s view (it may convert you, who knows?) or not (you may just enjoy the read). That quoted bit is telling. While so many Africans see Europeans as the former colonisers, therefore a Bad Thing, they are quite happy to hang onto the religion those former colonisers brought into the continent, obviously seen as a Good Thing.
He also has a go at an Albanian Catholic nun called Agnesë Gonxhe Bojaxhiu, a.k.a. that fraud, Mother Teresa, in a paragraph that reads:
I could not find a number large enough to put to the harm Mother Teresa vested on the world by her repeated bleating to stop abortions and ban birth control and condoms. Deaths aside, her insistence that suffering was a divine right for the poor and that terminal patients should suck it up and die in pain without spending a cent of her massive donation money on proper painkillers, puts her true agenda into perspective for me.
This wizened prune “shamelessly used her faith” says Walliser, to “catapult her church’s dangerous views around the world”.
Perhaps this column should be required reading in the Vatican. But they’d probably just throw holy water at it and hold up Latin crosses before it and hope that it will crumble to dust. After all, Walliser must be the spawn of Satan in their eyes.
