Longing For A Saviour

[Laeg]

Eamonn McCann: Longing for a saviour
[Published: Thursday 24, May 2007 - 10:03]

Indigenous peoples wiped out during the European colonisation of Latin America had been asking for it. In fact, "longing" for it.

So Pope Benedict XV explained in the key-note address of the papal visit to Brazil which ended on May 13.

There has been remarkable little reaction to the Pope's endorsement of the concept of genocide for Jesus.

Benedict made his remarks to a conference of Latin American bishops in the Basilica of Our Lady of Aparecida in Sao Paulo state, the second-biggest Catholic church in the world, after St Peter's.

At 173m long and 168m wide and with a 70m high dome, it has a capacity of 45,000 in a town of 40,000 souls.

The Vatican website quotes Benedict telling the conference that "the nations of Latin America and the Caribbean had been silently longing to receive Christ as their saviour" long before the arrival of Europeans in the 16th century.

Christ had been " the unknown God whom their ancestors were seeking, without realising it" . The colonisation of the continent should not be characterised as a conquest, but as the "adoption" of its indigenous people. " The proclamation of Jesus and of his Gospel did not at any point involve an alienation of the pre-Columbian cultures, nor was it the imposition of a foreign culture". The effect of the extirpation of ancient religions and the forced conversion of whole peoples had been to make their cultures " fruitful" by "purifying" them.

At the time of the Portuguese invasion of Brazil in 1500, an indigenous population variously estimated at between five and 13 million lived in around 1,000 communities. Today, fewer than 800,000 survive in around 220 groups. Enslavement and extermination, on the orders of the Portuguese ruling elite and carried out in the name of religion, was the main factor in their catastrophic decline.

Over the intervening centuries, many priests and nuns did defend the Indians. Some today are their strongest allies. But consistently, too, priests blessed the conquistadors as they waged savage war on peoples who were effectively helpless, and it is with these that Benedict XV now associates himself.

The Pope will have been concerned to defend his Church's historical role in Brazil, given that it's under mounting pressure from Protestant evangelicals. Pentecostal churches are enjoying explosive growth, promising not just pie-in-the-sky but milk and honey here and now. The most powerful, the Church of the Kingdom of God - it claims 18 adherents among members of parliament - operates under the interestingly ambiguous slogan, 'Stop Suffering'.

Benedict, the hammer of the Liberation Theologists during his stint with the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, will also have been determined to discourage Catholics, especially clergy, from seeking to validate their ministry through engagement with the oppressed.

What's involved is not a dispute over the meaning of history. Indigenous people are still hunted like animals across swathes of Brazil. Lawyers for the survivors of a small forest tribe, the Ha-Ha-Hae, are currently seeking redress for a programme in which a majority of its males were sterilised without their knowledge under the guise of vaccination.

A former governor and police chief of the state of Matto Grosse face accusations of genocide against the Rio Pardo Indians. Public prosecutor Mario Lucio Avelar has told the NGO Survival that there is sufficient ground for a charge of "deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part" .

Earlier this year, campaigners warned that heavily-armed loggers searching for hardwoods had invaded the lands of the Arara and Macuxi at the mouth of the Amazon and that the survival of the tribes was in peril.

Sandro Tuxa, leader of a coalition of Indian tribes in the north east of Brazil, and herself a lay Catholic activist, has described the Pope's remarks at Aparecida as "arrogant and disrespectful ... To say the cultural decimation of our people represents a purification is offensive, and frankly, frightening".

Reporting the Pope's outburst, Reuters offered the balancing comment that: "Many Indian groups believe the conquest brought them enslavement and genocide" - the equivalent of remarking that "many Jewish groups believe" that the Holocaust brought them enslavement and genocide.

Anyone crass enough to refer to the Nazis' final solution in such terms would, rightly, be denounced as a Holocaust Denier and excluded from respectable discourse. But the Pope, it appears, is immune from any such judgment. Or perhaps it's just that the forest tribes of Brazil don't qualify for consideration in this context.

I suppose the logging companies scything through the forest peoples could consider hiring Catholic chaplins to explain that the Ha-Ha-Hae, the Rio Parde, the Arara and Macuxi have, all unknownst to themselves, been silently longing for such adoption down the years and can now consider themselves purified.

Some cookie, this pope.

[DigitaLVampirE]

VATICAN CITY — Pope Benedict, who has been criticized by native peoples groups, said Wednesday the Roman Catholic Church does not gloss over the injustices that accompanied the Christian colonization of Latin America.

He said the church lamented that indigenous peoples’ basic rights were often trampled upon by missionaries.

