The rotten foul stench of the Roman Catholic Church, which holds sway over 1.2 billion members around the world and claims to have an “infallible” link to the mind of god in all matters of faith and morals, can no longer be hidden by the scent of incense burned at Sunday mass.

As an imperialist criminal enterprise worth billions of dollars of stolen wealth, the bloody hands of the Catholic church can be found in the enslavement of African people, the genocide of the Indigenous people and the continued colonial domination of the majority of humanity by white power. 

Today the Catholic Church, like U.S. imperialism itself, faces a crisis that calls into question its very existence.

The Catholic Church has historically been the arbiter that parceled out whole peoples and continents and massive resources to European colonizers, including itself. 

It vilifies the actions and struggles of oppressed and colonized people while upholding, obscuring and justifying the rape, murder and exploitation by the white colonizers. Some of the “saints” of the church—such as Father Junipero Serra—are known perpetrators of slaughter and genocide.

Today as the influence of the church is declining in Europe, 67 percent of its membership is located in Latin America, the Caribbean, Africa and Asia where it remains a strong tool of colonial domination.

Systemic rape and sexual abuse part of Catholic infrastructure

Almost daily new accusations of sexual abuse surface implicating the highest echelons church’s hierarchy and the pope himself.

Splits are erupting inside the Vatican city-state amid calls for resignation of the current pope Francis, just 5 years after the swift exit of the previous imperialist-pedophile pope Benedict XVI, aka Joseph Ratzinger—the first resignation by a pope in 600 years.

The current pope Francis, formerly known as Archbishop Jorge Bergoglio of Argentina, is portrayed today as a “progressive pope,” because he serves the interests of “liberal” imperialism. 

What is hidden is the fact that in Argentina, Bergoglio was an obedient servant to his imperialist masters working with the U.S. backed military government that came to power there in 1976. Bergoglio supported and covered for death squads, torture and disappearances of thousands of Indigenous and leftist revolutionaries in that period. He was linked to the murders of Catholic priests who worked with the guerrillas.

During the past month new exposures of the widespread rape, sexual abuse and cover up inside the Church—exposures that have been coming out for the past 30 years or so—make it clear: sexual abuse is not the result of a few bad priests.

It permeates the structure and hierarchy of the church whose full assets are hidden in its secret Vatican bank, vast wealth coming from centuries of direct participation in the trade in African human beings, the theft of land, gold, silver and resources from around the world and the genocide of Indigenous peoples.

The crimes of the Catholic church are so deep that an internet search for this article brought up more than 24 million entries.

The New York Times of Aug. 14, 2018 wrote about the release of a grand jury report on the Catholic church in Pennsylvania:

“Bishops and other leaders of the Roman Catholic Church in Pennsylvania covered up child sexual abuse by more than 300 priests over a period of 70 years, persuading victims not to report the abuse and law enforcement not to investigate it, according to a searing report issued by a grand jury on Tuesday.

“The report, which covered six of the state’s eight Catholic dioceses and found more than 1,000 identifiable victims, is the broadest examination yet by a government agency in the United States of child sexual abuse in the Catholic Church. The report said there are likely thousands more victims whose records were lost or who were too afraid to come forward.”

There are about 2500 priests in about 900 churches in Pennsylvania meaning that 12 percent or about 1 out of every 8 priests in the state is a known pedophile, and that doesn’t even include priests from Philadelphia and Allentown which have already been exposed in previous indictments.

The New York Times article continues about the priest serial rapists in Pennsylvania:

“It catalogs horrific instances of abuse: a priest who raped a young girl in the hospital after she had her tonsils out; a victim tied up and whipped with leather straps by a priest; and another priest who was allowed to stay in ministry after impregnating a young girl and arranging for her to have an abortion.

“The sexual abuse scandal has shaken the Catholic Church for more than 15 years, ever since explosive allegations emerged out of Boston in 2002. But even after paying billions of dollars in settlements and adding new prevention programs, the church has been dogged by a scandal that is now reaching its highest ranks. The Pennsylvania report comes soon after the resignation of Cardinal Theodore E. McCarrick, the former archbishop of Washington, who is accused of sexually abusing young priests and seminarians, as well as minors.

“Despite some institutional reform, individual leaders of the church have largely escaped public accountability,” the grand jury wrote. “Priests were raping little boys and girls, and the men of God who were responsible for them not only did nothing; they hid it all. For decades.”

Which means, of course, they are doing the same thing.

Catholic church rape of colonized children dates back centuries

The exposures of child rape in the U.S. and Europe are those of white children for the most part.

The massive role that the Catholic Church played in the colonial genocide, rape, child abuse and terror of the Indigenous people of the Americas for the past 500 years is rarely discussed.

The Catholic Church played a key role in and profited in this terror which along with the U.S. cavalry and white pioneer volunteer army, systematically wiped out the majority of the Indigenous people in the process of stealing their land and resources throughout North and South America.

The Catholic missions that dot the coast of California are now tourist sites. These missions are in fact concentration camps surrounded by mass graves of the bodies of Indigenous men, women and children who were enslaved there and brutally abused and murdered by Catholic priests. By 1818, 81 percent of the enslaved Indigenous people forced into the missions died there.

