What do Junipero Serra and Harry Truman Have in Common?

Pope Francis has announced plans to canonize the Spanish missionary to California, Fra Junipero Serra during the Pope’s upcoming visit to the United States in September and the announced canonization has caused quite a rumble in certain segments of U.S. society. 

Born in Majorca in 1713, Serra joined the Franciscans and was ordained a priest in 1737.  He earned a doctorate in philosophy before he was 30 and initially served as a professor at the University of Palma in Majorca before he left to serve the missions in Mexico/New Spain at the age of 36.  In 1768, at age 55, he was made superior of the Franciscan friars in Baja peninsula of “lower California,” now Mexico.  In 1769 the Spanish government decided to send colonizers into “Alta California” (upper California, today’s State of California) in an effort to check Russian colonization that was stretching down the West Coast of North America from the Russian colonies in Alaska.  The Franciscan missions planted up and down the California Camino Real (Royal Road) were an important part of this strategy of anchoring California firmly to the Spanish Crown.  Serra established 9 missions from San Diego northward to San Franciso.

The missions Serra founded were

San Diego de Alcalá (modern San Diego) 1769

San Carlos Borromeo de Carmelo (Carmel by the Sea) 1770

San Antonio de Padua, (near present day Jolon) 1771

San Gabriel Arcángel, (San Gabriel) 1771

San Luis Obispo deo Tolosa (San Luis Obispo) 1772

San Juan Capistrano (San Juan Capistrano) 1776

San Francisco de Asís,  (San Francisco)  1776

Santa Clara de Asís, (Santa Clara) 1777

San Buenaventura (Ventura) 1782

There would eventually be 21 missions in all established by Franciscan friars in Spanish California. 

The goals of the missions—as the goals of Christian missionaries, Protestant and Catholic, from the sixteenth through the twentieth centuries was to “educate” the indigenous population in order to help them integrate into European models of civilization and culture which the missionaries deemed to be superior to the indigenous customs in which they found the various peoples.  An essential part of this was to supplant indigenous religion with Christianity—in the case of the California Missions, with Catholic Christianity.  And part of accepting the new religious system, in turn, was the acceptance of the established social and moral norms of Christianity.  This displayed, of course, a certain contempt—implied or explicit—for pre-European contact cultures and religion.

In order to educate the indigenous population they were “invited” into the mission where housing was arranged according to marital status with unmarried men, and especially unmarried women, living under strict supervision.  Where marriages existed or were arranged, family units lived together.  Life was highly regulated on an almost monastic model with daily Mass and prayers, classes, and approximately six hours of manual labor daily.  Sundays and about 90 holy days a year were labor-free.  Life was organized communally with all working for the common good and the community providing necessities for all. 

Native Americans were taught various crafts—previously unknown and unneeded—such as shoe-making, dress-making, iron-mongering, book-binding, candle-making, wood-working, glazing, and the provision of other essential products.  European agricultural methods were introduced and indigenous peoples learned European music and artistry. 

The missionaries were undoubtedly sincere yet what they produced was not, in some respects, unlike the slave societies of the American antebellum south.  Granted, the indigenous people were generally treated more gently than most slave populations, but there was a lack of freedom to strike out on one’s own, develop one’s own personal wealth, or establish one’s own independence.  Runaways from the missions were sought out and brought back as were slaves with Spanish soldiery enforcing the mission system.  Physical punishment was certainly not unknown. 

In addition, contact between the Europeans and the indigenous peoples exposed them to new diseases from which their immune systems could not protect them. 

There has been much protest at the canonization of Fra Junipero because from a twenty-first century perspective we can see the harm done to the indigenous population by the mission system which he founded.  This presents us with a challenge that raises the spectre of Pius XII and the Holocaust, of Harry Truman and the Atom Bomb, of the 17^th century Wars of Religion, of the Spanish Inquisition, and a host of other topics. 

I am going to strike out and say that we can only judge a person’s moral character by the moral knowledge available to that person in his or her own life-context.  I think it is grossly unjust to apply today’s standards to people in situations who were working with different philosophical horizons than we have today.  I think Serra can only be evaluated by the established moral parameters of 18^th century European and Spanish society.

In Serra’s eyes, his work involved bringing knowledge of the Gospel and the protection of the King of Spain to the peoples of California.  He understood that he was expanding their intellectual horizons by introducing them to European culture and thought.  He also saw that he was introducing them to a more moral way of life according to Christian norms of human relationships and, in particular, sexual morality.  His aim was to make them Europeans.  This would erase their own cultural identity but in Serra’s eyes, to be European was an advancement in human development. 

