The Roman Catholic Church crisis is a crisis of imperialism

The child abuse scandal ripping through the Roman Catholic Church is one more part of the overall crisis splitting the foundation of imperialism itself. 

Countless reports of Catholic priests’ rampant molestation and brutal sexual attacks on children are rocking the upper echelons of the church, all the way to the doorstep of Joseph Ratzinger (Pope Benedict XVI) himself.

However, this crisis goes deeper than abusive, sadistic clergymen.

It is the reflection of the true nature of the Catholic Church as imperialism’s right hand that has used the cover of Christianity and religion to carry out massive crimes against African, Indigenous and oppressed peoples for the past 600 years.

Underneath imperialism’s ever weakening pedestal are hidden skeletons of genocide and colonization. Now, these skeletons are stirring to life.

In the recent weeks and months, new allegations of child abuse from clergymen have surfaced in European countries, including Germany and Ireland.

These events come in the wake of the Catholic sexual abuse scandal that has swept through the U.S. over the past 15 years.

The total number of official cases of abused children—mostly young boys—has reached tens of thousands around the world, and this is just the tip of the iceberg.

The abuse targeted the most vulnerable young children, including 200 students at for the Deaf in St. Francis, Wisconsin between 1950 and 1974.

Sixty-seven cases of abuse from 24 priests, brothers and religious men, occurred at the Antonio Provolo Institute for the Deaf in Verona between the ‘50s and ‘80s.

According to the Associated Press (AP) report, “Sexual Abuse Scandal in U.S., Italy Taints Papacy,” fourteen children from the Verona school for the deaf “wrote sworn statements and made videotapes, detailing abuse, some for years, at the hands of priests and brothers of the Congregation for the Company of Mary.

“One victim, Alessandro Vantini, told the AP last year that priests sodomized him so relentlessly he came to feel ‘as if I were dead.’

‘How could I tell my papa that a priest had sex with me?’ Vantini, 59, said through a sign-language interpreter. ‘You couldn’t tell your parents because the priests would beat you.’”

Current and past popes were complicit in current abuse scandal

Revelations of abuse in Germany, particularly in the Munich archdiocese while Ratzinger—the current Catholic pope—was the archbishop there, clearly expose the pope’s complicity.

According to the Los Angeles Times, March 27, “Catholic Abuse Scandal Edges Closer to the Pope,” Benedict “approved the transfer of an abusive priest from another jurisdiction.”

Later, the Times article states, as the church's top doctrinal official based in the Vatican, Ratzinger was in a position to know about a Wisconsin case in which the church failed to defrock a child-molesting priest.

The scandal, also, closely touches the pope as his brother, Reverend George Ratzinger, is implicated in charges by three men that they were abused in a Catholic school where George was the choir director.

These allegations came to light, after abuse cases at Jesuit schools all over Germany shocked that country last month.

The pope’s brother denies sexual abuse charges but admits that “he slapped pupils as punishment,” according to the Associated Press, March 9.

Further exposing the Vatican as the center of the crisis, the powerful, worldwide Catholic religious order, Legionaries of Christ, was forced to admit that the order’s founder, Father Marcial Maciel Degollado, who was a close friend of the previous pope, John Paul II, molested several seminarians and fathered several children.

Throughout the world, demands were made for Pope Benedict Ratzinger to take responsibility for the countless cases of abuse in the Catholic Churches.

Victims demonstrated at the Vatican on March 25, 2010. Leaders of the Survivor Network of those Abused by Priests (SNAP) held up photographs of their younger selves and signs saying “Stop the Secrecy Now.” Clergymen had all sodomized and raped them.

Catholic Church played key role in slavery, genocide that built parasitic capitalism

The crisis of the Catholic Church reflects imperialism’s inevitable downfall, for the church played a major masonry role in constructing the foundation of parasitic capitalism that was built on the enslavement of African people and the genocide of Indigenous people.

These long-standing cases of pedophile attacks on little children have their origins in the torture and terror of African and Indigenous people for the sole purpose of stealing our land, labor and resources for the benefit of the white population.

The Catholic Church served to justify colonial conquest, in the name of “the white man’s burden” to “civilize” and convert African and Indigenous peoples who were self-determining and living in some of the greatest civilizations in the world prior to the assaults by the white man.

In 1455, forty years after Prince Henry of Portugal launched his first European attack on Africa and 37 years before Christopher Columbus set out on his first genocidal voyage to the Americas, the Catholic Church “granted” the Portuguese all lands south and west of Morocco’s Cape Bojador, use to enslave African people with impunity and steal our gold and other resources.

Expanding their attack, Pope Sixtus IV and Pope Alexander VI issued decrees in the late 1400s that resulted in the theft of our lands in Africa, along with the theft of Indigenous lands in the Americas, laying the ground work for slavery and genocide.

Catholic priests, who were sent as missionaries to the Americas and Africa were agents of genocide and colonialism.

