https://international.la-croix.com/news/religion/black-catholics-in-us-dismayed-after-archbishop-calls-protests-pseudo-religions/15184

As for what this article cited above positively claims concerning the main influences behind the BLM (Black Lives Matter), and other allied social justice movements, I’ve occasionally heard about the kinds of assertions relative to these which Alessandra Harris makes here and there but have not seen as much of it as unfortunately the bulk of what I have been shown far outweighs both proportionally and in volume, the stuff that alludes to the positive side of the BLM. In the main, most of what I have randomly and repeatedly seen about this movement and its’ allies concerns a disturbing trend of violent video footage and photographs revealing the atrocious nature of much of these recent protest movements, which btw have all too often been tragically co-opted, hijacked and occupied by an insidious Satanic infiltration, and my heart aches and sinks into despair over the fact this type of phenomena is both antithetical and inimical to the authentic witness of any social justice movement. (1.)

Alessandra Harris from the Black Catholic Messenger, believes that Gomez’s speech was not only “erroneous” but “completely out of touch” with the true spirit behind contemporary social justice movements. She said, according to La Croix, “Today’s social justice movements are rooted in the very ideals that Catholics profess: that all life is sacred, that the least among us deserve respect and protection, and that we must strive to end oppression and hatred.”

My question is, if that is exactly as Harris claims, then why all the violence, senseless looting and toppling of statues affiliated with the Catholic faith, why burnings of Churches and other sacred places of worship if indeed these movements and their allies are in camaraderie with those ideals Harris claims today’s social justice movements are rooted in?

In some respects I sense Gomez is right but he too is still all mixed up on a point: for since when has nationalism (so-called “white”, “black” or otherwise) ever truly been the friend of an authentic faith life, especially when you consider that we are as pilgrims and wayfarers on this earth that God has entrusted to us and that nationalism has often been that accursed cause of so many wars, factions, frictions and strife on our beloved planet? To be as good stewards on this earth is our sacred duty and whilst nations are indeed a part of the Grand Plan of Redemption, they are to be interpreted through a primordial lens rooted in sacred Scripture rather than a gross worldly one steeped in crude political schemas.

According to Brian Fraga from La Croix, Archbishop Gomez said in his speech that today’s climate of social justice activism ought to be seen against the backdrop of “a global movement of secularization and de-Christianization”. He further stated that such a movement is promulgated by whirlpools of sentiment uninterested in religion and by people who “have no real attachments to the nations they live in” or to local traditions and cultures.

Let me say this, you do not have to be particularly attached to the location in which you live in order to be a person of sound faith and moral vision. There are many who are missionally minded/oriented and this roots them no where in particular as they have it their prime objective to be “on the move” for the sake of the Kingdom of God, i.e. they may be in certain locations for varying periods of time OR they may reside long-term in a country foreign to them or which is on the whole removed from or disconnected from their ancestry. Therefore, patriotism or nationslistic sentiment is of no or very little consequence to such people but this does in no way detract from the genuinity of their faith for faith is beyond attachments to worldly beliefs and let’s face it, patriotic and nationalistic sentiments are for the most part secularistic in essence for they wholeheartedly knit together the, dare I say it ‘spiritual mythology’ of the secular world, and have their origins not in the Holy Spirit but in both the spirit of this world and the spirit of the age. That said, let us not confuse ribald nationalism or patriotism with honouring one’s culture/s of origin. For although on the surface, the two may appear alike or somewhat similar, I can assure you, they are two very different things. To give you an example, someone can have a mixed heritage or ancestry which hails from 3 different places and yet, they themselves live in neither of these places but somewhere altogether different. And this person may honour his or her ancestry without being the slightest bit nationalistic or patriotic about the location where they currently live. I myself can testify to a similar experience. I live in Australia but I come from 5 different ancestral lineages, none of them from here. The fact that I live here does not automatically make me a ribald zealot about this location. However, I have a deep spiritual connection to all the different ancestral backgrounds which came together in my family history to make me who I am. At the same time, the different histories and cultural contexts which have all contributed to the kaleidescopic diversity of Australian society is rather fascinating. A similar fact can be observed in relation to the United States, which is why faith and spirituality has to be said to be conceived in an almost infinite number of ways. God and His myriad works cannot be put in a box.

