Short history of the Catholic Church in England

The writer, Michela Wrong, went on, вЂWhen I think of the Vatican’s record in Africa, I think of its failure to acknowledge what happened in Rwanda, where priests and nuns not only led the death squads to Tutsi refugees cowering in their churches, but provided the petrol to burn them alive, took part in the shootings and raped survivors. Rwanda was Africa ’s most devout Catholic nation, and the role the Church played in genocide is as shameful as its collaboration with the Nazis.’ There is a price tag and it is a large one. This is the anthropologist, Canadian Ronald Wright, on the invasion of the Americas by the Europeans in the name of God and of their sovereigns: вЂThe demographic collapse that took place within decades of 1492 was proportionally the greatest human death toll in history-removing about nine-tenths of the New World’s people, or close to one-fifth of all mankind-yet this huge fact has still to penetrate general knowledge and standard reference works. As the historian Francis Jennings wrote in 1975: “Europeans did not find a wilderness here… they made one.’” Those who saw David Puttnam’s film The Mission will recall some of the devious justifications found by the Catholic Church for genocide ...»