CT Blue

John Aravosis, at Americablog, does not take kindly to some remarks made by a black African cardinal (a serious pope candidate, apparently):

His name is Cardinal Peter Turkson of Ghana, and he’s one of the top candidates being considered for next Pope. He also has some disturbing theories on race. You see, Cardinal Turkson, who is black, thinks being a pedophile or gay (to him they’re the same) is a white thing.

Cardinal Turkson was asked about the Catholic church’s ongoing pedophile scandal, and whether there was a chance the scandal might spread to Africa – most of the cases have been in western Europe and America.

Turkson’s response included two basic parts:

1. The pedophile scandal is really a gay scandal.

2. It’s a white thing, so black Africa shouldn’t have a problem.

(via Americablog)

Now, in a larger sense, this is total hogwash, but in a smaller sense, there is a grain of truth hid within it.

You see, it is an open secret that priests in Africa don’t take their vows of celibacy all that seriously. A huge percentage have wives or mistresses. (See, e.g., here and here) This is not so unusual in the history of the church; parish priests in the Middle Ages often more or less openly kept wives and mistresses, with their parishioners kindly looking the other way.

This means that African priests actually have the option of having fairly normal sex lives, which means that fairly normal people are more likely to opt for the priestly career. You know, like those same type people might do here if they had the option to also live a normal life. Now, the gay remark, about which Aravosis probably feels more personally offended, is completely baseless, since pedophiles come in all orientations, but the white thing is at least statistically true, since white priests are drawn from a population far more skewed toward deviancy than that from which their African colleagues are harvested.

So, the pope-hopeful has a point, though it’s well hidden by a camouflage of bigotry. His problem is that he’s not allowed to acknowledge the reasons why there’s a glimmer of truth in his slanders.