This isn't a story I was taught at my Catholic elementary. On the contrary, I read stories of saints, martyrs for the church, tortured for their faith. Christians, particularly Catholics, were the victims of non-Christians. I observed the piety of family members and neighbors, nuns and priests, fellow schoolmates, and thought something is wrong with me. I looked at the statues of Jesus and Mary, their blue eyes and long straight hair, and couldn't imagine these two as originating from the Middle-East. They looked like the nuns and priests, not me, or anyone in my family or neighborhood or fellow students at school.
On Fridays, I did see people like me. Every Friday, throughout the school day, classes were lined up and taken downstairs to the cafeteria where the projector and film was ready to teach us about the missionaries. The "Africans," for the church, seemed to be on huge country! The Africans looked like me! It was the Africans who were in need of civilizing by the white missionaries, then, usually, wearing black habits or priest collars. The African children sat on patches of red clay before a nun or priest, teaching the power of prayer. Maybe the "teachers" of civilization hadn't noticed the distended stomachs of those African children.
Some Fridays, these sessions were completed with a short film on the crusaders. As if the mission these zealots of converting savages at sword point ended with the last crusader.
Crusaders, however, are alive and well and ruling.
The Secretary of Defense, Pete Hegseth, prays for a US victory in Iran, even when his boss says the "excursion" and not a war. Hegseth, however, prays that the "excursion" in Iran, which he calls the War for Jesus, eviscerates the Persians and Muslims. Any enemy still standing in that country. They deserve "no mercy." Armageddon is coming. No need to craft policies to throw money at head start programs, clean energy initiatives, affordable housing, medicare for all, no-debt college opportunities...
Hegseth, according to a PBS report, reminds active members of the military and would-be-military recruits, young men and women who could be deployed to fight a ground battle, that it's a war: Christianity against Islam. God is on our side! And the battle cry is Psalms 144: "Blessed be the Lord, my rock, who trained my hands for war and my fingers for battle."
Just like the old crusading days! This country is Christian! Was at the beginning! Is now, and forever will be! Remember to embrace God-- who looks like us, thinks like us, and whose message to us is to remove from the Earth heathens!
To some extend, I saw this decades ago, watching African children learning to pray while we, black children, remained in the dark about our connection to those children, to Africa. The nuns in black, seated among us, had souls to save, too. Because it mattered that in the late 1950s and early 1960s, while the Civil Right movement was forcing America to see black Americans as human, the Church, wanted to make sure we would accept a little change and not expect another American revolution, as Dr. Martin L. King would say, of values.
In 1967, King called America the "greatest purveyor" violence, and now it seems the regime in Washington D. C. is living up to those words, using them as a mantra. The greatest in violence ever! And most all of that violence and brought the US to a status of wealth. The wealthiest nation. The most armed nation.
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