We—or at least most of us—would not agree today.  Of course we export to any and to all who will take it our culture of violent entertainment, of tobacco and other carcinogens, of unstable human relationships, of gross consumerism, of religious skepticism and philosophic nihilism and we think nothing of it.   We are as appalled at the condition of women and girls in Muslim society as Serra was at the unconventional sexual liaisons of indigenous peoples but we are right to insist on change and he was wrong.   We are angered by the proselytism of the friars but see nothing wrong with imposing our secularist values on those whose religious scruples make them uncomfortable with the cultural shifts in our post-Christian society. 

I am not sure that the canonization of Junipero Serra is a timely act any more than I think this is the time to advance the cause for Pius XII.  Perhaps some dogs should just be allowed to sleep to another day.  But I do think that the proposed canonization offers us the chance to examine our own world and our own political choices for modern day neo-colonialism. 

What May Be Francis' Most Dramatic Break With Tradition II

In the last posting, I began the story of Archbishop Oscar Romero who it is rumored that the Pope will canonize during his trip to the Americas in September.  This would involve skipping the step of beatifying Romero,  a step which is in the papal prerogative but which is highly unusual. 

Romero’s conversion to a more radical outlook on the Church’s mission to the poor after the murder of his friend, the Jesuit Rutilio Grande, was not simply a personal shift: it shifted the Church in El Salvador from being a buttress to the oligarchy and the old moneyed families to supporting the cause of the peasants.   This shift happened in 1977 and indeed in 1979 the government of General Carlos Humberto Romero Mena was overthrown by a military junta determined to uphold the political power of the old families but, at the same time, initiate some degree of land reform.  Romero saw through the charade of the new government, however, and realized that far more drastic reform would be needed if civil war and possible Marxist takeover of the government was to be avoided.  Romero wrote President Jimmy Carter in February of 1980 to inform him that military aid to the junta would only “sharpen the injustice and political repression inflicted on the organized people whose struggle has often been for their most basic human rights.”  President Carter, afraid that El Salvador would go the way of neighboring Nicaragua and end up with a socialist government, continued American military aid to the junta.   It was one of the few moral failures of Jimmy Carter. 

The same month he wrote President Carter, Archbishop Romero was invited to the University of Louvain in Belgium, a noted international Catholic theology faculty, to receive an honorary doctorate and he went to Europe in February 1980 to receive the degree.  While in Europe, he also had an audience with Pope John Paul II.  The audience did not go well.  The Pope, new in his papacy but already forming a plan to bring down Marxism, was not happy with Romero’s social activism which he feared might politically radicalize Latin America at the very time John Paul was trying to deliver a deathblow to Marxism in Europe.   Romero, for  his part, insisted that he could not support the government of the Junta because of its programs of state-sponsored assassination and terror.   Less than a month after his unhappy meeting with the Pope, Romero was dead. 

Roberto D’Aubuisson, a major in the Salvadoran Army who had been trained in the “School of the Americas”—a United States Department of Defense Institution located at Fort Benning, Georgia and which gained infamy for many of its alumni who used terror, violence, torture, and murder against their political adversaries throughout Latin America—organized right-wing death squads in his effort to overthrow the ruling Junta in El Salvador and institute an extreme right-wing dictatorship in the country.  It was just at this time, the winter of 1980, that D’Aubuisson’s movement was gaining in power.   Catholic clergy, nuns, and lay catechists, because of their identification with the poor, were a specific target of the death squads. 

On March 23^rd 1980, two weeks before Easter,  Archbishop Romero gave a sermon which immediately gained international attention because he called on the soldiers of the Salvadoran army to disobey the orders of their military superiors when those orders violated basic human rights.  This was a direct challenge to the military and give the piety of many ordinary soldiers threatened the government’s control.  The following afternoon as Romero celebrated Mass in the chapel of a cancer hospital run by Carmelite Sisters and at which he lived, he was shot through the heart by a sniper through the chapel doorway as he lifted the chalice at the consecration of the Mass.

But the drama—and the terror—were not over. 

