Last week, The Patriot looked at the Roman Catholic Church’s role in promoting racism and slavery. This week, The Patriot continues to expose the Roman Catholic Church’s role in oppressing black people. Read on…
By Taona Wajona
THE Roman Empire overtook the Greek Empire which was the first European, Western or white civilisation to become a world power
In this period, around 68 BC, Asiatics, including Egyptian, Arabian and Hebrew people, were black.
Romans killed John and Christ and persecuted Christians afterwards.
They also killed Peter and Paul.
Christianity became too influential and threatened to upset the rule of Rome.
The Catholic Church became prominent as a religious and political tool for control after Emperor Constantine became Christian.
Even in that early period, the Catholics practised the enslavement of blacks.
St Augustine taught that the institution of slavery derives from God and is beneficial to the master and the slave.
Likewise, in 650 CE, Pope Martin I condemned people who taught slaves about freedom and encouraged them to escape.
The Catholics lost dominion to blacks from Arabia and East Africa, called Moors, after the advent of Muhammad and Islam.
The word ‘Moor’ was derived from the Latin word ‘moro’, meaning ‘black’.
The Moors chased off the Romans, Greeks and Hellenic Jews from Asia and Egypt.
Romans were now stationed in Italy and confined to Europe.
Byzantine was the only Greco Roman stronghold left in Turkey.
Moors were mostly Muslims and their official languages were Arabic and Hebrew.
Their skin was said to be as black as ink.
Moorish groups, like the Al Moravid, came straight from West African countries like Senegal and Mali where blacks of this complexion abound in numbers.
Those who were racially mixed with non-blacks were called moranos or tawny Moors.
The term ‘Moor’ was therefore equivalent to the term ‘negro’ which exclusively refers to blacks.
They set up a base of operations in Granada, Spain.
Moreover, they took over southern France and their presence and influence reached as far north as Germany and Denmark.
They were leaders of a new civilisation, having with them resources from Africa, inventions from Asia and innovations of their own, such as eye surgery.
Many whites converted to Islam, particularly those in Spain, and they attended Moorish learning institutions like Taledo.
Modern construction methods, street lights, universities, running water, writing, numerals, sugar, coffee, chivalry, the compass, irrigation and so on were brought into Europe by these blacks called Moors.
They took over Jerusalem and were gradually gaining dominion over Byzantine in Turkey.
In the start of the 1st Millennium, Emperor Alexis of Byzantine wrote a letter to Pope Urban II requesting help to fend off the Muslims who were threatening to take over his empire.
The Catholic Pope took this as an opportunity to wage war against the Moors in Jerusalem, who had driven the Romans away almost four centuries before this period.
He wanted to settle old scores and bring the Catholic Church back into world dominance by first reclaiming the holy site.
He went on a propaganda campaign and mobilised the Caucasian whites who were all Catholics at that time.
They were told that loyalty and obedience to the Church and Pope was the way to salvation, and taught about precatory (equivalent of purgatory).
This is a made up place believers supposedly go to after they die before they go to heaven or hell.
The Catholic authorities claimed one had to obey and pay the church tithes to get out of precatory and make it into heaven.
The Pope’s plight was portrayed as a holy war against heathens who took over God’s chosen land.
The whites were given crosses to sew on their clothing and incited to fight the supposed enemies of God.
These were called the Crusades.
The whites marched in their numbers, many of them dying on the way from hunger, exhaustion, disease and internal fighting.
They killed the unsuspecting populations they ran into and ate their young.
Yes, there was cannibalism and in some cases adults were also killed and had their buttocks eaten!
Groups were sent in waves at varying times.
Though collectively called Franks, they were not all French.
France was more loyal to the Catholic Church than most other northern European nations.
Since King Clauvus’ conversion to Catholicism in the 5th Century CE and even to this day, France is very Catholic.
The northern Europeans tasted spices and learnt of chivalry for the first time on the Crusades.
They began admiring Moorish smooth skin and took to shaving and trimming after acquiring sharp blades from them.
After seeing the devastating barbarism that the Caucasians brought to Turkey, Emperor Alexis wrote a letter condemning the instigation that it was he who requested for the Crusades to take place.
He simply wanted support from the Church to fend off a few threats and not to declare a full scale war on the region.
The Pope’s goons carried on and arrived in Syria, then finally Jerusalem, where they caused even more havoc.
They set ablaze buildings full of Muslims and would also behead them.
Egyptians had a big presence in Judea and were victimised along with the Palestinians and Moors.