That said, Archbishop Gomez has no doubt hit home on a few major points which bear witness to the current state of crisis our world is flanked in by on all sides right now. There is the grip of secularist tendencies over much of governmental and civil society in our world today that makes religious faith strikingly unfashionable and often shamefully misrepresented, particularly in the secular media and its related production partners in film and tv, not to mention all the grossed-out worldly hype that sickeningly pervades social media and the crassly laissez-faire world of online shopping. And further too, the quogmire of secularism has gone into where it proverbially should not be (cf: Matt 24 : 15), and that is into the Church itself. I have written on this at some length in some other unpublished articles on these issues.

Gomez also does well in relating the Christian narrative of salvation. He is succint and his rendition flows well. He does also very well in highlighting the bane of an all-too-familiar trend within the dominant culture or secular worldview which habitually downplays the importance that faith, religion/spirituality, and morals hold in the context of one’s personal life as well as the fact that these vital interconnecting facets of existence serve an interconnected higher purpose of ensuring that the ethical framework and moral substance of relational accountability is upheld in society at large.

This btw, was an area that Brian Fraga had declined to address in his article. For there is a genuine aura of care and concern which shines forth from the way Archbishop Gomez unfolds the critical interplay between the Christian narrative of salvation and the greater good of optimal health & wellbeing in the world around us, and how this narrative is one of universal benefit both on a profoundly personal level and in the context of public life. Gomez further goes on to sympathetically acknowledge the oppression of “lostness” that accompanies many of those who cleave to secularist social movements. For there can be no genuine “wokeness” or “state of being awakened to the truth of how things are” without a knowledge of and a loving personal relationship with one’s Creator. For as He created all that exists, including the land, the seas, the animal life and all other life integral to the ecological wellness of our planet, it figures then, that just as it is our fundamentally human obligation to care for our planet instead of exploit it, it is also our mutual obligation to honour our primordial Maker, the One who entrusted to us the very life of this world. He is to our very spirits and souls as water is to our bodies. In fact, He holds spirit, soul, and body together in a dynamic symbiosis, without which, we would simply die.

And it must be said that the wisdom of ancient cultures the world over understood this, even as commonly touted by many in today’s climate of hungry social activism, with all its emphasis on the dangers of neocolonialism and corporate greed. What’s more is that Church teaching fundamentally decries these social ills and can historically claim original sovereignty in this area of being outspoken against them. It just so happens that many contemporary social justice movements have ceded to secularism despite many of their historical roots being linked to faith centered initiatives be it around women’s sufferage or the abolition of slavery just to name a couple. It must also be acknowledged that even most Native American societies had a profound awareness of the importance of custodial stewardship of the earth precisely because they had an intimate relationship with its Maker. Well, the same goes for the people of Israel, from which the Judeo-Christian tradition springs. And if you look to the farthest corners of the globe, you will find that there exists a universally abiding reality of ancient cultural understandings, encounters with, and appreciation of God’s existance and His very own interpersonal relationship with His creatures and that these are vital to a robust personal relationship with one’s own existence, with others near and far, and with the beneficient continuity of communities & societies as well as the planet as a whole.

The real issue is that these historical situations decried by Alessandra Harris as those where Christians or the Catholic Church were complicit were actually not the way they were because of Christianity. In fact, if anything, Christianity is neither complicit in any of these but rather the innocent scapegoat wedged and falsely waggered around as a ‘justification’ for the very things it ontologically contests as morally corrupt and impermissible within the edicts and codes of God’s law such as slavery and war. Take the classic statement by Jesus where He emphatically warns “Those who live by the sword will die by the sword”. Further to this the fact that the statement Christians were complicit is actually antithetical because in reality you cannot be a Christian and be complicit in evil and by the same token honour your faith and heritage by doing so for the two are diametrical polarities. Instead the hypocritical double dishonour is done by being knowingly and willfully complicit with evil in any form and consequently, this on a spiritual level disengages or severs the genuine Christian identity from being an intrinsic part of the personhood of such a one who cooperates with this evil to the extent that they excommunicate themselves from that intrinsic love-relationship which they professed to hold within them prior to their fall from grace.

