As the Catholic church continues to reel from the global outcry over the rampant child sex abuse by holy fathers across the globe, and with the image of the Holy See in tatters, I decided to travel to the Vatican to see the capital of Christendom up close.
I was moved to embark on this trip by the unbridled zealousness of Reverend Fathers across Africa, who are rampaging across the continent uprooting centuries-old trees, and burning irreplaceable, millennia-old places of African worship, claiming that these defenseless trees and centers of ancient worship harbor evil spirits. I wanted to travel to the Vatican to determine if European Reverend Fathers, Bishops, and Popes were tripping over each other to make a bonfire of shrines of Greek and Roman gods! I wanted to know if these men of God had denuded Europe of her ancient trees!
If you have not yet read about the excesses of overzealous African church leaders bent on destroying all and every vestige of pre-colonial African traditional life, including harmless trees, please read: https://insightlinks.net/2018/08/18/nawa-o-pastor-cuts-100-year-old-tree-says-its-evil-community-reacts/. These pitiful priests have sunk so low as to accuse free-standing trees of evil deeds!
To make sure that I did not miss anything of importance, I booked a VIP-guided tour of the Vatican.
On entering the hallowed grounds of the Holy See, I was astounded to see hundreds of original and re-created images and sculptures of all the Greek and Roman gods of antiquity comfortably housed in the Vatican and held in high veneration, under the tightest of security protocol. Even the pantheon of the Greek gods is replicated in one of the hallowed halls of the capital of Christendom! Before you, stood the images of Apollo, Artemis, Zeus, and countless headless, dismembered gods and snakes and humanoids! I wanted to start calling on these Reverend Fathers in Africa who are out to wipe out their so-called abodes of the evil one to come to the Vatican to see how white people, who gave them Christianity, have preserved their own ancient gods and pagan religious institutions. But, it is also on record that most of these priests have been to the Vatican, but may not have been shown what I saw, or were shown these naked sculptures of ancient European gods but chose to look the other way, or were simply too timid to raise their voices.
But there’s more.
As we moved through the halls, I was confronted with explicitly nude sculptures of men and women in various positions of lubricity all over Vatican. Now, don’t get me wrong, I appreciate the delicacy and sophistication of visual arts, but can you imaging entering a church, or a bishop’s court anywhere in Africa, or the entire Third Word for that matter, and beholding explicit sculptures of unclothed men and women in voluptuous display! I don’t think so. In such parts of the world, these images would be banned as the handiwork of the devil; or if displayed at all, must be totally covered up with the thickest of black cloths! But, these images are fully protected, ventilated, and openly displayed at the capital of Christendom!
Regrettably, these rampaging priests and their Christian soldiers in Africa and other parts of the Third World do not know what the capital of Christendom looks like, and the pope and his cardinals will never advise them that it is okay to allow images of gods and nude sculptures in their hallowed church grounds, or even in the natural shrines dedicated to these ancient gods and traditions. So, these misguided, and semi-literate priests believe that they are doing the work of God through their wholesale destruction of these rare artefacts, symbols, and domains of our ancient civilization. Can you imagine what fate would have befallen the Stonehenge and the Coliseum if these sites were within their reach! Even then, some church leaders had at one time called for these ancient sites to be razed to the ground. Our Third World priests believe that they understand Christianity more than the Europeans who developed and packaged this modern religious order and sold it to the rest of the modern world.
But my primary premise for visiting the Vatican still eluded me. I had traveled to the Holy See to confirm the contributions of Africans to Christendom. In my guided tour, I journeyed through the entire Vatican Museum, through the Hall of Maps, Hall of the gods, sculptures of European pagan traditions and gods, the Sistine Chapel, St. Peter’s Basilica, and even the Vatican gift shops. I did not see anything suggesting that there are Christians living on the continent of Africa! Even the meeting between King Solomon and the ancient Queen of Sheba was nowhere to be found!
Instead, I saw arrays of gilded halls dedicated to the memories of European popes, some of whom had the most sordid history in all of Christendom, such as Pope Alexander VI, who not only fathered countless children but used his children to deliver poison to his enemies! Yet the Holy See has a hall dedicated to this fallen pope! But there was no verifiably authentic African pope, despite all the wild claims to the contrary, and no hope of ever having one; but our zealous priests are ignoring this continental snobbery, and are instead running around the continent with chainsaws, pitch forks, and torches, razing trees and ancient shrines of African traditional worship most of which date back to thousands of years.
None of these fire-breathing priests would ever call the Vatican and ask one simple question: ‘Why has there been no modern pope from Africa?’ Little do these ardent priests know that the appointment of an African pope would go against everything that the modern political Christianity stands for? Instead of raising such a critical question, they are busy grabbing money from poor men and women in Third World nations, pocketing their own share, and transporting the rest to Vatican. Is it possible that these fervent priests who are causing this enormous carnage in Africa are also partaking of the child sex abuse that is rocking the Roman Catholic church in the Western world? Is this penchant for destruction a means of hiding some sordid aspects of the church? A little foray into history shows that the epidemic of child sex abuse in the Roman Catholic church is rooted in its Greco-Roman roots, and if you can decode the Greek meaning of the phrase, ‘agape love’, which is held as the highest form of love by the Greco-Roman ancestors of Christendom, then you will understand that the culture of child sex abuse is baked into the cake of Catholicism! When will someone do a study on the unholy adventures of scandalous European priests who were expelled from Europe and sent on a one-way ticket to African during the colonial era?
But the Roman Catholic Church is not the only culprit. The Anglican church has continued to balk at the appointment of an African as the Head of the Church, and no African has served as the Grand Mufti of the Moslem faith. So, as Africans troop to churches and mosques, doling out money into offertory trays week after week to these religious entities, they should ask themselves, ‘Why are Africans not allowed to lead these godly organizations that are supposedly founded on egalitarian principles?’
At the end of my visit to the Vatican, I concluded that what we have is a modern political Christianity that has nothing to do with what Christ taught, but is set up to ensure that wealth flows from Africa, Caribbean, South America and other poor areas of the world to Europe, while discounting any contributions to Christianity by these less fortunate areas of the world. It is time for leaders of Christianity in these less-developed regions of the world to wake up from their timidity, and begin to make concrete demands from the Vatican. Instead of rampaging through the continent and uprooting harmless trees and burning hallowed places of ancestral traditions and worship, these priests should emulate the popes and cardinals and safeguard these rare gems of ancient African civilization!
B.U. Nwosu
Rome, Italy.
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