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Decolonizing our Hearts and Minds-

Waking up to Our Own Christian History

Presented by

Molly McGettigan Arthur, ASCJ,

Mary Kay Hunyady, RSCJ,

January 2020

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Native Land Acknowledgement

2-Molly -2 minutes

We want to start with an acknowledgement of respect for the Indigenous Peoples of this land right here where we are sitting. The original people of what is now San Francisco County were called the Yelamu, which is a local tribe within the Ramaytush (pronounced rah-my-toosh) Ohlone territory. Of the original, approximately 1500 people who inhabited the San Francisco Peninsula prior to the Portola Expedition in 1769, only one lineage is known to have survived. Their descendants comprise the four branches of the Ramaytush Ohlone peoples today.

We honor the thousands of years that these Indigenous lived in harmony with their environment, some of the artifacts found are up to 5,000 years old, which is older than the Egyptian Pyramids. And we respect their relationship with their land and relations and are cognizant of the history that took away their land. http://www.ramaytush.com/who-are-the-original-people-of-san-francisco.html

https://native-land.ca/

http://www.ramaytush.com/

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Sacred Heart of Jesus - Waters of Grace and Love

Madonna of the Society of the Sacred Heart

St Madeleine

Sophie Barat consecrated the Society in front of this painting in 1800

Original emblem of the Society of the Sacred Heart, embroidered by St Madeleine Sophie as a young girl

3- Mary Kay, Molly Arthur, 1 minute each

Mary Kay--I am a Religious of the Sacred Heart, more easily put, a Roman Catholic nun.The charism of our order is to discover and reveal God’s love. The pierced heart of Jesus is one of the symbols of our order, and we see that pierced heart in the world today in a variety of ways: the treatment of people of color, poor people, women, people in the LGBTQ comty, the elderly, the planet, and ultimately the universe. It’s in that context that I come to own the history of the RC church and its hegemony wrt people who were not Catholic/Christian. My family is much newer to this country than Molly’s, having emigrated from eastern Europe in the 1910’s. We were staunchly Catholic, and staunchly democrat. In my adult life, I have come to see more clearly the sins of the Catholic church, primary among them is the Doctrine of Discovery.

Molly --I am an Associate with the Society of the Sacred Heart. You could call me a lay nun. My mother and her four sisters and my grandmother and her five sisters and most of my 14 Irish Catholic girl cousins, attended Sacred Heart schools here in the Bay Area. My sister and I went 12 years here at Broadway- starting around 70 years ago! I am a 6^th generation Californian whose family was proud of their early Californio lineage from General Mariano Guadalupe Vallejo. I have come to a better understanding of the extraordinary effects, intimately, spiritually and psychologically for me, of settler/colonization, starting with my ancestors in Ireland, the first country colonized by the English. It has taken me some time and learning to come to the realization that my ancestors needed to be accepted as “white” to become members of the mainstream American story.

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What is the role of our Christian history

in this current planetary crisis?

What responsibility and obligations drive us as faithful persons to transform this legacy of oppression, violence and genocide?

4- Mary Kay–2 minutes

Molly and I realized that we did not know a major portion of own Christian spiritual lineage and history and its connection to the current culture of continuing oppressions, destruction and violence in crisis mode still today. And we asked:

What is the role of our Christian history in this current planetary crisis?

What responsibility and obligations drive us as faithful persons to transform this legacy of oppression, violence and genocide?

We have noticed a disconnection with our own authentic sense of self, particularly as vowed and committed faith people in this culture. We have understood that this is a on-going journey, best faced with humility. We are facing our grief about our broken world, and its personal cost in our soul's integrity and separation from our beloved earth community. We invite you to a beginning look at some Christian history, it has been a major force in the world’s history and can be very personal. We are not experts on any of these topics, but as Christian women of faith, we can speak to our own history and our responses to it.

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Collusion between Church and colonizers: our heritage

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6- Mary Kay- 1 minute

The Doctrine of Discovery specified that the entire world was under the jurisdiction of the Pope, as God’s representative on earth. One root of the Doctrine of Discovery lies in the Crusades of the Middle Ages, when Christians adapted the concept of the Chosen People for themselves and claimed the Promised Land to be anywhere they settled, which provided justification for the conquest and enslavement of other peoples as well as seizure of their land wherever they went. You can see 1823 on the timeline when the US Supreme Court determined that all US land was owned by the federal government based on the precedent of the Doctrine of Discovery. This is still true today-all the federally–recognized tribes reservations in the US are not owned by the Indigenous Peoples but by the federal government.