On March 30, over 250,000 people gathered in the plaza outside the Metropolitan Cathedral of San Salvador for Archbishop Romero’s funeral Mass.  In some ways it was an awkward assembly.  The Archbishop of Mexico City, Cardinal Corripio y Ahumada, was the legate of Pope John Paul II and celebrated the Mass.  It was not an easy tightrope to walk.  John Paul had not been happy with Romero’s radical stance and it is rumored had even signed the letter removing Romero from the Archbishopric of San Salvador the very morning Romero was murdered.  Yet not only the quarter million Salvadoran peasants but the several hundred cardinals, bishops, and priests who came from Ireland, England, Spain, Belgium, Nicaragua, Peru, Canada, the United States, Venezuela, Brazil and other nations held the Archbishop as a hero.  The Archbishop of Canterbury, Robert Runcie, had been informed of Romero’s murder just prior to his enthronement in the ancient Cathedral of Thomas à Becket, and had halted the ceremony to decry the murder.  Pope John Paul, on the other hand, was—and remained until his death—opposed to the sort of liberation to which Romero had been converted by the death of Rutilio Grande.  As the funeral progressed and Cardinal Corripio heaped the perfunctory praises on the murdered Archbishop, a bomb suddenly went off in the crowd.  Then a second bomb.  Suddenly snipers appeared on the roofs surrounding the square and began shooting at the worshippers.  The scene turned to bedlam and people ran for shelter from the bullets.  Prelates were hurried inside the cathedral and the coffin containing Romero’s remains was hastily interred in the crypt.  Somewhere between 30 and 50 died in the melee.  While no official blame has ever been assigned for the atrocity, it is generally agreed that the snipers were army troops in civilian dress.  Indeed, the whole events surrounding the assassination and the murders at the funeral were suppressed from investigation for decades with neither the Holy See, nor the United States, nor the Salvadoran government pressing for a full and open investigation.  It was only decades later that witnesses definitively linked D’Aubuisson to the murder of the Archbishop.   Roberto D’Aubuisson was not the sniper but he was the one who gave the orders. 

In El Salvador Archbishop Romero has been considered a saint from the day of his martyrdom.  Pope John Paul (somewhat reluctantly) approved the introduction of Romero’s “cause” (case for sainthood) but it went nowhere during the remainder of his pontificate.  Yet various prelates from the Americas have slowly insisted on its continuance and it has cleared the doctrinal panels who have examined the Archbishop’s writings and sermons for orthodoxy. 

While the normal process of canonization involves a long investigation that includes the certification of miracles performed through the intercession of the posited saint, there is and has always been an alternative route whereby the Pope recognizes, in the name of the Church, the “cult” or devotion offered to a particular person who has long been venerated in a local Church (diocese or region) as a “saint.”  Marko Krizin, Melchior Grodziecki, and Hildegard of Bingen were so canonized by Pope Benedict XVI.  Actually the list of such extra-canonically “raised to the altars” is quite impressive: Albert the Great, Good King Wenceslaus, Margaret of Scotland, Stephen of Hungary, Boniface, Cyril and Methodius, Peter Damian, Peter Faber and Angela of Foligno among others. 

Nevertheless, despite the somewhat illustrious company in which this would put Archbishop Romero, it would considerably anger many right-wing American Catholics who identify Archbishop Romero with the liberation theology of which they have a peculiar paranoia.  Perhaps more threatening to them, however, is that such a canonization would indisputably mark a realignment of the Church with the world’s poor that would make it far more difficult to reconcile the vision of American foreign policy with the Church’s geo-political stand.  As popular as Pope Francis is among most American Catholics, there is a deep fear of him spreading on the American right.  His intention to write an encyclical on our responsibility toward the planet and his open acknowledgement of climate change has been a red flag to conservatives from John Boehner and Paul Ryan to economist Steve Ryan of the Heritage Foundation.  His brokering a change in American foreign policy towards Cuba has sent right wing-nuts from Senator Marco Rubio to Paul Kengor of The American Spectator over the edge. Maureen Mullarkey (how aptly named) of First Things, called Pope Francis “an ideologue and a meddlesome egoist” who “sullies his office by using demagogic formulations to bully the populace into reflexive climate action with no more substantive guide than theologized propaganda.” And as for American political gadfly Rick Santorum—he has always considered himself more Catholic than the Pope; now he says he has the proof.  What could be really interesting is what the Pope says when he fulfills Speaker Boehner’s invitation to address a joint session of Congress.  (My bet is that the invitation will be rescinded under the pretext of the first amendment.)  The last thing the right-wing wants is to let a plain-spoken man with Francis’ views get that kind of audience.   Joe Biden and Nancy Pelosi will march up the communion aisle with confidence while John Boehner and Paul Ryan will fear refusal, or as Saint Luke put it: the mighty will be cast down and the lowly will be raised up.  And if that isn’t a sign of the end times, I don’t know what is. 