Therefore, it is not Christianity itself or even Christians as such that bear the responsibility for the injustices that were historically inflicted in the name of, be it the Catholic Church, the spreading of the Gospel, the Salvation of the gentiles or even the defence of the Faith and Tradition that is the bulwark of the Church’s sacred duty & responsibility here on earth. For it is intrinsically alien to an authentic Christian identity and witness to be in support of or to turn a blind eye to any form of injustice for true justice, i.e. righteousness is a moral tenet central to Christianity. Rather, it is the pernicious crime of political irresponsibility and reckless bootlegging of trade and commerce that galvanized the passage of both death and disease to the New World, Africa and Asia at a time when the governing powers in those lands were also willing to be complicit in such deletarious agreements and dangerous trade-offs. It will do well to remember that slavery was already present in Africa since the time of the Roman Empire as the various African kingdoms had historically traded with imperial Rome as well as Egypt during the time of the Pharohs. And so it figures then that 17th and 18th century Europe was not solely to blame for the Atlantic slave trade for just as it takes two to tango, so it was that European and African trade partnerships were built whereby the then rulers of these disparate populations on the African hinterland gladly in exchange for more wealth and power, handed their poor subjects over to the European racketeers. That is the curse of authoritarianism and dictatorship no matter what the time in history or the location. These corrupt politicking African leaders were equally responsible in complicity with the Atlantic slave trade as their European business brokers. This helps to explain too why there is so much political and social unrest in Africa today. The terrible state of affairs in that part of the world has more to do with the deeply rooted historical complicity of the African nations themselves with centuries of slave trading from the days of imperial Rome and what with the pervasive cultural influence of the Upper Nile Delta in shaping the entire course of African political and social life from ancient times.

There is no doubt that, as Harris alludes to, “Christianity has lost the moral authority for too many people” in our now time but this is more so all because of the loss of moral compass and the vaccuum of emptiness foistered upon the generations that grew up with severely misguided and distorted notions about the kind of God they are to be accountable to in the first place. The notable and hieneous influence of secularist mindsets and value-systems creeping into the edifice of the Church was extant in her midst prior to the Reformation. Moral accountability in leadership in the civil society sphere was sorely lacking despite a vibrant seemingly symbiotic relationship between Church and State. For in the main, this relationship was merely cosmetic in the realm of authentic witness to the truth and spiritual substance. There were copious lip-service exchanges but nothing deeper than that. You do encounter exceptions but these for the most part are rare simply because when Christianity spread to the European mainland from the Middle East, the governing powers of the people in those parts, their chieftains and monarchs agreed to be educated in regards to the Faith on the condition that they be allowed to delegate civil society rights and responsibilities according to whatever was their particular tribal or national custom, and get this, even if only in part, some of these customs like that of vassal & serfdom and land tenure linked to these, were antithetical to the moral teachings inherent in Christianity.

For instance, Jesus commands that for His disciples to be true disciples, they must love one another and that authentic leadership is expressed and exemplified through humble, compassionate, and self-giving service, especially to those who are in most need, be it a giving of simple love and acceptance or materially. And Jesus exhorted that such service is to be done in such a way that those giving it are to exemplify their leadership through this way of life while those receiving it are to be invited and treated by the givers as literal family not just in a once-off instance but as a continual dedication of relational commitment and bonding that was supposed to be of inalienable and inseperable worth, if not exactly brothers and sisters then as cousins.

However, this type of existential community-orientation was way too intimate for the cultural norms and customs of many European peoples for their societies had been historically structured so that there were multiple divisions present according to clans and castes on account of clan status. Because missionaries did not want to impose upon these peoples the organic intimacy and communitarian relational life model intrinsic to Christianity, they sought to gradually educate and integrate these beliefs of sisterly and brotherly love and care alongside a community-orientation of discipled servanthood in leadership within the already existant structural models of social interactivity, occupational endeavour, and education entrenched in pre-Christian European society, be these models still indigenous to respective locations outside of Rome or be they already heavily influenced by the pervasive impact of Roman imperial governance and trade. Hence you get the development of profoundly institutionalized structures based upon the Roman models of structural cohesion in society coupled with the Greek model of education. And besides this was the model so efficaciously embraced by the Roman Emporer Constantine simply because he sought the good of both the pagans as well as the Jews (from whom the Christians hailed). The pagans, i.e., the great majority of Roman citizens, including those citizens of the empire living beyond the borders of the imperial state, were not content to change themselves to the point of dropping altogether their own customs, habits, and practices in favour of adopting full-on the protocols and inherent ontological mindset and heart-way that to them was a foreign culture.

