The Communist Clergy
3/5
SOUTH
AMERICA
...
South America is home to
nearly half of the world’s 1.2 billion Catholics, but there had
never been a South American pope until Pope Francis. He won because
the Vatican had been anxious about the dramatic decline of
Catholicism across the region in the last decade. Mexican journalist
Diego Cevallos has noted that what the Vatican had once seen as a
“continent of hope,” is now thought of as a “continent of
concern.” According to Brazil’s 2010 census, 65% of the
population is Catholic, down from over 90% in 1970. Similarly,
between 2000-2010, the percentage of Mexicans that identify as
Catholic dropped from 88% to <83%, the largest fall recorded to
date. If these trends persist, by 2025 about 50% of all South
Americans will be Catholic, down from approximately 70% today. Such a
decline would offset any gains the church might make in its new
continent of hope, Africa.
The history of South America
is
important to understand the 'Liberation Sympathy' of Christian
churches. The pioneering missions in South America were led by
Catholic Jesuits. John Crow, Professor Emeritus of Spanish at the
University of California, Los Angeles, held in his book ‘The
Epic of Latin America’ that
the Jesuits were inspired by St. Thomas More’s Utopia,
and chose the
jungles of the New World in which to fulfil More’s prophesy.
After Portugal won
independence from Spain in 1640, Philip IV granted the Jesuits’
request to arm the Indians of South America. Jesuits formed a
formidable fighting force comprising of Native Indians against the
Portuguese. Without this force, great parts of Uruguay, Bolivia and
Paraguay might even now belong to Brazil. In 1754 the Paraguayan
Fathers revolted against a Spanish-Portuguese boundary treaty. In
Peru, Jesuits were accused of terrorizing Indians and depriving them
of land, wages, women, children and personal freedom. Militant
radicalism had grown gradually. The Bourbons also cited widespread
smuggling, graft, cheating and general lawlessness. Jesuits were
expelled in 1767 as a part of foreign and domestic administrative
reform under the Bourbons. As an official explanation, the monarchy
cited the need to “bring local Jesuit power to an end and assert
royal power in their stead.” In 1767, there were barely 2200
Jesuits in all of Spanish America, 'taking care' of 7,00,000 Native
Indians.
The removal of the Jesuit
influence brought on a series of local uprisings. The revolt at
Asuncion grew into the Antequera revolution. In the 17th and 18th
centuries, the Jesuits began to defend their Indian charges and their
rights against the authority of Spain. Finally, after the rupture
with landowners, Pope Clement XIV dissolved the order in 1773.
Without the Jesuits, dissatisfaction over military recruitment,
ever-increasing taxes and the Indians’ hatred for their Spanish
magistrates came to the surface. John Gunther stated that the
Catholic Church grew rich and decadent in America. Paraguay became
practically a Jesuit colony.
In Chile, in 1856, violent
controversy erupted over the jurisdiction of ecclesiastical courts.
In Argentina, Catholic Action became associated with nationalism,
anti-communism, social reform and even became linked with Italian
Fascism. The Church was slow to respond to the industrialized world.
In 1891, Pope Leo XIII addressed the Church to the industrialized
world. He deplored laissez-faire capitalism, materialism, and the
atheistic aspects of socialism.
A Brazilian Catholic
theologian, Hugo Assman, held that the Christians were searching for
substance rather than a structure in religion.
The Church made
“positive acts of witness” as processes of the liberation of the
laity. Christ became “true” because he laid down his life for his
people and committed a positive act. Christian participation in the
struggle for liberation became a major act of faith. God stopped
existing in fixed institutions. The theology of revolution attempted
to define the revolutions to come. The revolutionary theologian
started using theology to provide concrete ideas and strategies of
revolutions.
Karl Schmitt wrote in ‘The
Roman Catholic Church in Modern Latin America’ how the
period from 1830 to the present has been characterized by
Church-state conflict. Clericals wanted the continuation of special
rights. Anticlericals supported free, secular, universal education.
Anticlericals wanted the abolition of Church courts. In liberation
theology, the biblical motif of Exodus is mentioned frequently
concerning the process of liberation in South America. The theology
of liberation is linked to the process of conscientization, a jarring
of moral wrong into awareness, hence the revolutionary zeal.
BRAZIL
In 1991, a group of
missionaries from New Tribes Mission UK were expelled by the
Brazilian governmental protection agency for isolated and recently
contacted tribes - National Indian Foundation (FUNAI). New Tribes
Mission UK (NTM) had been successful in establishing contact with an
isolated indigenous tribe of Zo’é people. New Tribes Mission has
since changed its name to Ethnos360 (E360). Far-right Brazilian
president Jair Bolsonaro is overseeing a new push to spread
Christianity among Brazil’s indigenous people. UN special
rapporteur termed his zeal 'genocidal'. Ricardo Dias worked as a
missionary for NTM between 1997-2007 where he pledged to convert
every last “unreached people group” on earth.
Today, Dias has access to
detailed information on 107 isolated tribes, including monitoring and
location studies of “voluntarily isolated” tribes. Some of these
tribes managed to evade missionaries until now, but their paradise
was lost long ago. Christian missionaries need “martyr” for the
greater good, and somehow that is okay too. The recent case of
missionary John Allen Chau who was killed by a Sentinelese arrow
neatly illustrates the path of radicalization. People who are
delusional behind divine mandates can easily justify cruel means to
genocidal ends. There’s little that tempers such zeal.
As recently as in 2018, a
missionary-evangelist Manoel de Oliveira was handed a 3-year prison
sentence for enslaving Zo’é people of Amazon at his cashew nut
plantation. The reader must never lose sight of the two ironies that
lie herein - the deliberate use of the word 'Indian' for indigenous
people as in the name FUNAI, and the vast difference between the
sentences of 58 years and 3 years given to the two criminals.
Missionaries are helped by colonial laws. Tribal genocide is an
inescapable Christian colonial legacy. Our turbulent history haunts
us still.
E360 is a militant
missionary group of 'Rapture believing' Christians who think
returning Jerusalem to the Jewish people is a key to 'the second
coming of Christ'. This belief is
a key driver of
both evangelical support for Israel and attempts to missionize
uncontacted peoples. It calls for “finishing the task” of
relentlessly shoving Goebbelsian gospel in gullible throats. E360 has
appealed for donations to buy a helicopter to evangelise isolated
indigenous groups in western Brazil near the Peruvian border. They
require the chopper to reach the Javari Valley, “the darkest,
densest, hardest-to-reach place in all of South America", which
is home to the highest concentration of uncontacted tribal groups in
the world.
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