An influential delegate at Pope Francis’s global summit has directly linked African Catholic bishops’ stand for traditional biblical values with financial coercion from American evangelicals, Russian Orthodox, and Gulf-linked Muslims. Cardinal-designate Timothy Radcliffe, who has been the retreat-preacher to the Synod on Synodality both in 2023 and 2024, took a potshot at the conservative African bishops in a column published in the Vatican’s official newspaper on October 12. “African bishops are under intense pressure from Evangelicals, with American money; from Russian Orthodox, with Russian money; and from Muslims, with money from the rich Gulf countries,” Radcliffe wrote in L’Osservatore Romano, explaining the almost unanimous rejection of Pope Francis’s declaration, Fiducia supplicans, by African prelates.