Instead, the “Vicar of Christ” asked the Indian population to forgive the Church for its genocide, slavery and racism that decimated the Native American population in Latin America. The pope did not speak of atonement, reparations or reconciliation, thereby rendering his apology somewhat meaningless.
To the pope’s credit, however, he was being more Farrakhanesque in his call for the redistribution of land. Min. Farrakhan, in his national speeches, reminded audiences that the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King spoke about having gone to the mountaintop and having seen the “Promise Land”—not the promised sky, but land. Dr. King pointed out that the U.S. government had given to European immigrants land that had been promised to the Black ex-slaves, along with equipment and training to develop the land. The persistent poverty of Black America was the result of that broken promise of land redistribution, and that’s why Dr. King, in planning the Poor People’s March in 1968, said he was coming to Washington “to get our check.”
Given the Holy See’s outspokenness about the bankers’ war on the poor, it would be interesting to see the pontiff assemble the Jewish banking cartel and ask their cooperation in modifying the predatory practices that have enslaved a significant portion of his followers.