The World Health Organisation has expressed concern after Kenya's Catholic Bishops issued a call to boycott the country's Polio vaccination program

The polio virus attacks the nervous system, and can cause someone to be paralysed within hours. It mostly hits children under the age of 5, and there is no cure.

Eradicating the virus requires immunising every child until it has nobody left it can spread to.

"Kenya is one of the countries in the “wild poliovirus importation belt” – a band of countries stretching from west Africa to central Africa and the Horn of Africa, which are recurrently re-infected with imported poliovirus," according to the World Polio Eradicaiton Initiative.

According to Christian Today this is the second time the Catholic Bishops have opposed a vaccination effort, as they mounted a campaign against a Tetanus vaccine last year citing fears that it was "being used as a covert means of controlling the country's population."

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Kenya's government meanwhile is less than pleased.

"Any attempts aimed at mobilizing the public against taking their children for vaccination is a serious violation of the right of children to health and survival," said Dr. Nicholas Muraguri, director of Kenya's Medical Services, in the statement according to the National Catholic Reporter.

http://www.timeslive.co.za/africa/2015/07/31/Catholic-Church-makes-things-easier-for-Polio-in-Kenya

Catholic doctors and priests versus the tetanus vaccine in Kenya
Posted by Orac on November 13, 2014

Of the many lies and myths about vaccines that stubbornly persist despite all evidence showing them not only to be untrue but to be risibly, pseudoscientifically untrue, among whose number are myths that vaccines cause autism, sudden infant death syndrome, and a syndrome that so resembles shaken baby syndrome (more correctly called abusive head trauma) that shaken baby syndrome is a misdiagnosis for vaccine injury, the lie that vaccines are being used for population control is one of the most persistent. In this myth, vaccines are not designed to protect the populations of impoverished nations against diseases like the measles, which still kills hundreds of thousands of people a year outside of developed countries. Oh, no. Rather, according to this myth, vaccines are in fact a surreptitious instrument of population control designed to render people sterile.

You might recall how a few years ago antivaccinationists leaped on a statement by Bill Gates that “if we do a really great job on new vaccines, health care, reproductive health services, we could lower that [population] by perhaps 10 or 15 percent.” They used it to accuse Gates of being a eugenicist and that vaccines were in actuality an instrument of global depopulation. It was a ridiculous charge of course. In context, it was clear that Gates was referring to how the expected population increase from 6.8 billion to 9 billion could be blunted with good health care; in other words, he was referring to how good health care could decrease the rate of population growth, not how vaccines could be used to depopulate the world. However, because of the prevalence of the myth that vaccines are sterilizing agents intended for global depopulation, the charge that Gates is a eugenicist, as batshit nuts as it obviously is to reasonable people, resonated in the anti-science world of antivaccinationists. Similar claims, namely that there is “something” in vaccines that results in infertility and sterilization, have been unfortunately very effective in frightening people in Third World countries and have played a major role in antivaccine campaigns that have delayed the eradication of polio.

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Lest you think that this obsession over vaccination as a cause of infertility is limited to Kenya and other Third World countries, consider this. The very same theme frequently appears in antivaccine rants against Gardasil, which has been blamed without evidence for premature ovarian failure. Another favorite antivaccine trope is that polysorbate-80, which is used in some vaccines, causes infertility. Yes, we in the “advanced” First World nations are as prone to falling for these lies as Kenyans. Never forget that.

http://scienceblogs.com/insolence/2014/11/13/catholic-doctors-and-priests-versus-the-tetanus-vaccine-in-kenya/

We must be realistic about the pope's visit. He is a wonderful role model; he will not make miracles happen for American Catholics.

The pope's visit, we hope, will be a refreshing antidote to our jaded state and the appalling condition of many of our once cherished institutions before scandals rocked them.

In 1870, the year when the newly created Kingdom of Italy carried out the Capture of Rome and put an end to the Pope's temporal power, Laurens made this painting of the Cadaver Synod, a notorious Medieval event reflecting badly on the Papacy's reputation

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cadaver_Synod