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Cultural Prejudices? Who in Their Right Mind Would Want What Bergoglio Wants?

Francis has claimed that Africans oppose homosexual sins because they have “cultural prejudices”. Anthony Esolen (TheCatholicThing.org, 7 February) responds: “Thank God for cultural prejudices.”

• A cultural prejudice implies that people have a culture.

• Today “the West” [e.g. Francis] brings to Africa “a solvent for culture, an ideal of monochrome globalism, managed by the most ill-read, ill-bred, dim-sighted, and irreligious elites the world has ever produced.”

• "If you tell a healthy boy what sodomites do [...], he will rightly feel disgust and his imagination would never have been able to conceive of such a perversion."

• The West now has seventy years of evidence as to what happens when all sexual norms are overturned: “Who in their right mind would want what the West is peddling?”

• What is there for an African to see that would attract him? Deserts of loneliness; couples childless by choice; men and women by the hundreds doing in public parades in the sight of children what would get them arrested if they did it by ones and twos in their front yards; a public square notable for crudity and far worse; populations collapsing; men and women mutually suspicious and nearly incapable of appreciating the wonder of the other sex; confusion and acrimony, with children paying the price for the licentiousness of adults.

• Wanting to stay away from this is not prejudice but the only rational conclusion to be drawn.

Picture: © Mazur/catholicnews.org.uk, CC BY-NC-ND, #newsIyvfvykenr

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philosopher

The Pope's comments reflect a sociologism, the epistemology that posits moral truth as being socially constructed by the cultural and historical circumstances of a particular society. Truth is not socially constructed but objectively stands above any society and culture.

giveusthisday

I find his comment racist - Africans oppose sin because they have "cultural prejudices"? Catholics must always oppose sin because it is
it offends God.

Another great article by Anthony Esolen. I look forward to reading his thoughtful pieces in the monthly issue of the Magnificat. Yes, thank God for the “prejudices” of Africa.