UNITED STATES
Modern Ghana
By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D
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.
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