In 1769, a Franciscan missionary named Father Junipero Serra led a Spanish army in Mexico to what is present-day San Diego, California, which was part of the lands stolen by the U.S. from Mexico in 1848.

Serra built 21 missions that extended up to San Francisco, California. These missions are surrounded by mass graves of Indigenous people who were slaughtered as part of the colonial policies to exterminate the people.

Serra had used the native populations as slaves in order to maintain farms to feed the missions, working the people to death.

During this period, Spanish soldiers kidnapped thousands of Indigenous people, who were stripped of their names, cultural dress and language. They were given Christianized names and made to wear blue uniforms, while they were enslaved on the mission work farms.

The Indigenous people were forced to care for livestock, tan hides and produce candles, bricks, tiles, shoes, saddles, soap and other colonial products for missions.

Hundreds of thousands of natives were killed, whipped, branded, mutilated, executed and purposely exposed to malaria.

In response to the brutality, the Indigenous population rose up in 1775 to mount a fierce attack. Around 800 Ipai and Tipai people burned down the Sand Diego mission.

The Spanish soldiers savagely put down the resistance. Denied traditional burials, the natives were put in mass graves upon their deaths near the church.

Thousands of Chumash make up the burial registry at the Santa Barbara mission, another stark reminder of the Church’s role in the barbaric slaughter of Indigenous people.

In the 1980s, militant Indigenous resistance in California prevented the move by the Catholic Church to make Serra—one of the most infamous agents of genocide in the Americas—from being promoted to a Catholic saint.

In the wake of U. S. colonial expansion, more than 100,000 Indigenous children were kidnapped and placed in Christian boarding schools. 

There, they experienced prison-like conditions, facing physical and sexual abuse, along with forced labor and the treacherous process of assimilation.

The colonial impact of these boarding schools remains in Indigenous nations. The trauma has yet to be resolved with the still existing U.S. colonial state occupying their lands.

Catholic Church played major role in trade in African people

The Church had, also, been heavily involved in the slave trade of African people and in the colonial genocidal policies of our people and made no condemnation of slavery until the year 1890, years after abolition in most of the capitalist nations.

According to the article “The Church of England apologizes over its involvement in the slave trade,”

Rev. Robert Scully, SJ, assistant professor of history at Le Moyne College in Syracuse states, "From the New Testament period on, the Church generally accepted slavery as a 'natural' part of socio-economic reality, or spoke of it as a necessary evil," he explained.

 “… Certain Jesuit provinces owned slaves into the 18th and even the 19th centuries."

When slavery was abolished in the Caribbean, the Catholic Church was granted millions of dollars for the loss of their enslaved “property”.

In the Belgian Congo, Catholic and other missionaries were pivotal in stealing our boys and, as with Indigenous children in the U.S., put them into boarding schools where they were tortured, abused and made to relinquish their native tongue to speak French.

As King Leopold of Belgium slaughtered 10 million of our people—a colonial mission to turn Congo into a giant rubber plantation that served the burgeoning automobile industry in America and Europe—the Church forced Christianity onto the remaining survivors to complete the colonization.

The pope is the richest man on the planet based on stolen labor, resources

In addition to being an imperialist tool the Catholic Church has always amassed and continues to reap immense worldly rewards from its bloody history.

According to the book, “The Vatican Billions,” by Avro Manhattan:

"The Vatican's treasure of solid gold has been estimated by the United Nations World Magazine to amount to several billion dollars.

“A large bulk of this is stored in gold ingots with the U.S. Federal Reserve Bank, while banks in England and Switzerland hold the rest.

“But this is just a small portion of the wealth of the Vatican, which in the U.S. alone, is greater than that of the five wealthiest giant corporations of the country.

“When to that is added all the real estate, property, stocks and shares abroad, then the staggering accumulation of the wealth of the Catholic Church becomes so formidable as to defy any rational assessment.

"The Catholic church is the biggest financial power, wealth accumulator and property owner in existence.

“It is a greater possessor of material riches than any other single institution, corporation, bank, giant trust, government or state of the whole globe.

“The pope, as the visible ruler of this immense amassment of wealth, is consequently the richest individual of the twentieth century.

“No one can realistically assess how much he is worth in terms of billions of dollars."

This is the stolen wealth of African, Indigenous and oppressed peoples and every cent of that is owed to us in reparations!

It is clear with the Roman Catholic Church being exposed as the perpetrators of sexual abuse of children that the core of imperialism is crumbling. 

The Church was the tool for the white population to gain control over African and Indigenous people, our land and resources.

Now, with African and other colonized people resisting, the white masses are forced to face the skeletons of truth that they have tried to bury so deeply underneath their pedestal. 

They can no longer hide behind their institutions of oppression.

The only solution is for African and all oppressed peoples to seize control over our stolen land and resources and to destroy this vicious white power system built on our suffering.

 The Catholic Church and all manifestations of parasitic capitalism and imperialism must go!

One Africa! One Nation!