Anyone black and not Christian, even the Hebrew groups that were in the land, were attacked by the Barbarians who stationed themselves in Acre.
Eventually, the Moors, Egyptians, Turks and Palestinians grouped together to face the problem at hand.
Black Muslim rulers like Zenghi, Noardim and Saladin successively made war against the Crusaders and kept them at bay.
An Egyptian Muslim called Beibaz put an end to the Crusader threat for good.
Europeans were chased off once again and would not return to the region until the fall of the Ottoman Empire in the beginning of the 20th Century.
The Catholic Pope heard about the defeat of the Crusaders and ran out of resources to continue fighting.
The Crusaders only won battles they imposed on unsuspecting people, otherwise the Crusades were a failure.
They unjustly cost the lives of many blacks.
Unprovoked, the Catholic Pope declared war on believers of God, namely Muslims who also consider Jerusalem a holy site.
If believers are not white and Catholic, does it justify their killing in the name of a holy war!
To the Moors and other Muslims, the Crusades were like a pestilence and anything but a holy war.
After the demise of the Crusades, the Moors remained strong in Spain and southern France.
The Catholic Church also remained bitter and their ambition to oust the black Muslims from Europe grew stronger.
In this period, the legitimacy of slavery was incorporated in the Corpus luris Canonuci.
It was written by Pope Gregory IX in 1226 CE but remained the official law of the Catholic Church till 1913.
It stated that slave ownership was lawful if the conditions met the following criteria: Captured in war, condemned to slavey for crimes committed, sold themselves into slavery (including a parent selling his or her child) and being born of a slave mother. These conditions were deemed as just causes of enslavement by Catholic canon lawyers.
St Thomas Aquinus also defended the institution of slavery and called it a ‘God-ordained institution’ which is a punishment for sin, justified right of nations and a part of natural law.
All these were measures to prepare for the intended subjugation of the blacks of Europe — the extreme hate being derived from the failure of the Catholic-led Crusades.
Meanwhile, Rome, through the Catholic Church, began turning European kings and nobles against the Moors.
By the 1300s, some Moors began losing ground in Europe.
There was resistance, mainly in the form of sabotage. Infrastructure such as irrigation systems was destroyed if the Moors did not comply with the demands of certain nobles.
They would ask the Moors to educate them, build castles, sew them glamorous robes and other services.
On June 18 of 1452, Pole Nicholas V authorised King Alfanzo V of Portugal to reduce any non-Catholics to perpetual slavery.
By the 1490s, the Moors had lost their territory in southern France and all of Spain, besides Granada.
The monarchs of Spain and Portugal were Catholic and worked closely with Rome and the Catholic Pope to frustrate the Moors and consequently oust them from Europe.
The monarchs enforced the Pope’s order to convert any non-Christians to Catholicism otherwise they would face the wrath of the law.
The Moors and other Muslims, including white converts, fled to North West Africa in numbers.
The Moorish stronghold of Granada fell in 1492 and thereafter the Spanish inquisition began.
This involved ethnic cleansing by way of expelling or killing any blacks or whites who were not Catholic.
The ones who survived went as far as West Africa, seeking refuge.
Christopher Columbus was one of the converts to Catholicism, who previously was a Serphadic Jew from Italy.
He worked under the authority of the monarchs of Portugal and Spain for funding and manpower.
The Moors used to set sail to the would-be American continent for hundreds of years before Columbus.
They brought guanine gold from this area which was previously unknown to Europeans.
Moranos; that is the mix of white Jews and black Moors, were Columbus’s guides, advisors and so on.
They too were forced to become Catholic and so were the ships of voluntary soldiers called Conquistadors who would murder and impale indigenous Americans in a bid to colonise their land.
In 1493, Pope Alexander VI authorised the King of Spain to enslave all non-Catholics in the Americas (new world).
America, north and south, was inhabited by blacks and later Mongols who crossed the Bering Straits from Far East Asia in relatively recent times.
Prominent groups, like the Mayans, were black people with dark brown skin, tall stature, dreadlocks and so on.
The Mongoloids, called Red Indians or Native Americans, were not the main victims of enslavement and ethnic cleansing.
To the contrary, it was the blacks of the Americas, who included the Washitaw, Yamasee and Mayan tribes, among others.
Red Indians were relatively few in number to begin with and were not preferred as labourers because they were not as physically strong as blacks.
These blacks were depopulated in a period of 50 years of Conquistador attacks.
Conquistadors eventually began capturing them and shipping them to Europe to be sold as unpaid labourers on slave markets like Seville in Spain.
