@AssociatedPress @u-s-news-AssociatedPress people are fleeing #churches #church because many religions treat women and children as property. They don’t teach the word of Christ. They teach some horrible version of misogyny, ignore the poor and gather wealth and power.

@photography

Catholic priest Reginaldo Manzotti conducts a mass, broadcast live on television, with photos of the faithful over the church's pews at the Santuario de Nossa Senhora de Guadalupe church in Curitiba, # Brazil, March 21, 2020. REUTERS/Rodolfo Buhrer

#COVID
#church

@dedicto @AnarchoNinaAnalyzes

I didn't know about #COINTELPRO until I was an adult. I did know the gummint was being super nasty to natives.

This is, indirectly, how I learned that the #church didn't really believe in #Jesus. I spent much of my childhood in #SouthDakota. You probably are aware of the scaremongering about #immigrants. How they break into houses and crime on the people who live there... The same kind of scaremongering was going on about "Indians." The particular town I lived in was not near any of the reservations, but people were talking scared.

I was attending the local #Catholic gradeschool, where most of my teachers were #nuns. The school principal was also a nun. My mother would sometimes take a few nuns out to the local pizzeria, and on one of these occasions, the topic of "Indians" came up, and the principal asked me, "<name>, what would you do if Indians came to your house while your mom was at work?" I answered that I would ask them if they were hungry, and cook them macaroni and cheese (the only thing I knew how to cook, other than heating up a can of soup).

And I *knew* that my answer was somehow wrong by the way the adults were acting. But I didn't know *why* and I absolutely did *not* want to ask in front of my two little sisters.

I did figure it out. If they were there to hurt me, or kidnap me, mac and cheese wouldn't stop them. And I thought the adults were being stupid about that. I mean, when *I* wanted to hurt someone, it was because of something they did. And I knew that I hadn't done anything to any Indian, ever.

I didn't even laugh when Sister T. bopped the Indian boy who read in class with the clown hammer. Normally, she'd grab the library book he was reading, slam it shut, and bop him on the head with the book, and then put it back on his desk. That day, she went into the cloak room and brought out the beepy clown hammer. She bopped him, and his desk. The other kids laughed. I wanted to cry. She made a point of bopping *my* desk, to show how it beeped and didn't actually hurt.

I was single-digit years old. But Catholic school means #Mass every school day, and *lots* of reading from the #Bible. First a reading from the Old Testament, then a bit of Psalm, then a non-gospel New Testament, and then the gospel.

If they broke into Jesus' house, he would bless them. Kids can't bless anybody unless they sneeze. And I had just learned how to make macaroni and cheese.