Archbishop admits adultery: CEN 4.04.08 p 6. April 3, 2008
Posted by geoconger in Church of England Newspaper, Roman Catholic Church, Zimbabwe.trackback
Published in The Church of England Newspaper
Zimbabwe’s leading democracy activist, the former Roman Catholic Archbishop of Bulawayo, Msg. Pius Ncube has admitted to violating his vow of celibacy and having had an affair with a married woman.
Last September, Archbishop Ncube resigned his see two months after state television broadcast films of the prelate in bed with Rosemary Sibanda, a church employee.
Attorneys for the Archbishop denounced the films as fakes, but the sex sting, played across the pages of the government-backed Harare Herald for two months, severely damaged the credibility of Robert Mugabe’s most prominent critic.
Mrs. Sibanda’s estranged husband sued the Archbishop for £80,000 in damages for criminal conversion, (adultery), and President Mugabe publicly joked about the archbishop’s indiscretion and denounced him as a hypocrite unwilling to live up to his ordination vows.
Doubt as to the veracity of the films increased after it was revealed they were taken by a private investigator who was a former member of the Zimbabwe secret police, the Central Intelligence Organisation who had been involved in the politically-motivated mass murder of supporters of the Zimbabwe African People’s Union in the Ndebele provinces of Matabeleland. An estimated 10,000 to 30,000 civilians were murdered in the pogrom in the 1980’s.
When the allegations arose Archbishop Ncube said they were a “state-driven, vicious attack not just on myself, but by proxy on the Catholic Church in Zimbabwe,” and he received the backing of the Zimbabwe Catholic Bishops’ Conference and human rights activists across Southern Africa.
However, according to a report printed on March 25 by the Catholic Information Service for Africa, Archbishop Ncube conceded the charge of adultery was true.
“It is true. I do admit that I did fail in keeping God’s commandment with regard to adultery,” Archbishop Ncube told South Africa’s Frontier Africa TV.
“Having failed in keeping the Seventh Commandment Thou shalt not commit adultery, I would like to apologise to you, I’d like to apologise that so many of you were praying for me, for the fact that so many of you standing with me in fact suffered so much,” he said.
On Sept 11, 2007, the Vatican released a letter written by the archbishop in which he offered his resignation as Archbishop of Bulawayo “in order to spare my fellow bishops and the body of the Church any further attacks.” Pope Benedict XVI accepted the resignation under Canon 410.2, which allows a bishop to resign if he becomes ill or for some grave reason becomes incapable of continuing his ministry.
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