The African Bish­ops of the Catholic Church are call­ing on cor­rupt African Lead­ers to “repent and leave office”. The mes­sage came from a meet­ing of the African bish­ops at the Vatican.

From this Asso­ci­ated Press arti­cle that we found at the Philadel­phia Daily News, writer Nic­hole Win­field relays the bish­ops statement.

While prais­ing some Catholic lead­ers who are doing their pub­lic ser­vice well, they accused oth­ers of hav­ing “fallen woe­fully short in their per­for­mance in office.”

“The synod calls on such peo­ple to repent, or quit the pub­lic arena and stop caus­ing havoc to the peo­ple and giv­ing the Catholic Church a bad name,” the bish­ops wrote at the end of their month­long synod.

The bish­ops didn’t name names, but Zimbabwe’s Robert Mugabe, who has been blamed for pre­sid­ing over a polit­i­cally repres­sive regime that led to the eco­nomic col­lapse of the coun­try, and Angolan Pres­i­dent Eduardo dos San­tos, whose party swept elec­tions last year that crit­ics say were marred by fraud and cor­rup­tion, are two well-known Catholic leaders.

The prelates, about 300 from Africa and around the world, also con­demned non-Catholic lead­ers and out­side for­eign inter­ests for allow­ing African coun­tries to fall into such dev­as­ta­tion, say­ing “in most cases we are deal­ing with greed for power and wealth at the expense of the peo­ple and nation.”

In par­tic­u­lar, they cited areas of con­flict such as Soma­lia, the Great Lakes region, Sudan and Guinea.

“What­ever may be the respon­si­bil­ity of for­eign inter­ests, there is always the shame­ful and tragic col­lu­sion of the local lead­ers: politi­cians who betray and sell out their nations; dirty busi­ness peo­ple who col­lude with rapa­cious multi­na­tion­als; African arms deal­ers and traf­fick­ers who thrive on small arms that cause great havoc on human lives, and local agents of some inter­na­tional orga­ni­za­tions who get paid for ped­dling toxic ide­olo­gies that they don’t believe in” — a ref­er­ence to non­govern­ment orga­ni­za­tions and human­i­tar­ian groups that pro­mote abor­tion rights.

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