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1455 – Romanus Pontifex, Pope Nicholas V ��Confirmed by Pope Calixtus III (1456), Sixtus IV (1481) and Leo X (1514) and became the models for subsequent bulls issued by Pope Alexander VI ( 1493)�

“to invade, search out, capture, vanquish, and subdue all Saracens and pagans whatsoever, and other enemies of Christ where so ever placed, and the kingdoms, dukedoms, principalities, dominions, possessions, and all movable and immovable goods whatsoever held and possessed by them and to reduce their persons to perpetual slavery, and to apply and appropriate to himself and his successors the kingdoms, dukedoms, counties, principalities, dominions, possessions, and goods, and to convert them to his and their use and profit”

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St Dominic presiding over the burning of heretics �c. 1213.�The Inquisition lasted roughly 700 years, the last person executed was in 1826 in Spain

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Spanish Inquisition, brought to the “New World” in early 1500s

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14-Molly- 2 minutes

This is currently what is said in the San Rafael Mission store/museum. The patronizing padre, the infantilizing of the local tribes- but no mention of the average death rate in the California Missions as 80-90%. Nor that the California Mission system was a conquest and control partnership between the Spanish Empire and the Roman Catholic Franciscans. The Spanish monarchs wanted land and riches, the missionaries believed that the only way to “save” the Indigenous peoples was by destroying their way of life by incarcerating and enslaving them, destroying their social customs of family and marriage as well as their successful economy of relationship with their environment. The Padres considered themselves the “Fathers” of the savage heathens- by definition in those days- Fathers had authority of life or death over the members of their families.

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The Act for the Government and Protection of Indians -1850

17-Molly

I also read that Mariano Vallejo, at the first 1850 California legislative session, with the likely motive of wanting to keep the indentured/enslaved Indians working on his ranchos, was instrumental in negotiating the "Act for the Government and Protection of Indians” (look at the misleading language). The new California law controlled Indian labor, permitting the indenture of Indian children and mandating that all Indians work. On the word of any white person, any Indian deemed to be "loitering or strolling about" (homeless?) could be arrested and sold for payment of his fine to the highest bidder -to labor for a period of four months (debt peonage/slavery?). This law allowed for murder of Indian parents, so a “white” man could sell Indian children into bondage for a specified legal length of time(trafficking?). This law opened the gates to local vigilantes, state militia and eventually even the US Army itself to perpetuate efforts for extermination of the Indigenous Peoples in California- I had searched with foreboding to find out that yes, my ancestor was deeply involved in this travesty of horrendous consequences and yes, this was the initiation of a period of genocide of California’s Native Peoples until the 1880s.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Act_for_the_Government_and_Protection_of_Indians

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18-Mary Kay

The Doctrine of Discovery legitimized enslaving non-Christians and the expansion of the transatlantic slave trade.

As it expanded under European colonialism to the New World in the late fifteenth through nineteenth centuries, slavery took on a new, racialized form involving the movement of millions of peoples from one continent to another based on skin color, and the creation of a vast slave-plantation complex that was an important cog in the modernization and globalization of the world economy. Africans provided the bulk of labor in this new system of slavery, but American Indians were compelled to labor in large numbers as well. The European trade in American Indians was initiated by Columbus in 1493. Needing money to pay for his New World expeditions, he shipped Indians to Spain, where there already existed slave markets dealing in the buying and selling of Africans. He financed his 4 voyages with the money he made selling slaves.

https://www.lib.umn.edu/bell/tradeproducts/sugar

immigration patterns. http://users.humboldt.edu/ogayle/hist110/enslaved.html

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Enslaved populations in the Thirteen Colonies in 1770

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20-Molly

Today, more than 1 in 8 Americans are immigrants, and almost all of us are descendants of those born in foreign lands.