Constantine was also no stranger to the fact that the stubbornness of his own people gave rise to in times gone by, tyrannical persecutions of the small but ribald new Jewish clan whom practiced and taught customs and ways of life way too radically intimate – up close and personal – for the Roman plebicite and all too often, their megalomanic leadership to accept. This pagan society was although accustomed to interacting with the Jews of the Old Covenant but those of the New Testament era were a different breed altogether and this did not sit well to say the least with the strict formalism and authoritarian modes of governance the Romans were used to. Therefore Constantine was well acquainted with this type of social tension and sought to mitigate it through a complete change in the way he approached the presence of Christianity in his midst – an approach that included not only tolerance but a welcome embrace of this faith of Jewish origin in a nuanced way and one that was to be seen and adulated in such a way as to be crafted to harmonious discourse with and therefore, officially promoted and wrought as compatible with Roman social mores in an effort to both discourage popular revolt as well as to inspire people to become better people over time, in the human sense of the word. And additionally, but more influentially to these makeovers rather than as a consequence of them, the emporer testified to a profound conversion experience on account of a dream-encounter with the Christian deity. This imperial Roman backdrop of nascent European Christianity paved the way for how the Church was to be planted across the entire continent. And of course it was good, for Divine Providence orchestrated it that way. For it was part of God’s grand salvific plan that all those redemptive aspects, those inherently virtuous qualities unique to the culture of the empire were to be woven into the fabric of the new social vision which Constantine had for it. 

That said, there were certain challenges and difficulties along the way which meant that some forms of incompatible socioeconomic relations such as slavery and serfdom remained intact from the pagan era. These contractual obligations and relationships were inimical to the traditional Christian way of thinking and were rooted in the politicostructural arrangements of pagan society. It was deemed ‘proper’ for some strange logically ineffible reason to keep these arrangements intact to a certain degree although the official teaching of the Church prohibited its members from acquiescing to these social evils. On the whole, although vast numbers of the population were being Baptized and received into the faith, including political leaders, such ghastly inherited codes of socioeconomic relationships common to pagan lore like slave ownership and serfdom remained and were to a large degree ubiquitously used to wage war in the gamble for power and possessions that characterized pre-Christian life on the European continent. Irrespective of the public acceptance of Christian teachings and the acceptance of the presence of Church representation in society at large, the ancient battles between chiefdoms continued long after missionaries arrived. One well might ask “where indeed was the success and proliferation of the Gospel message to be felt throughout Europe if indeed vassals and lords still waged war over serfs and land as they had done for centuries prior to the coming of Christianity?

It appears that the bigger picture in God’s plan has it that the evolution of positive transformation in human consciousness away from the false attractiveness of the vices of the flesh as exemplified through the lust for power and privilege is a gargantuanly slow one, particularly on a macrosocial level. What’s more is that the dire neglect to practice the sacred virtues on a microsocial – personal & interpersonal – level, particularly as seems to be evident from the predominantly secularist hedonistic lifestyles lived by many in European civil society leadership positions of various types during the Middle Era. It’s one thing to go to Mass and be seen “doing all the correct external practices of the faith” – even the Pharisees in Jesus’ time were exemplars of this type of thing! But it is another thing altogether to cultivate hand-in-hand with these extrinsic expressions of faith a proper interior disposition, depth and relational purpose according to the sacred virtues. To routinely examine one’s conscience and to develop an abiding spirit of close friendship with God that is seen in the personal and public fruits of this friendship where love, humility and compassion abound is essential to anchoring one’s lived experience in an authentic Christian life and witness. The sheer lack of this, comparable to the yeast of the Scribes & Pharisees was that which co-opted these civil society leaders to secular forces (those forces that do not have matters and the value-system of the faith at their heart), and this ultimately meant that European society became increasingly dominated by these forces, and from here a terribly distorted image of God as One Who only delights in exterior displays of dedication and ‘perfection’ was often cultivated and promoted. This drove a deep wedge between the seamless harmony galvanized by the Church’s providential presence in the world, and the superficial (as opposed to what should have been) interests of the State. The seamless harmony of the Church sowing the seeds of universal brotherhood in society at large attempted to bridge (and quintessentially disintegrate and dissolve):