"While we do not overlook the various injustices and sufferings which accompanied colonization, the Gospel has expressed and continues to express the identity of the peoples in this region and provides inspiration to address the challenges of our globalized era," Benedict told English-speaking pilgrims in St. Peter’s Square as he talked about his trip to Brazil earlier this month.

Benedict said that his visit to Brazil, his first papal voyage to Latin America, "embraced not only that great nation, but all Latin America, home to many of the world’s Catholics." He described the trip as being "above all, a pilgrimage of praise to God for the faith which has shaped their cultures for over 500 years."

"Certainly, the memory of a glorious past cannot ignore the shadows that accompanied the work of evangelizing the Latin American continent," he said.

Benedict’s remarks to Italian-speaking pilgrims at his general audience in the square were even stronger than the comments in English.

"It is not possible, indeed, to forget the sufferings and injustices inflicted by colonizers on the indigenous populations, whose fundamental human rights were often trampled on," Benedict said.

The pontiff said he was making a "dutiful mention of such unjustifiable crimes" and said some missionaries and theologians in the past had condemned them.

Native rights groups in Brazil criticized Benedict for his insistence that Latin American indigenous people wanted to become Christian before European conquerors arrived centuries ago.

During the trip, the pontiff told a regional conference of bishops in Brazil that pre-Columbian people of Latin America and the Caribbean were seeking Jesus Christ without realizing it.

Paulo Suess, an adviser to the church-backed Brazil’s Indian Missionary Council, said at the end of the trip that Benedict’s comments failed to take into account that native people were enslaved and killed by the Portuguese and Spanish settlers who forced them to become Catholic.

Marcio Meira, in charge of Brazil’s federal Indian Bureau, said indigenous people were forced to convert to Catholicism as the result of a "colonial process."

The Pope in Brazil told the bishops that, "the proclamation of Jesus and of his Gospel did not at any point involve an alienation of the pre-Columbus cultures, nor was it the imposition of a foreign culture."

In 2000, during the Vatican’s Holy Year, the Catholic Church apologized to Brazil’s natives and blacks during a ceremony in Brazil for the "sins and errors" committed by its clergy and faithful in the past 500 years.

A Vatican cardinal representing Pope John Paul II participated in the ceremony, which saw the head of Brazil’s bishops conference ask God for forgiveness for the sins committed against brothers, especially indigenous people.

’It is not possible, indeed, to forget the sufferings and injustices inflicted by colonizers on the indigenous populations, whose fundamental human rights were often trampled on.’

By FRANCES D’EMILIO The Associated Press

[DigitaLVampirE]

From his onslaught on liberalism during the papacy of John Paul II, Joseph Ratzinger, the current Pope Benedict XVI, has possessed a determination to return Roman Catholicism to the global influence it exerted during medieval times.

Any astute observer of Joseph Ratzinger is aware of his deliberate and calculated agenda to wind back the clock during his papacy. He wants the Roman Catholic Church to reverse the damaging liberal social politics and rationalist theology that so weakened its political and moral authority in the decades following World War ii and return to the position it once enjoyed at the peak of its power.

Ratzinger accomplished much of this agenda in tandem with Karol Wojtyla, Pope John Paul ii. The closeness of the relationship enjoyed by the Polish pope and the Bavarian cardinal was evident by how religiously they adhered to their weekly scheduled private Friday meetings, and the fact that Ratzinger was the only cardinal permitted to address the pope in his native German tongue.

The papal political platform Ratzinger built in association with Wojtyla established the ideal launching pad for his now increasingly aggressive evangelizing papal agenda for the Roman Catholic Church.

Benedict’s most recent evangelizing initiatives have been directed at Latin America, specifically during his recent visit to Brazil to open the Fifth General Assembly of the Latin American bishops’ conference celam just north of the city of Sao Paulo.

This visit to Brazil was not by invitation. It was by Benedict’s own personal choice—thus, no doubt, in pursuance of the latest phase in his agenda to progressively evangelize the world.

That this pope is in a hurry to fulfill his agenda is made obvious by the fact that he has, just two years into his papacy, enjoined war on not one, but now on four distinct fronts—and has done so with elegance and panache using rapier-like thrusts of both tongue and pen.

On the home front, Benedict wasted no time in making a number of deliberate personnel changes at the Vatican after he took over in April 2005. He is intent on building a team in Rome that will support his agenda. He closed some Vatican offices and consolidated others, thus ensuring that no individual Vatican functionary is left with a degree of undue power that might frustrate his efforts at returning to a more traditionalist approach to liturgy, nor interfere with his wider global political agenda. We should expect to see further refining of the papal base of support in Rome as Benedict gains ground on the other three fronts of his evangelical crusade.

