OWEYEGHA AFUNADUULA: Are Popes Always Right?

By definition, a Pope is a prelate who as Bishop of Rome is the Head of the Roman Catholic Church. He is a human being elected by the topmost leaders of the Catholic Church called Cardinals to be head of the Catholic Church of Rome and by extension the head of the global Roman Catholic Church. As a human being the Pope can make both right and wrong decisions. And as the Bible says, all of us including the Pope have fallen short of the Glory.

Popes have made many right decisions that have affected humanity in all corners of the Earth. They have also made very many wrong decisions that have also affected humanity in diverse ways. In the early days of Catholicism and growth of the Catholic Church, Popes were also Politicians as Emperors and, therefore, made political decisions that affected people positively or negatively. With time, however, the Catholic Church liberated itself from mainstream politics, although Popes and clergy could still make political statements, with far reaching social, political, ethical, moral and scientific consequences, to name but a few.

One example of scientific consequences of a decision made by a Pope took place during the papacy of Pope Urban VIII. A young highly creative and highly innovative academic and intellectual, who did not even have a formal university degree when he made his revolutionary innovations, Galileo Galilei, using his powerful telescope, established that it was the Earth which orbited around the Sun, not the other way as the Catholic Church adherents believed. Pope Urban VIII, the whole Church and the academia of the time were infuriated. Galileo got multi-pronged attacks from even his professors who though the young man had denigrated them. The Church, which had a lot of power and authority over humanity then, chose to try Galileo for his scientific discovery, which contradicted one of the main doctrines held by it – that it is the Sun which goes round the Earth.

Doctrines are almost always non- scientific but mere beliefs that cannot be backed by science. Galileo was tried by the Church for something that was backed by Science: the Earth Orbiting the Sun. After his formal trial, Galileo was convicted of a “strong suspicion of heresy,” a lesser charge than actual heresy. “In sum, the 1616 event was not the beginning of a 17-year-long trial, as is often said, but a non-trial,” Galileo officially faced the Roman Inquisition in Aprand and agreed to plead guilty in exchange for a lighter sentence. He was incarcerated under house arrest indefinitely by Pope Urban VIII who also excommunicated him from the Church. Galileo spent the rest of his days at his villa in Arcetri, near Florence, before dying on January 8, 1642. More than 350 years later, Pope John Paul II absolved Galileo, thereby rectifying one of the Church’s most infamous wrongs — the persecution of the Italian astronomer and physicist for proving the Earth moves around the Sun.

One thing is true and must be emphasized. Churches -and even Mosques are made of human being and led by human being, who must necessarily make mistakes and ask for divide guidance to put them right. If Pope Urban VIII had asked for divine guidance, instead of using human knowledge, wisdom, understanding and insight, the Catholic Church would have been saved its most infamous embarrassment to-date.

Today, Popes have been faced with one of the post-modern joint threats to the Church – homosexuality and Lesbianism. While in Philippines President Rodrigo Duterte publicly revealed that he had been forced into gayism by a Catholic Church Father, but he is no longer one, there aren’t many rulers and leaders on the globe who will be as open about the vice that compelled God, as the Bible chronicles, to burn Sodom and Gomorrah. They quietly support the vice and have to this made laws to legalize it. However, there others who have outlawed it. Former USA President Donald Trump launched a global campaign against homosexuality.

Many African countries do not approve of gayism. However, the gay movement is well-funded. Some rich are investing in the popularization and proliferation of the vice, in particular by causing vulnerable government to pass laws to legalize the vice. In May 2021, BBC News reported that there are 69 countries in the world that have laws criminalizing homosexuality. There are countries, including Nigeria and Uganda, where existing laws outlawing homosexuality have been tightened. In others, efforts to get the laws removed have failed. For example, in Singapore a Court, early 2020, dismissed a bid to overturn a law that prohibits gay sex. In May 2019, the high court of Kenya upheld laws criminalising all kinds ofhomosexual acts. In 2021 a crackdown on lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender people in Cameroon resulted in the arrest or assault by security forces of dozens of people this year, according to Human Rights Watch. In the most recent incident, two transgender Cameroonians were sentenced to five years in prison after being found guilty of “attempted homosexuality”. However, in February 2021, Angola’s President, Joao Lourenco, signed into law a revised penal code to allow same-sex relationships and ban discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation. In June 2020, Gabon reversed a law that had criminalised homosexuality and made gay sex punishable with six months in prison and a large fine. Botswana’s High Court also ruled, in 2019, in favour of decriminalizing homosexuality.

