Gnéba was not a recently arrived outsider to the diocese who took sudden and dramatic action based on a first or partially formed impression of the local Church.
The Vatican announced this week that the former bishop of the Ivory Coast’s Diocese of Man has been transferred to an auxiliary position in another diocese. A move which appears to draw to a close a simmering two year dispute.
Since 2008, the diocese had been led since Bishop Gaspard Béby Gnéba, 63.
But the bishop had been at odds with local clergy since January 2024, when he published a letter to Catholics in which he asked that they denounce priests living in concubinage, maintaining illicit families, or committing other crimes of sexual or financial abuse.
The response was uproar among local clergy, leading to a standoff with the bishop, an apostolic visitation ordered by Rome, the temporary sidelining of Gnéba, and the appointment of a caretaker bishop later that year.
The transfer of the bishop may resolve the impasse in Man, but the bishop’s apparent demotion and the publicly unaddressed conclusions of the apostolic visitation of the diocese highlight wider tensions — both in the Church in Africa and globally — about clerical misconduct and scandals, and the way Catholics are expected to respond.
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