Benedict opened a second front in his onslaught last September at his old alma mater, University of Regensburg, when he, in the words of Dr. George Friedman, ceo of Stratfor, “thr[e]w a hand grenade” into the Islamic arena. The outcry over the pope’s deliberately chosen words in his verbal attack on Islam is now a matter of history. It was, as Friedman pointed out, “an elegant move. He has strengthened his political base and perhaps legitimized a stronger response to anti-Catholic rhetoric in the Muslim world. And he has done it with superb misdirection. His options are open” (Sept. 19, 2006). That’s the way of this pope. He will go for the jugular, but with such finesse that it leaves his options open. This is the mark of a quintessentially expert diplomat.

Benedict is working to stem the Islamic onslaught that has brought the crusading imams right up to the Vatican’s doorstep.

On a third front, the pope frontally attacked European secularism when he used the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the European Union to castigate the leaders of the EU for their failure to recognize the traditional religion of Europe, which grew out of Rome, in its declaration of fundamental values. He accused Europe of being “built upon a cynical form of pragmatism that compromises on all principles, sacrificing fundamental ideals and undermining the dignity of human nature and freedom” (CWNews.com, March 26).

[DigitaLVampirE]

CWNews.com recently ran a story pointing out how Benedict’s attacks on secularism were further endorsed by Bishop Giuseppe Betori, secretary of the Italian bishops’ conference. Betori declared that “the Christian people face a new challenge, in the form of political forces that are ‘attempting to storm our cities, undermine their peaceful order, and bring turbulence into their lives’” (May 16).

Benedict drew a fourth line in the sand in his global crusade during his most recent trip to Brazil. In his address to the bishops of Latin America, Benedict challenged them to galvanize a continent-wide evangelical crusade to rout the competing non-Catholic religions—“sects” as he called them—that have penetrated Latin America on the heels of the liberalizing wave that hit the church in the 1960s and ’70s.

Having declared, before gaining papal office, that no Protestant church could be regarded as a true church, it would seem that Benedict’s ecumenical thrusts will be primarily directed to the Orthodox religions. But it is the evangelical “sects” largely emanating from North America that have most significantly penetrated Catholicism in Latin America. A purge of these competing religious groups may well be on the horizon as Latino bishops lobby national governments for legislation to ban their operation within Latin America.

Pope Benedict has high hopes for his challenge to the Latin American bishops to evangelize afresh that which he calls “the continent of hope.” His intentions are to create the springboard within Latin America that will lead to a re-energizing of Catholicism not only in Europe, the continent of Rome’s “religious roots,” but also, indeed, across the whole globe!

That this is the ultimate goal of his evangelical agenda was made obvious during his weekly address in St. Peter’s Square Sunday, May 20. Addressing the crowd assembled below, Benedict called for a “‘renewed Pentecost’ for the entire church, and especially for the church in Latin America …” (CWNews.com, May 21).

But this pope’s agenda is broader than just an appeal for Catholic laggards to return to their faith. It has definite political overtones—of a global nature.

On the eve of the G8 conference shortly to convene under Germany’s leadership, CWNews.com ran an article headlined, “Global Economy Needs Catholic Insights, Pope Says.” Receiving delegates of the Centesimus Annus Pro Pontifice Foundation, established under John Paul ii to promote the social teachings of the church, Benedict “noted that their recent conferences have studied ‘Asian countries characterized by strong economic growth which, however, does not always lead to real social development; and on African nations where, unfortunately, economic growth and social development face many obstacles.’ In both cases, the holy father said, societies could profit from the insights of church teaching” (May 21).

As we have often pointed out, this is a pope worth watching: A real mover and shaker whose small, somewhat unimpressive physical appearance is belied by strength and force of his public pronouncements. Here, indeed, is a pope intent on evangelizing the world using religion, the world economy, social issues, global politics or whatever weapon he chooses that suits the time, place and public mood. And Benedict is making it increasingly clear that he is prepared to take on all comers in his quest to revive the global dominance of the Vatican’s religion.

Benedict xvi won’t rest until he has achieved that goal!

By Ron Fraser
Monday, May 28, 2007
Copyright © 2007 Philadelphia Church of God

[Laeg]

Very true. He knew what he was doing when he first made his speech regarding the Muslim faith. He knew what way he was pitching it. Hes not stupid. He knew exactly what he was doing. And if he didn't I'm sure he has a host of advisors to advise him otherwise.