When a leading perpetrator of genocide, Father Junipero Serra, the Catholic priest of the 18th century who created 21 of the Spanish mission camps from San Francisco to San Diego was sainted in 2015, there was huge outcry from Indigenous people.

As the UK Guardian wrote at the time of Serra’s sainthood:

“Opponents point out that, from the time Serra arrived in 1769, the native population was ravaged by European diseases, including syphilis spread by marauding Spanish soldiers. Indians brought into the missions were not allowed to leave, and if they tried they were shackled and severely beaten.

“They were used as forced labour to build out the Mission’s farming projects. They were fed atrociously, separated from close family members and packed into tight living quarters that often became miasmas of disease and death.

“When the Native Americans rebelled, which they did on at least two occasions, their rebellions were put down in brutal fashion. When Native American women were caught trying to abort babies conceived through rape, the mission fathers had them beaten for days on end, clamped them in irons, had their heads shaved and forced them to stand at the church altar every Sunday carrying a painted wooden child in their arms.”

Another front of the genocide against the Indigenous people were the “residential” or “boarding” schools, the Catholic church’s concentration camps for children in place in the U.S. and Canada from the 1770s to 1997—over 220 years.

In Canada at least 150,000 Indigenous children were stolen from their families in the last century alone and then subjected to beatings, banning of their language and religions and sexual and verbal abuse in the camps.

According to the UK Guardian article on March 28, 2018, “up to 6,000 are said to have died [in the past century alone]. Almost two-thirds of the 130 schools were run by the Catholic church.”

After Indigenous people of Canada demanded a response from the Catholic church for these crimes, pope Francis firmly stated that he “will not apologize to the survivors of Canada’s Indian residential schools for the role the Roman Catholic Church played in operating the institutions or the abuses suffered there,” according to the Guardian article.

Catholic Church played major role in trade in African people

Neither pope Francis nor any other pope has ever called for reparations to African people.

The Guardian newspaper reported that in 2015 on a trip to Kenya the pope supposedly denounced “a new form of colonialism” while speaking to one of Nairobi’s most impoverished neighborhoods. He never mentioned the horrors of direct white power European colonialism which is the basis for the wealth and power of U.S. imperialism and the Catholic church.

The Church was heavily involved in the kidnapping and sale of African people and in the colonial genocidal policies of African people but made no condemnation of slavery until the year 1890, years after abolition in most of the capitalist nations.

Rev. Robert Scully, SJ, assistant professor of history at Le Moyne College in Syracuse stated in an article from the Guardian, "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." a UK Guardian article wrote in 2006.

This reality came to light in 2016 when it was exposed that Georgetown University, the Jesuit institution in Washington, DC, had used an 1838 sale of 272 African people to finance their college.

According to the New York Times:

“At Georgetown, slavery and scholarship were inextricably linked. The college relied on Jesuit plantations in Maryland to help finance its operation, university officials say. (Slaves were often donated by prosperous parishioners.) And the 1838 sale—worth about 3.3 million in today’s dollars—was organized by two of Georgetown’s early presidents, both Jesuit priests.”

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 African boys and, as with Indigenous children in the U.S., putting them into boarding schools where they were tortured, abused and made to relinquish their native tongue to speak French.

As King Leopold of Belgium (who was Roman Catholic) slaughtered 10 million of our people in the early 20th century in a program to turn Congo into a giant rubber plantation that served the burgeoning automobile industry in America and Europe. The Catholic church played the role to force Christianity onto those Africans who survived Leopold’s genocide to complete the colonization process.

Today as the Congo continues to be plundered and raped by colonial powers, there are about 35 million African people in the Congo who are members of the Catholic Church.

The filthy Catholic church must go: Liberate Africa and African people everywhere!

As Chairman Omali Ye****ela, leader of the African People’s Socialist Party and the African Socialist International has stated:

“The Catholic church is  a whole criminal enterprise. You’re talking about imperialism with so much moral authority that it can condemn African children living in housing projects to poverty, prison and colonial violence imposed on them by this social system but the rapists and colonizers walk free.

“If the Catholic church were a black or Korean or Mexican organization they’d initiate missile strikes on it.

“The Catholic church is white power, white nationalism, white people—christians, who have the power to condemn young Africans to the worst conditions. The Catholic church and christianity contributes to ability of governments to kill us and starve us in this country and around the world. They make us the examples of moral deficiency, the “superpredators,” and criminals, while the church is raping children and these churches are the ones who define our morality. They are the rapists and how many people have they condemned to poverty, suffering, war and death?”

This is why we have no choice but to fight for our independence, self-government  and state power over our lives. We must seize back our stolen resources, land and the value of our stolen labor. We must write our own narrative, condemn the cesspool of the Catholic church to its place in white people’s hell and liberate Africa and all her children.

Join the African People’s Socialist Party. Be part of the African Socialist International.

Learn more at the 7th Congress of the African People’s Socialist Party, Oct. 6-12 in St. Louis, MO. For more information see APSPCongress.org

Izwe Lethu i Afrika!