1. the commonly ‘accepted as necessary’ role of the socioeconomic class system – through a renewing, refocussing, and rededicating of one’s life to a completely new vision encompassed with the moral authority of the Church in this role reversal and its triumph in the educational life of society and

2. the suboptimal realities of friction and discord between polities that sought to maintain and popularize what for them was the socioeconomic vitality of this class system as it helped sustain their access to material affluence and the worldly artifice of social status taken to a grandiose excess.

The purpose of this attempted bridging by the Church, and (subsequent ignoring to a certain degree) of these sin-laden ideological mine-fields of class and status etched into European social life and the affairs of State in that period was to in part help remove and disengage their influence from bearing unfairly and encroaching too heavily upon the quality of life of all people and particularly those who came to seek refuge and sustainance from within the Church. After all, it was the role and goal of the Church to set the example of true freedom being found outside of worldly (secular) status for as God would have it all are created in His image and likeness and therefore, all should be made welcome in this world of planet earth that He had originally created, so that as humans in loving cooperation with Him and the angelic realm alongside the animals and the rest of creation, we should exercise our divinely delegated role as custodians and stewards of this earth with kindness, diligence, and humility. And at this the secular forces balked and repeatedly ignored the counsel of the Church’s wisdom, preferring instead to listen to money and privilege talk to their lustful passions and tickle their ears rather than listen and pay heed to the voice of God. And it is also equally true that the merely cosmetic allegience between some members of State and the Church, such as that exemplified by Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain meant that the faith was co-opted by and mixed in with secular interests, ultimately misrepresented and misused as a political football. 

This is the stuff of history that needs to be decried and learnt from because such political stunts and fronts that manipulate religion for their evil ends seriously break a number of God’s commandments, in particular, the ninth of the ten covenantial laws – The Ten Commandments – given to the people of Israel at Mount Sinai (cf. Exod. 20 : 16), “thou shalt not bear false witness”. That said, the breaking of these commandments on a public scale en masse needs to be reproofed and learnt from reflexively and the actions of calling out these outrages and blasphemies and learning from them ought not to be done out of context from the spiritual canopy of safety and true liberation that the faith provides. That is, the critical intersectionality of these issues ideally needs to be positioned within a comprehensive relationship to both their historical and contemporary contexts and not analytically displaced and then decried outside from these. This is so that a further garbelling and fracturing of the relational significance between these present crises and the truth of the past does not continue to blind people to the linkage of this relationship insofar as the origins of their own moral visions, albeit however warped, are concerned. Many people en masse have lost God in our time and have become hostile or numb to the moral authority and relevance of Christianity to their lives precisely on account of the deceit that comes with a repeated fracturing by secular voices of the relational significance between these present crises and the truth about the history of this evolutionary struggle between the interests of faith and those of the secular world which stand juxtaposed – even though they may have been cosmetically promoted at various times by secularist interests as though they were in allegiance.