Post script: Commenting on Maureen Mullarkey’s blog, Katholik Krazy blog Rorate Caeli proclaimed: “Well... when you've lost First Things, you've lost mainstream American Catholicism.”  First Things, mainstream American Catholicism???? What parallel universe are they living in???

What May Be Francis' Most Dramatic Break With Tradition

Rumors are flying around that when Pope Francis comes to the United States in October he will continue on to El Salvador where he will canonize Archbishop Oscar Romero, the Archbishop of San Salvador who was murdered by  an assassin from the American backed Salvadoran military in 1980.  The interesting aspects of this canonization is that Romero has not yet been beatified—the normal preliminary step to sainthood—and there as yet no approved miracles to testify to his sainthood. 

Romero was born on August 15, 1917 to carpenter Santos Romero and his wife, Guadalupe de Jésus Galdámez in Ciudad Barrios, El Salvador.  He was one of 8 children. The family does not seem to have particularly devout as the child was not baptized for 20 months after his birth, yet Oscar himself was drawn to the churches in town even as a very young child.   There were only three years of formal schooling available to him but he was tutored by a local teacher and at age 13 went off to a high-school seminary.  His father, a practical man, had wanted him to be a carpenter and the boy showed promise in that trade, but wanted to be a priest.  His intelligence was noticed in the seminary and he was eventually sent to Rome for theological studies and he was ordained in Rome on April 4, 1942.  World War II was raging at the time and on his way back to El Salvador, Father Romero and his companion, Father Valladares were imprisoned in Cuba as they were coming from Italy, then an Axis power.   He was soon repatriated and took up pastoral work in his native region in eastern El Salvador. 

Romero was by nature a conservative and a pious man.  He did what for the time and place were some innovative things such as establish Alcoholics Anonymous groups, but by and large he was given to supporting the traditional devotions and pieties of the Salvadoran peasants. 

El Salvador had from the time of its independence from Spain been controlled by an oligarchy sometimes called “The Fourteen Families.”  (There were, in fact, more families than fourteen, though they were all inter-related through marriages and had common interest.)  These were the great landowners of Spanish blood.  Their children were sent to Cuba or Mexico or even to Spain and other European countries for education.  They lived on large estates farmed by peasants of Native American or mixed blood.  After independence their cash crop was indigo from which an expensive blue dye is produced, but by the latter part of the nineteenth century the economy had switched to coffee production.  90% of the land was owned by this small number of wealthy families.  The Constitution was written to give these families a majority of seats in the national assembly and they—or their client families—held the officer positions in the military.  The military controlled the government by a series of dictatorships from 1931 until 1979.  A 1932 peasant rebellion led by Farabundo Martí was brutally suppressed with the murder of over 40,000 Salvadoran peasants.  In 1979 the government of General Carlos Humberto Romero Mena was overthrown by a conservative but reformist military junta that realized unless there was some economic and land reform the situation in El Salvador would be untenable and the country would be vulnerable to an extreme left-wing (read Marxist) power-grab.  The American government under President Carter, and later President Reagan, supported to the Junta, while Cuba and more left-wing governments supported the FLMN  (Farabundo Martí Liberation National Front) rebels.  This led to a violent civil war.  In an attempt to suppress the rebels the Salvadoran Army, under command of the Junta, was often responsible for indiscriminate slaughter of civilians, most notably the El Mozote Massacre in 1981. 

The teachings of the Catholic Church regarding a just social order—teachings rooted in the Encyclicals of Leo XIII, Pius XI, John XXIII, Paul VI and the decrees of the Second Vatican Council—were a powerful stimulus for the poor of El Salvador to seek social change and this left priests, nuns, and lay catechists vulnerable to attack by Junta forces who saw the work of the Church as supporting a more radical social change than they were prepared to make. 

Meanwhile in 1970 Romero had been named auxiliary to Archbishop Luis Chávez of San Salvador and four years later given his own diocese of Santiago de Mariá, a poor rural diocese.  In 1977 Paul VI named Romero to be Archbishop of San Salvador in succession to Archbishop Chávez who reached the mandatory retirement age of 75.