Mozambique and the Seychelles have also scrapped anti-homosexuality laws in recent years. In Trinidad and Tobago, a court ruled in 2018 that laws banning gay sex were unconstitutional. Following these developments, gay individuals and organizations have increased their activities, especially through aid to schools and universities to recruit young people into gayism.

There is no doubt that the devil has found a conduit to fell Man, Homo sapiens through perverted sex. It is definitely an affront against God who created sex and special sex organs, more for reproduction of the human species and other biological beings and their perpetuation in the biocultural landscape. Young people have become extremely vulnerable. Reproduction and survivability of humanity as a species is both threatened and endangered by the deliberate conversion of the Anus, the body organ designed for ejection of faeces from the alimentary canal, into a sexual organ. Increasingly, many young people are being forced into homosexuality by adults. This is being compounded by harsh socio-economic conditions, which young people are suffering the most. Many young people are being forced to reject marriage because they fear the responsibility of raising children. Others see homosexuality as a source of livelihood.

Those sucking them into the gay trade have money and promise good life and riches for them. Indeed, the lure of getting rich quick has made many young people fall victims to the vice, which it promoters see as a virtue. They need the protection of the government, the church and the Mosque, and ultimately God.

However, if some of the promoters of gayism are in the government, the church and the mosque, then humanity is in real trouble. God could abandon humanity as he did during the days of Noah and Lot, when he sacrificed humanity to a worldwide flood and to fire in order to destroy it before his eyes. Today he could choose to sacrifice it to nuclear war and destruction whereby Russia, North Korea, Iran and China could team up to destroy humanity in the other nuclear countries and beyond. Indeed, the war between Russia and Ukraine, which has raged on for almost a year, shows that use of nuclear weapons to destroy humanity is not a distant possibility. Apparently, Russia, Iran, North Korea and China are hard on gayism, while virtually all the other nuclear countries are soft on the vice. God, on the other hand, has never approved of gayism. Gayism has emerged as a 21st Century dilemma.

It is against this background that Pope Francis has put himself and the Catholic Church at the centre of the gayism dilemma, just as Pope Urban VIII put himself and the Church at the centre of resisting the scientific truth revealed by Galileo that it is not the Earth that orbits the Earth but the Earth that orbits the Sun.

In an interview on 25th January 2023 in the Vatican, the sear of Global Catholicism, Associated Press (AP), Pope Francis maintains that homosexuality is not a crime. AP saying, “Pope Francis criticized laws that criminalize homosexuality as “unjust,” saying God loves all his children just as they are and called on Catholic bishops who support the laws to welcome LGBTQ people into the church”.

The Pope may have had Jesus’ defense of a prostitute and children guiding his children, but what matters today is the interpretation of his statement. The statement was immediately hailed by gay rights advocates as a milestone. However, some people are saying it is a milestone in Satan’s struggle to destroy humanity and the Kingdom of God before Jesus comes back. They are convinced the Pope has become the most high-ranking religious leader to openly work for the dark kingdom of the devil. Many religious leaders are perplexed and no doubt many young people will be confused.

However, as I said and illustrated elsewhere in this article, the Pope is first and foremost a Pope is a human being and like all human beings can make mistakes, and like the rest of us, has fallen short of the glory of God. Fortunately God does not deal with groups any more like he di when liberating the children of Israel from bondage in Egypt. He deals with us individually.

So if you asked me if Popes make mistakes, I would respond in the affirmative. They have made mistakes in the past. And they will continue to make mistakes well into the future until Jesus comes back. Or if you asked me “Are Popes Always Right?”, I would say “How can they be always right when, like all human beings, they are not free from making mistakes? I have shown that they can turn right into wrong as Pope Urban VIII did with the scientific truth revealed by Galileo and punished him for sticking to the truth, just like Jesus was punished for the truth and many people are punished by governments for the truth.

It is future generations of humanity that will assess the full impact of the Pope’s statement that homosexuality is no a crime. In spiritual terms, homosexuality is a sin. The boundary between sin and crime is not there. When you commit a crime you are invariably Sinning and you will not be fit to enter God’s Kingdom.

For God and My Country