Contrary to the bad example given through the tyrannical excesses of political leaders like Ferdinand and Isabella, the reality is Christianity preaches that everyone, in their God-given dignity as sons and daughters of the Almighty is, without reserve, entitled to a blessed status and the due respect which the sacredness of their common shared humanity affords. As Jesus Himself counselled his disciples “it is well known that worldly leaders lord it over the people, let it not be so among you. Rather anyone who desires to lead must be a humble servant…..For those who are now first shall be last and those who are now last shall be first in the Kingdom of God.” He in fact through this warned them of the deceit that the world holds up as though it is ‘truth’. In this is a message about secularism and the dangers of bending to that mentality or adopting or not even discarding (as was the case in Europe during its’ formative Christian era), the old sinful habits of the flesh that seek to divide and conquer for selfish gain. No, this is not the dividing of the fleshly or fallen nature from the God-given nature and thereby then seeking to conquer it,….this fallen nature, and root it out of ones’ being, but rather the “divide and conquer” paridigm is the insideously inverted mirror image of this methodology of virtue taken and misused on a global or macrocismic scale by the Devil who by it seeks only to steal, kill, and destroy because he was a liar and a thief from the beginning, and as surely as his tempting of our first parents in the Garden of Eden goes to show, he is, along with Adam and Eve’s doleful acquiescence to his murderous murmurings, the original propigator of the lie that not listening to God and instead listening to him is somehow good for you and actually, it must be said that the Devil is the inventor of egotism for he deceived Adam and Eve into listening to an exterior consciousness that was neither God’s consciousness, nor their own nor any other lovingly created consciousness wholeheartedly submitted to the will of God. It was rather, the primordial false consciousness. From this stems the fleshly ego and all other forms of sin, vice & wickedness. It is apt to assert that the term “fleshly” as used here does not refer to bodily existence or physical reality. Instead, it is used as St Paul uses it to refer to the fallen part of human nature, the morally compromised and inverted version of the natural world that came into existence when Adam and Eve disobeyed God in the Garden of Eden. This version of existence is intrinsically and extrinsically diametrically opposed to the will of God and the reconciliatory process between humanity, God, and the entire created order that we humans are decreed by divine purpose to lovingly and dutifully commit to engaging in and ultimately fulfill through cooperation with divine grace.

So there you have it 😆

In conclusion then, the above explanation is in fact, a look into what is precisely the origin of all the dilemmas and discrepencies that keep Archbishop Gomez from being able to understand that whilst excessive proliferation of the secularist mindset out there in the world at large is indeed the cause of people losing sight of their critical God-given moral compass, he still remains blinkered to this mindset’s stealthily, cunningly hidden, and at times somewhat subtle but no less deceptive presence within the Church.

For where parishes and pastors promote simony – the belief that charity is now a mere bye-word, and all in-practice fundamentally obsolete – because the user pays system has predominated out there in the wider world so in order to be ‘more relevant’ to contemporary society, the Church at the local level essentially has to sell out integrity-wise and take instead to doing things as the world does them!

There you have the seeds of worldliness, and again, where the pastorate, parish or social service hubs within the Church promote nationalism (whatever the colour), all kinds of divisions, (alongside an unhealthy, inward looking parochial bigotry) begin to develop, where lack of acceptance of “the other”, “the different” rule the roost, and cultural snobbery becomes engrained and so much the norm, that “the forest” of it becomes so thick that they cannot see it for “the trees”. In this type of environment bigotry becomes an unconsciously repeated habit of either snide reactivity or cold indifference to the presence of “the other”, “the different”. Underneath the polite and well adjusted and kept veneer of vibrant localized togetherness, the ugliness of that “pride of the Fall” seethes and breathes fire as the Reprobate Dragon who so scandalously corrupted humanity with his haughtiness and conceit, lies in wait to catch and devour unsuspecting victims in his relentless efforts to do as he so pledged in that conversation b/n himself and Our Lord which Pope Leo XIII was witness to. Here we see in action the unfolding of that great drama foretold in Scripture and in the prophetic visions and dreams of the saints, the very stuff of Matthew 24 : 15 and indeed of that whole End of The Age Discourse. Strife and discord lurk unnoticed and unchecked and they abound in an environment bent upon an unhealthy preoccupation with the location that is the subject of nationalist ferver. This too is what Our Blessed Mother was alluding to in Fatima. It was no wonder she spoke then and there about the evils that cause nations to rise against each other as being borne of the idolatrous ferver that is inherent to nationalism often breeding in silence, going unnoticed in some contexts whilst being bellowed from the rooftops in others.

And further to, you have here in all I have mentioned, the origin of the dilemmas and discrepencies that keep Alessandra Harris and indeed Tia Pratt from holistically understanding that the problem of systemic racism is neither rooted in Christianity or the Church for that matter, nor is it exclusively a European or so-called “white” problem. Rather, it’s a problem rooted in all that is antithetical to recognising the fundamental need to respect the presence of God’s natural law as embedded and etched into the entire Handiwork of His creation. Btw, I think it is apt to mention that I have a solid ground of personal authority here generationally-speaking as I come from a mixed Eurasian heritage and I’m incredibly grateful for the for the five unique culture strands that make up my genetic background.

