Nuns with guns

The President of the Fascist States of America and the “new” Pope are fraternally bound. They are offspring of ideological war, of the Cold War. As the years go by and hence past settles as dust into history, one needs reminders of how the battle between power and multitude was once fought. Back then, in late 60s and 70s, there were guerrillas and guns in South America, they were fighting as they do now in Iraq, against American imperialism. Back then, as now radical clerics abounded, of various sorts, and one such group became known as the "liberation theology". They were far from an homogeneous crowd but from Mexico to Paraguay their mission was alike, to join in struggle their communities against poverty and coercion. Some merely preached rebellion from their privileged pulpits – Porfirio Miranda’s Marx and the Bible for instance, others carried guns and joined the guerrillas, as in Nicaragua or Haiti. It was romantic but both genuine and effective.

It is at this historical juncture that the Bushes and the Pope met. Such radical priesthood, and nunhood, was a danger to the authority of the client regimes of America as well as to the wealthy orders and reactionary theology of the Catholic Church. A double strike was devised, from America came counter-revolutionary training and funding for paramilitary to promptly massacre radical priests. But crucially, from the Vatican came excommunication for dissent, so that these assassinations would go unpublicized and unscrutinized.

Who was paying for the paramilitary? Ronald “the cowboy” Reagan and his vice-president George Bush signed the checks. Who was excommunicating the priests? The Prefect for the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, aka the Holy Inquisition under its more politically correct name, was Cardinal Ratzinger. Religion is political.