Pope Africa Visit -- Condemns Ideological Colonialism | [site:name]

Pope Francis greets children in Bangui, Central African Republic. (Giuseppe Cacace/AFP/Getty)

Pope Francis wrapped up his visit to Africa last week, having received exuberant welcomes in Uganda, Kenya, and the Central African Republic. Before departing the continent, during a visit to Kangemi, a slum in Nairobi, the pontiff alluded to how the rich and powerful West continues to exercise its considerable influence on the African nations. Specifically, he condemned “ideological colonialism”: the relentless effort by the West to impose its values regarding family and sexuality on the African people as a condition of economic assistance.

All those who decry the long history of European and American paternalism and colonialism should be aware that they continue in this new form — ideological rather than military. Powerful and heavily funded actors such as the U.N., the World Health Organization, and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation ignore the rich cultural contexts of the African nations in favor of promoting their own social ideologies. Their purpose is to force cultural changes in the areas of sexuality, family, and reproduction. To be fair, their efforts are mostly made in good faith, based on the view that the loose family arrangements in the West and its rapidly shrinking birthrates (approaching zero) are great boons that the West should export.

The most egregious of these efforts are aimed at lowering the birth rate through sterilization, contraception, and abortion. The World Health Organization is enthusiastically promoting the use of Depo-Provera, a long-acting injectable contraceptive, in foreign-aid programs, especially in Africa. This hormonal contraceptive has been linked, in three separate studies, to an increase in breast cancer. It has also been cited as increasing the risk of HIV transmission, highly dangerous in Sub-Saharan Africa, where 60 percent of women are using this type of contraception and the HIV infection rates are very high. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation disburses 3 billion dollars a year to the WHO, and the Foundation is deeply committed to spreading the use of Depo-Provera. FP2020, an initiative headed by Melinda Gates, has the goal of getting this drug to an additional 120 million women and girls, mostly in Africa, by the year 2020.

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Even programs that were originally intended to address particularly poignant and distressing problems, such as the high rate of maternal and infant mortality, are being hijacked in favor of a Western agenda that cannot conceive of pregnancy and children as anything but a burden. For instance, the U.N.’s initiative for healthier mothers and children — called “Every Woman, Every Child” — has drifted from a desperately needed focus on maternal and infant health toward abortion access and funding. New partners in the endeavor include the Planned Parenthood Federation and Marie Stopes International, which both lobby aggressively for abortion funding. The agenda now includes an “adolescent” sexual-education component, which — under the rubric of “sexual and reproductive rights” — has a goal of promoting controversial programs that foster the sexual liberation of youth. This is an odd emphasis for a program designed to foster the survival of mothers and babies.

#share#The promotion of the liberal West’s cultural agenda does not stop there. The African Group at the U.N. General Assembly, which is composed of 54 countries, strongly objects to new proposals regarding the sexual education of children. They deplore the lack of cultural sensitivity in WHO guidelines that seek to expose children, even in primary school, to controversial issues such as masturbation, gender identity, and homosexuality. The stated purpose of the proposal now before the General Assembly is to “modify the social and cultural patterns of conduct of men and women of all ages.” The Africans, who love their children and seek their highest good, would like to decide for themselves how best to educate them in these delicate and intimate areas.

African women find themselves at odds with many of the feminists driving international policy at the U.N. Security council as well. At a U.N. panel in October on Women, Peace, and Security (WPS), Anne Marie Goetz, a noted feminist professor, worried that too many women were interested in “reasserting a romantic traditional, rather rigid view, a heteronormative view, of the family.” Goetz had complained in a 2014 panel that WPS activism was focused too much on security and not enough on “attacking patriarchy.” Many of feminists are more dedicated to deconstructing the traditional family than to training women in peace-building and preventing conflict at the local level. The feminists openly object to those efforts, because they rely on the traditional role of women as wives and mothers.

#related#This cultural aggression on the part of the global community against Africa is not lost on Pope Francis. In Kangemi, he talked about the effort to make African countries “parts of a machine, cogs on a gigantic wheel . . . pressured to adopt policies typical of the culture of waste, like those aimed at lowering the birth rate.” Instead, he holds up the Christian ideal of marriage — permanent, faithful, exclusive, and fruitful — as a liberating force.

The West is experiencing a huge cultural and human crisis. Bad ideas have flowered into ideologies that assault human nature, especially the complementarity of men and women and the way they pair up in love to form lasting and exclusive marriages that are the safest place for women and children. Not content with deconstructing the basic institutions of society that promote human flourishing in the West, leftists seek to export these flawed and damaging ideas to the developing world, where their impact will be devastating.

— Grazie Pozo Christie, M.D., specializes in radiology in the Miami area and serves on the advisory board for The Catholic Association.