Are African Catholic bishops ‘sanctimoniously’ defying Pope Francis? Rethinking same-sex blessings, cultural borders, and the rhetoric of colonization in postcolonial ‘African’ Catholicism

My essay focuses on the emergence of cultural border rhetoric among African Catholic bishops that functions to ‘un-Africanize’ homosexuality following Pope Francis’s Fiducia supplicans, which called for the pastoral blessings of couples (Catholic or otherwise) in irregular situations and of couples of the same sex across the globe. I argue that the Symposium of Episcopal Conferences of Africa and Madagascar’s (SECAM) No Blessing for Homosexual Couples in the African Churches performs a salient function other than Catholic doctrinal reinforcement on sex and marriage: SECAM’s paradoxical protest against Fiducia supplicans operates as protection of what I call the ‘African cultural border’ from seemingly ‘insidious’ postcolonial Catholic sex and marriage politics. Through rhetorical analysis, I unravel how pastoral care in Catholic churches on the continent becomes a tool of exclusion (and oppression by extension), as African Catholic bishops mobilize religio-cultural rhetoric to assert postcolonial sovereignty and consolidate heteronormative power. This exclusionary discourse obscures Africa’s internal cultural diversity and weaponizes ‘authenticity’ to suppress African queer identities. I use postcolonial cultural bordering as a critical analytic to unsettle the paradox of how African Catholic bishops reject LGBTQ+ rights as Western impositions while embracing Catholicism, itself a colonial import with a brutal history.