Movement on the Fiducia Supplicans Front

This Declaration has provoked protests from a significant number of episcopal conferences across four continents, and particularly a real outcry in Africa, which, outside of North Africa, has completely rejected it.

One of the main opponents, Cardinal Fridolin Ambongo, Archbishop of Kinshasa and President of the Symposium of Episcopal Conferences of Africa and Madagascar (SECAM), traveled to Rome and obtained from Pope Francis a text exempting the African continent from the application of this miserable Declaration.

In an interview with ETWN, Cardinal Ambongo stated on July 1, 2025, that the position adopted by African bishops regarding Fiducia Supplicans was not limited to Africa, but "was also that of many bishops in Europe. It is not just an African exception," he told EWTN.

This is in direct opposition to what Pope Francis had said in defense of the Declaration, calling the African Church a "special case." And in an interview published in the Italian daily La Stampa, the Argentine Pontiff added: "For them, homosexuality is something culturally ugly; they don't tolerate it."

On January 4, 2024, the DDF issued a note acknowledging that different pastoral contexts might require a slower reception of the document. The DDF was beginning to bow to the chain reactions from African bishops' conferences.

Cardinal Ambongo traveled to Rome to convey all these reactions to Pope Francis. He recounted how he had drafted, in collaboration with Cardinal Víctor Manuel Fernández, Prefect of the DDF, and Pope Francis, a statement affirming that this authorization was not applicable in the African context.

This SECAM statement, dated January 11, 2024, cited, in particular, the biblical prohibitions against homosexual acts and described same-sex unions as "intrinsically corrupt."

A New Attack on Fiducia Suplicans

The SECAM president emphasized that African opposition to Fiducia Suplicans is shared in other regions of the world, emphasizing that the issue of homosexuality is a doctrinal and theological problem, and that the Church's moral teaching on the subject has not changed. In other words, it is not an African exception, but a fundamental problem that must be addressed.

Cardinal Ambongo further stated that Africa had received this declaration as an imposition alien to the continent's priorities. "The pastoral priority for us is not the problem of homosexuals, nor that of homosexuality. For us, the pastoral priority is life: how to live, how to survive." 

This is a way of throwing a stone in Leo XIV's garden and highlighting an element that should be one of the new Pope's priorities: ridding the Church of the errors sown by his predecessor, which are the source of internal fractures that urgently need to be repaired. Cardinal Ambongo seems to indicate the revocation of Fiducia Supplicans is one of these priorities.