a pope dies after easter and now everyone’s doing catholicism revisionist history.
ya’ll: “catholics never did witch hunts! that was protestants 👆👆”
maybe they didn’t do witch hunts in europe or whatever but they sure as shit tried to beat indigenous spirituality out of people in the Americas. oh and in Africa. and in Southeast Asia. on every continent whoops.
James Baldwin has an interesting quote, something along the lines of “you kneel at the white man’s cross and he gets your land,” i.e., you accept the colonizer’s god as your own (that he is the supreme authority, that his word is law) and that entitles the colonizer to your resources.
as far as im concerned the catholic church is the religious arm of colonization. for every plantation settlement in the Latin America there were catholic clergy there making sure everything ran smoothly.
the catholic church as an institution is just as complicit in colonization (and its continuing effects) as every other european nation who participated.
[from James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time]