So who were our ancestors who came to America? Where did they come from, what motivated them to leave their homelands and give up their traditions , family relationships and connection to their land? What ethnicities, what persecutions possibly drove them here? What did they lose in becoming American? How is that shown in our times and ourselves? What is your family lineage?

Population of US- 33 million from europe, 22 million americas, 13 million asia and oceania, 1.3 million africa

With a population of 362,801 Native Americans, California has the largest indigenous population in the United States. The indigenous population in the United States is estimated between 2.5 and 6 million people,¹ of which 23% live in American Indian areas or Alaska Native villages.

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Manifest Destiny� 1846 American Christian mission

21- Mary Kay 2 minutes

Manifest Destiny is the belief that white 19th century American settlers were chosen by God to spread democracy and Christianity across the continent, with historical connection to the Crusades and the Doctrine of Discovery, and especially with the New England white Protestant Puritans who carried with them a demanding sense of Providential Christian purpose.The national narrative of Manifest Destiny was used by colonizers to subjugate the peoples they conquered in order to claim legitimacy for their colonizing practices. The brutal violence of conquest must be forgotten, in part, through myths of heroism and “God’s will”. This kind of national mythic narrative can be seen as essential to nation-building- in this case defining the “true national” only through the definition of the “other” –like those being forced forward by the inexorable figure (of course, using a pure white female) of Manifest Destiny.

The doctrine of Manifest Destiny facilitated the geographic extension and economic development of the United States while confirming racist policies and practices. It institutionalized White Supremacy more firmly than ever as central to the U.S. definition of itself. The arrogance of asserting that God gave white people (primarily men) the right to dominate everything around them still haunts our society and sustains its racist oppression. Manifest Destiny was used to create a circle of power around the United States. It’s what propelled the US into the war in Vietnam, and Korea before that. It’s what gave us the “right” to manipulate the Central American countries and hold the puppet strings of those dictators whom the U.S. helped stay in power so as to be able to benefit financially. Some current effects today can be seen in the desperate Migrant caravans trying to escape their dangerous home countries like Honduras and Guatemala.

Colonialism and its narratives were morally wrong- and there is no erasure of this immorality by excusing the behavior in terms of cultural or historical context.

http://nationalhumanitiescenter.org/tserve/nineteen/nkeyinfo/mandestiny.htm

http://soaw.org/resources/anti-opp-resources/108-race/482-what-is-white-supremacy

http://christianhegemony.org/the-doctrine-of-discovery-manifest-destiny-and-american-exceptionalism

https://www.shmoop.com/manifest-destiny-mexican-american-war/ideology.html

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Embedded harmful consequences-creating climate chaos

22-Mary Kay 1 minute

As faith leaders, we may feel both responsible and helpless as we have watched the worsening of environmental destruction and climate chaos, in spite of the best efforts of some of us to turn things around. This photo is of the Alberta Tar Sands extraction site and is one of the most egregious sites of ecocide on the planet. Colonization treats people and land as disposable, to be exploited for profit by the few people in power. It is important to know what is happening to our Mother Earth and to all life now – to realize that the history that we are outlining here, has lead to the current results- we may not see it easily ourselves, in our beautiful school, surrounded by loving teachers and family. But this is going to be a part of your future and we invite you to learn more about how this came about, in the outside world and within your own family lineage.

https://www.lifegate.com/people/lifestyle/alberta-tar-sands-unprofitable

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23- Mary Kay - 2 minutes read the slide

The ideologies of Christian divine providence, white supremacy, and racist capitalism are the undergirding of on-going societal violence. This beautiful young woman is Melina Laboucan-Massimo, a Lubicon Cree environmental activist, her tribal lands are the Canadian Tar Sands. She has lost a sister and cousin to violence.