To shift the focus from the historical reality of conflict and discord that was common to societies in the pre-Christian era and which nonetheless is still consequentially bearing upon the course of the interaction between nations and continents in the contemporary era (2.) to that of the Church being complicit where it wasn’t morally as such but was in hindsight pragmatically manipulated and at times under compulsion and duress from secular forces, is doing a gross injustice to and is naiively overlooking the need for moral redress in society at large irrespective of what politicosocial camp one identifies with belonging to.

These issues ultimately have nothing to do with a perceived need to reactively bolster the identity of “this race”, “this gender” or “that age” either because irrespective of what our ancestry is, whether we are male or female or claim a substance or makeup in this area like that of the angels, whether we have been 20, 40, 60, 80 or 100 years on this earth, when we sincerely look at why we need the complementarity of authentic social justice movements that seek a comaraderie with God’s intrinsic vision for the world He created, we will come to recognize that we need the complementarity of all methods and ways of walking with each other in a spirit of good will so that we can seek to unite our unique approaches with the view to a continual dialogue that desires and acts to cultivate mutual respect in concrete ways that traverse the public, interpersonal, and personal spheres of life experience. It has to be built on a vision where the differences and diversity God created can be celebrated in such a way that all are given rightful place of appreciation, recognition and worth in our hearts and our communities at large. We need to learn to recognize and celebrate both our differences and similarities, negating neither one or the other. For it is when we can freely grow in humble and enthusiastic appreciation of these attributes, that our true God-given humanity can flourish.

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Endnotes:

(1.) Karl Marx calls this kind of phenomena the epitome of the lumpen proletariat. And btw, I am only citing Marx here because whilst alot of his thought and writing was misused and no doubt misunderstood, wrongly contextualized to the grave detrement of whole communities and societies, there are admittedly gleanings of wisdom, vistas of illumination that point to truth about certain things especially those things which have to do with the different types of relationships that can play out in structural dynamics. No doubt he was influenced to a large extent by some tenets of Protestant philosophical and theological doctrine. And the deeper you go into the meaning of some of his writings, the clearer their Biblical foundations become to the heart and the mind’s eye of the reader, and especially so if you as reader already have some substantial rudimentary foundation in Biblical values, knowledge and wisdom.

(2.) It remains so that even after the spreading of Christianity in Europe, the most organically relational aspects of its unique communitarian cultural expressions failed to properly integrate into the interface of society due to a popular lack of all-round spiritual depth and holism being practiced on both an interpersonal and personal level. While people were at large Baptized into the faith, received a rudimentary instruction and induction into the sacramental life of the Church, that was about the extent of it insofar as a diligent, conscientious nurturence and practicing the faith went. It must be emphasized that whilst a rudimentary induction into the Church’s sacramental life of supernatural grace is necessary, it is simply not all there is to understand about practicing the faith and what’s critical to appreciate here is that people’s spiritual depth will be shallow and their personal love for the life of faith will wane if they merely go through the inductive motions and leave it at that. The authentically fruitful spiritual life is like unto a well cultivated and watered garden, quoting of course none other than the great St Teresa of Avila. Hence the spiritual life of the Church was not permeating each strata and sector of society in every area right from the public sphere to the interpersonal and personal spheres enough, even during that period, and that’s why you had a chronic condition of relative spiritual tepidity coursing through Eupropean public life. Sure there was a great deal of formal public acknowledgememt of the universal importance of the spiritual life, far greater than that which plays out today in public life, and that was necessary but it wasn’t enough. Which is why you have the situation you have today of rampant secularism, precisely because the lived-experience of the spiritual life was just not a reality in every strata and corner of society and this is where the culpability of draconian social structural edifaces come into the picture here. It was those social artifaces inherited from pagan times such as the various forms of inequitable land tenure that problematically don’t sit well with the values enshrined in the Christian ethos but they were kept anyway. And meanwhile both behind, betwixt, and within this mysterious playing out of contrasting sociopolitical dynamics and intercultural dialectics is the Act of Divine Providence directing the course of events in the unfolding drama of Salvation history that arranges as if by chance but evolves in a simultaniously all-too-synchronistic way for mere chance to be the main game changer.

Keywords: Black Lives Matter, Catholic Faith, Christianity, Social Justice Movements, Secularization, Social & Spiritual Evolution, Church & State