Romero was, as I said, a pious priest of a more conservative bent.  He was certainly no political activist.  But like many holy people, he did not limit himself to those with whom he agreed but had friends across the political and theological spectrum.  Among his closest friends was the Jesuit Rutilio Grande.  Grande worked among the peasants, catechizing them and raising their consciousness to understand that the sort of social dysfunction where wealth in concentrated in the hands of a few while others lack necessities is contrary to the Gospel and the Kingdom of God.  Rutilio Grande had huge influence among the peasantry and his message became a threat to the existing social order.  In a famous homily he declared

I am fully aware that very soon the Bible and the Gospels will not be allowed to cross the border. All that will reach us will be the covers, since all the pages are subversive—against sin, it is said. So that if Jesus crosses the border at Chalatenango, they will not allow him to enter. They would accuse him, the man-God ... of being an agitator, of being a Jewish foreigner, who confuses the people with exotic and foreign ideas, anti-democratic ideas, and i.e., against the minorities. Ideas against God, because this is a clan of Cain’s. Brothers, they would undoubtedly crucify him again. And they have said so.

On March 12, 1977, Grande and two lay associates travelling with him were ambushed and killed.  Romero heard of the murders and went at once to the church where the three bodies lay.  After celebrating Mass there, the Archbishop spent hours listening to the stories of the peasants who had gathered their to mourn.  Unable to sleep, he spent the night in prayer and underwent a deep personal conversion where he realized that the Church, if it were to be faithful, could not stand silently by while the poor were being driven ever deeper into the dirt but had to stand with them and for them.  He said that as he looked at the body of his friend,  he thought “If they have killed him for doing what he did, then I too have to walk the same path” The morning after the murders, Archbishop Romero announced that he, as Archbishop, would attend no government function until the murders had been investigated.  In a Catholic culture where the presence of the Archbishop gave a legitimacy to the government, this act of separation was seen as a repudiation of the government’s moral legitimacy and a severe blow to its credibility.  It was an invitation to reject government authority.  The following day Romero published the following statement

The true reason for [Grande's] death was his prophetic and pastoral efforts to raise the consciousness of the people throughout his parish. Father Grande, without offending and forcing himself upon his flock in the practice of their religion, was only slowly forming a genuine community of faith, hope and love among them, he was making them aware of their dignity as individuals, of their basic rights as words, his was an effort toward comprehensive human development. This post-Vatican Council ecclesiastical effort is certainly not agreeable to everyone, because it awakens the consciousness of the people. It is work that disturbs many; and to end it, it was necessary to liquidate its proponent. In our case, Father Rutilio Grande.

As if this was not sufficient aggravation to the government, Archbishop Romero next cancelled all Masses throughout his Archdiocese, instead summoning the faithful to a single outdoor Mass in San Salvador.  150 priests and over 100,000 faithful attended.  
to be continued