She says:

‘The systems of patriarchy, capitalism, colonization, and imperialism are based on a system of power and dominance. When you have these types of systems governing the way a society lives, that’s how people are being treated on the ground. That’s how the Earth is being treated. Indigenous people have always known that. Our relationship with Mother Earth is an attempt to be reciprocal — the cycle of life, you know.”

https://grist.org/climate-energy/making-the-connections-on-tar-sands-pollution-racism-and-sexism/

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Thousands gather with candles to march along the path that white supremacists took the prior Friday on the University of Virginia Campus in Charlottesville, �August 16, 2017

25 Molly- 2 minutes

Yes, we must fight White Supremacy, it is a distortion of humanness, a dark shadow embedded in our ancestral memories. We can find it subtly in ourselves and blatantly in the public square now. I have realized the depth to which my ancestors were influenced by their need to join the “White” narrative- a system that is based on the very long history of Europeans and Christianity. I realize the benefits that I maintain in my life now- very clearly traceable through the last 6 generations and passed onto my children as education, money, status and the lack of oppression as being “white” in this society and culture. My education here at Broadway is very much a special privilege, that I now realize was enabled by a system that ostracized and excluded the “others”. I didn’t really know any “non- Catholics” as we called those “Others”, when I was growing up and had a very close and closed Irish Catholic clan. There were 22 in my generation, we were each other’s best friends growing up in San Francisco.

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St. Philippine Duchesne, brought the Society of the Sacred Heart to America in 1818.

26- Mary Kay- 2 minutes

Our moral values and models... We have been talking mostly about ideologies and narratives that were propounded in our Christian history. We, as a part of the Sacred Heart Family have a personal relationship to this history. Philippine Duchesne, along with three Religious of the Sacred Heart brought our religious order to the US in 1818. Philippine established schools in Louisiana and in Missouri. At the Louisiana school, she was given, as well as bought and owned slaves at the Grand Coteau, LA school. St Philippine’s desire to be with the Potawatomi put her in collusion with the destruction of their religion and culture, she was misguided by her church (male, insular and patriarchal). The US-C Province of Society of the Sacred Heart is in the process of being accountable to the descendents of the people we enslaved between 1818 and 1865. While we look back in history with the eyes of a 21st century philosophy now, still we must be held accountable for the sins of our foremothers. Repentance and atonement are called for.

https://www.sacredheartusc.education/page/news-detail?pk=956737

https://www.theadvocate.com/baton_rouge/news/article_3ac5a8b4-2246-11e8-b12b-33cfe1fa08d9.html

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Our way of being Catholic/Christian

27- Molly 2 minutes

I was introduced to the Doctrine of Discovery when I went to a protest against the sainthood of Junipero Serra at Mission Dolores here in San Francisco. I spoke as a descendant of the Californios who perpetrated the harms against the California Natives. I ponder on who is a saint, how one might act saintly and what is sacred and holy in this world? I try to align myself with humans who look to live that journey in their personal lives- who humbly act as best they can with integrity and moral perspective. I grapple with my spiritual lineage to a Christian history of dogmatic rigidity, religious righteousness and imposition of ultimately destructive good intentions, which has seen the worst of human qualities and actions perpetrated on those seen as “Other”. And I see a logical historical continuum to the current distorted system of entitlement and “divine impunity”, connected to the horrors of the Church’s current sexual abuse scandal that has been protecting perpetrators of incalculable harm.

Photo- my own photo at Mission Dolores, San Francisco, CA Sept 15

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jun%C3%ADpero_Serra

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Indigenous Women of the Americas-

Defenders of Mother Earth

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Corrina Gould leading us

31- Molly 1 minute

I am lead and guided by the current local Indigenous, descendents of those who were harmed by my ancestors, in their reverent relationship with Mother Earth. I try to understand their depth of commitment and love, to be on the frontlines with blessings, prayers and care for all creation. I follow them with admiration and awe, in gratitude and humility.

I personally apologize to Indigenous people for the horrors perpetrated by my genetic and spiritual ancestors. I renounce those actions, realize the privileges and benefits I have accrued by them and resolve to make amends and atonement as a woman of faith.

This is my own photo taken at the Berkeley Shellmound site at a prayer service in 2019. They won protection from further development there. http://sogoreate-landtrust.com/shuumi-land-tax/

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Facing the current and historical truths from our lineage, we will proclaim our moral stance for healing, restoration and reparation. We will manifest the restitution desired by our ancestors.

And with humility, bless the future generations.

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Whom should I turn to,

if not the one whose darkness is darker than night,

the only one who keeps vigil with no candle, and is not afraid-

the deep one,

whose being I trust,

for she breaks through the earth into trees, and rises, when I bow my head,

faint as a fragrance from the soil.

Rainier Maria Rilke,

Book of Hours