African clergy go on strike as Archbishop sacked: CEN 6.12.09 p 6.

The Roman Catholic clergy of the Central Africa Republic (CAR) staged a one day strike last week to protest the removal by the Vatican of the Archbishop of Bangui, Msgr. Paulin Pomodimo, for violating his vow of chastity.

Appointed to oversee the country’s nine Roman Catholic dioceses in 2003, the 54 year old archbishop resigned on May 27 after he was found by the Vatican to possess “a moral attitude which is not always in conformity with his commitments to follow Christ in chastity, poverty and obedience.” The archbishop’s resignation follows that of the former president of CAR’s episcopal conference, Bishop François-Xavier Yombandje of Bossangoa, who stepped down on May 16 after a Vatican fact finding mission faulted him for having a common law wife.

Meeting at Bangui’s cathedral, the CAR clergy voted to strike in protest to a “lack of consultation” over the appointment of a new archbishop, prompting the closing of all parishes and the suspension of all religious services and sacramental acts.

In March the Rev. Robert Sarah, secretary of the Congregation for the Evangelization of Peoples, toured the CAR and issued a scathing report on clergy discipline. The French language Bangui newspaper, Le Confident on May 20 published extracts of a letter written by Cardinal Ivan Dias, the Prefect for the Congregation for the Evangelization of Peoples to the CAR bishops stating that numerous “bad things” had been done to the Body of Christ through the clergy’s “poor and scandalous comportment.”

The cardinal’s letter said it was “pointless” to deny the accusations of widespread unchastity, nor was there a need to judge the motives or circumstances behind the “evil that has been committed.” Bishops, priests and religious in the CAR had “in one way or another” been accomplices in the scandal and each “shall assume his own culpability proportionally to his own responsibility,” Le Confident reported.

A majority of Roman Catholic parish priests in the CAR have common law wives, local news agency i.media reported and Archbishop Pomodimo and Bishop Yombandje were “reportedly suspected of frequenting women and having children.”

Clergy spokesman Fr. Mathurin Paze Lekissan said the strike was called off after one day to avoid “depriving Christians of the divine word and the body of Christ.”

The CIA World Factbook estimates the former French colony’s religious demography to be 25 percent Roman Catholic, 25 percent Protestant Christian, 15 percent Muslim and 35 percent animist. Anglican evangelists from the Congo are active among the tribe’s along the country’s southern and eastern borders, but no national church has yet been formed. Bangui however is home to Francophone Africa’s only higher Protestant school of theological education the Faculté de Théologie Évangélique de Bangui—a school supported by a number of overseas Anglican mission partners.