Pissed At The Post

I don’t know if you have seen The Book of Mormon, but it has one of the best musical scores that Broadway has seen in years.  That doesn’t negate the fact that at the end of the day it just a foul rant on religious faith set to some really great tunes.  God bless those Mormons.  They took this attack on their beliefs and practices on the chin, pretending it didn’t hurt.  I think they took it too well.  In fact, I think we have all taken it too well because it is not just violence against the faith and intellect of the Latter Day Saints, but a vulgar slur on believers of any stripe.  Readers of this blog will certainly know that I am no religious wing-nut sounding the tocsin against those who are forcing America into godlessness, but “ya got trouble, my friend, right here, I say, trouble right here in River City.”  And seventy-six trombones ain’t goin’ to fix it.    
I mentioned the other day in posting that Tom Toles, the political cartoonist for the Washington Post, published a particularly malevolent “cartoon” scorning the canonization of John Paul II.   Now as I said in several previous posts, I think the recent canonization of popes 261 and 264 was ill advised and for a number of reasons.  Maybe I expect too much of an “heroic degree of sanctity,” so sue me, but while each of these popes was truly remarkable from a historical perspective and each was certainly extraordinarily pious, I just don’t see either of them as a Teresa of Avila or an Augustine or a Francis of Assisi.  And in my blog entries I have had some particular criticism of John Paul for his poor handling of the sex-abuse crisis in the Catholic Church—but I also had some particularly good things to say about him for what he had to say and—more important, what he did—for human rights and for his role in bringing down Totalitarianism. 
Now I know that the essence of cartooning is succinctness in caricaturing, but Tole’s cartoon wasn’t succinct, it was vilifying.  Removing a subject from his or her context is not succinctness, it turns the cartoon from a caricature to a lie.  The problem is not Toles, of course, it is The Washington Post.   It’s sad because the Post could be a first-rate paper like the Times.  It used to be.  It has good writers.  It’s “opinion page” most often presents some of the best and most thought-provoking columnists.  It certainly beats out The Dallas Morning News, The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, The Arizona Republic, The Saint Louis Post Dispatch, or the Newark Star Ledger.  But the Post has just gone on the rag about religion these last few years.  Like the South Park crew that wrote The Book of Mormon, the Post just has no respect for people, including its readers, who still have religious views. 
We have lived in a Christian culture for a long time—far longer than any of us can remember.  What I mean by “a Christian culture” is a culture whose myths and stories, whose art and music, whose philosophy and value systems, have been shaped by the Christian religion.  This is nothing new. It goes back to Constantine.  Our “Founding Fathers” who were—for the most part—agnostics, wove this Christian culture (though not the Christian religion) into our national identity.  (Our Founding Mothers, by the way—far wiser than our Founding Fathers—tended to be Unitarians north of the Mason Dixon and Episcopalians south.  And Unitarians in those days were non-Trinitarian Congregationalists, not the sort of “make it up as you go along” quasi religionists of today.  But that is for another time.)  We could afford to have a Christian culture for the last two centuries+ of our nationhood.  Just about all of us were Christians.  And we left enough wiggle room in just how Christian our culture is that Jews didn’t have to feel uncomfortable, at least if they had an open mind.  (An open mind was optional for us Christians since we held all the cards.) 
Much has changed over the last half-century and our culture has for the most part lost that distinctly Christian catch.  Christmas is now “the holidays.” Church bells, if they ring at all, only ring at noon.  Ten Commandments and Christmas crèches no longer stand in public places.  Bible reading is banned in the schools.  And the clergy all know how to offer some vague aspiration that passes for a “prayer” at Memorial Day observances.  The situation is that we are no longer a Christian populace with a relatively small Jewish minority.  It’s not just Jews and Christians in bed together any more. Today we are Buddhists and Sikhs and Muslims (lots of Muslims), and Wiccans, and Hindus, and a smattering of anything and everything else.  And we need to make room under our American cultural tent.  We have to become a secular culture.  It is painful, I know; it is like when once you were the rich family in town and then Daddy lost the factory in a poker game and you go to public school now and live in an apartment.  But put on your big-boy pants and get used to it—that is the way it is and the toothpaste doesn’t go back into the tube. 
The thing is that there are two kinds of secularism.  There is the secularism that wants to ban any and all religion from the public square.  That is the sort of secularism that fed the Marxist/Leninist regimes of Eastern Europe and Asia.  And there is the sort of secularism that insists on a level playing field for everyone—whatever their belief or non-belief.  That sort of secularism—the level playing field—is something we can live with. It is built not just on tolerance, but on mutual respect.  The former kind—the kind whose ideology provokes the sort of Cartoon Tom Toles published—poses a grave danger to us individually and collectively.
Religion speaks up for human rights in societies where individuals are seen as having less worth than some vague “collective good.” The eugenics of a Margaret Sanger or an Adolph Hitler were both threatened by religion because it stood in the way of their desires to create a world in which their ideals of human perfection could eliminate the flesh and blood realities of individuals with Downs Syndrome, same-sex attraction, or who had Roma or Jewish or African bloodlines.  It was religion that after chafing for four decades under communist totalitarianism brought down the Soviet client-state of Marxist Poland, the first domino to fall in the “evil empire.”  It was the combined efforts of the Churches that eventually cracked the apartheid in South Africa.  The Civil Rights movement in the United States and the anti-war movement of the ’60’s and ‘70’s were led by ministers and rabbis and nuns.  It was religious voices that cried out against the American-client military dictatorships in El Salvador and Nicaragua and Brazil and other countries of Latin America.  Tens of thousands of Protestant Ministers and Catholic priests were imprisoned at Dachau, and Auschwitz, and Sachsenhausen for their resistance to National Socialism.  Tens of thousands more would disappear into Siberia or be shot under Stalin.  Priests and ministers played key roles in the resistance movements of World War II and while not nearly enough was done to save the Jews of Europe, nearly all of those “righteous among the nations” who risked—and sometimes gave—their lives sheltering the hunted were religious believers.   Religious faith deserves more respect than either The Book of Mormon or Tom Toles and the Washington Post are willing to give those people who root their lives in a religious belief.  Shame on you Book of Mormon and Shame on you Tom Toles and the Washington Post.