On the slave markets, these captured indigenous Americans were referred to as negros, proving they were black.
A great many simply died from acquiring illnesses they were not immune to, such as small pox, which they contracted by simply getting in touch with an infected white man.
They would also contract syphillis from being constantly raped by the Conquistadors.
After the Americas had become almost void of blacks because the majority of survivors retreated to remote areas in South America, the need for labour to develop the land grew.
Nowadays, the presence of indigenous black Americans, like that of blacks in ancient Egypt and Israel, is hidden from mainstream educational institutions though the physical proof abounds.
Mayan temples have paintings of the inhabitants and rulers who were indistinguishable from black Africans.
There are also gigantic Olmec heads and sculptures of legends like Kukulcan (Quezacoatl) who were undoubtedly black.
The plot of the Catholic-led invasion of the Americas was to kill the indigenous people, replace them with Europeans and make sure that the ones who remained were ignorant of their land rights as indigenous people.
This is the same tactic that the whites used in colonising Africa and Australia, among other territories.
When the transatlantic slave kidnappings and trade began, descendants of the indigenous black Americans were made to believe that their ancestors were also captured slaves from Africa.
This left them no incentive to fight or claim their land and heritage.
The Catholic Church had a major role in permitting and tolerating the enslavement, consequent abuse and dehumanisation of blacks in the Americas.
Catholic Bishop Las Cansus requested the extensive enslavement of blacks from Africa after the depopulation of labour resources in America.
Charles V authorised this request in 1517.
White Jews concurred and argued blacks were sub-human.
They also spearheaded the transatlantic slave trade.
Spain and Portugal laid claim to much of the Americas, including Brazil, Argentina, Cuba, Panama, Honduras and Mexico, among others.
That is why South America is also known as Latin America.
Before the breakaway of England from the Catholic Church to form the Anglican Church, northern Europeans, also known as Caucasians, began sailing to the Americas but confined themselves to the central and northern parts of the continent in fear of the heat of the south.
They were fleeing religious persecution from the Catholic Church in Europe.
Italy, too, was prominent in places like New York and Baltimore wherein the Catholics worked closely with the white Jews to authorise and profit from the sale of Africans as slaves.
The Catholic Church and its popery could have prevented or stopped the enslavement of blacks if they had so willed because, for a long time, they were the most influential and arguably the most powerful authorities of that time.
The Dutch, English, French, Spanish and Portuguese, among others, were competing against each other for territory in the so-called new world yet the majority of them were loyal to the Catholic Church.
However, the Catholic Church did not condemn slavery until the practice had become infamous and was outlawed.
In fact, in 1548 CE, Pope Paul III confirmed the right of Catholic clergy and laity to own slaves.
The slave abolishment movement, that saw some whites protest against the institution of slavery, comprised mostly of non-Catholic Christians.
Pope Pius IX said: “Slavery itself considered as such an essential institution is not at all contrary to the natural and divine law. Slaves can thus be sold, bought and exchanged or given.”
Catholic missionaries, such as Jesuits, were two-faced hypocrites with double standards.
They owned African slaves but sort to remove Mongol Americans from enslavement.
However, if any missionaries attempted to emancipate black slaves, they were ex-communicated.
This law was derived from a clause drawn up by the Roman Empire in 362 CE.
This law was enacted at the local council in Gangra Asia Minor and called for the excommunication of anyone who encouraged a slave to despise his master or withdraw from his service.
It is clear Catholics were not against black slavery.
Rather, they would work to win over both the souls of the enslavers and the enslaved.
This they did by not making any efforts to stop the profitable business of kidnapping blacks and selling them as unpaid labourers.
Theirs were, therefore, sins of commission and ommission!
All the while, they were offering privileges such as disallowing the killing of baptised slaves unless one faced murder charges.
Yes, it was lawful for a slave owner to kill any of his slaves because he could do with his property as he pleased!
The Catholic Church forbade the whipping of exclusively baptised slaves on Sundays and on Catholic holidays.
It was over 100 years after the abolishment of slavery by the Lincoln Government in 1863 that the Catholic Church made a statement that was outrightly against slavery.
In 1965, the Second Vatican Council declared that forced slavery was an infamy that dishonoured the Creator and was a poison to society.
The Catholic Church profited from the enslavement and trade of blacks for centuries, only to condemn it long after its abolishment.
Unsurprisingly, the Catholic Church took part in Africa’s colonisation.
Yet, in 1965, they faked sympathy towards black slavery, but did not condemn it when it was ongoing.
God forbid!