Harvey Milk, the wafer and the wine, and Sotomayor
Finally, after much soul-searching, a statement was prepared and verified by churchmen and lawyers; it offered Indians, who were acknowledged as humans the blessings of Christianity and the protection of the crown, but only if acceptance was immediate. If the Indians hesitated, as they always did, conversion by the sword was justified.
— Texas; pg 39. James A Michener
The way it often worked was this: Recalcitrants to immediate acceptance of the faith were rounded up, then brutally tortured — including waterboarding — until, unable to any longer endure the excruciating pain, they at last accepted Jesus Christ as their lord and savior and the Church as His instrument here on earth. At the moment of their conversion the torture would cease, and they’d be mercifully executed.
The “churchmen” were Roman Catholic bishops and cardinals and popes. The place was the geography now known as Mexico and those realms now within the southwestern US and almost everything south of Mexico. The time ranged from the early 1500s through the early to mid-1700s. It was a many centuries-long pan-global practice that was born of the many centuries-long original sin: the certainty the institution was right, not just in some things, but in all things, and that God was always on its side.
A millennium of military crusades into the mid-East, into northern Africa, was capped by the institution’s full-fledged foray into the Americas. It was genocide unalloyed with any baser metal.
That genocide was followed by brutalizing Inquisitions to stamp out scientific advance, all the way to the present where barbaric pedophile priests, protected by the Church hierarchy, brutalized children. A few days ago a nine-year investigation was summarized in a damning 2,600 page report, “Commission to Inquire Into Child Abuse.” (http://www.childabusecommission.ie/rpt/)
It told of decades of “rapes, humiliation and beatings” at Church-run reform schools in Ireland. The investigation provided proof positive evidence that the Vatican had been fully aware of the savaging since the 1930s.
In Luke 4:23 Jesus is reported to have counseled, “Physician, heal thyself.”
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