During a thousand year long subjection to the church's holy canon law, Europe's noble families raised their first born sons to the military glories of battlefield accolades. Then, intent on amassing wealth, Old World, patriarchal doyens entrusted their second sons to the Catholic church's apostolic echelons, that they may jockey within its diocesan hierarchy and so wield ecclesial influence over the continent's demon affrighted masses. Given the universal church's fondness for opulent pageantry, Europe's affluent families bribed venal cardinals so to purchase command of its ecclesiastic sway. Burdened with an incessant need to refill its coffers, within time Rome's One True Church grew riddled with illiterate, whore fornicating priests that paid sparse attention to the teachings of their confessed savior, Jesus. After centuries of papal supremacy had empowered prelates to arrest whomever they deemed enemies of the church, many of Christianity's more spiritually inclined faithful believed that the church had strayed too far from its avowed Lamb of God teachings. These Lions of the Faith, declared themselves better than the drunken, power hungry, simoniac priests of an idolatrous institution, and broke from the Whore of Rome in a religious schism.A violent Counter Reformation followed and, by 1540, a Spanish Catholic zealot by the name of Ignatius de Loyola approached Pope Paul III requesting ecclesial approval to establish an order of militant priests that would serve the papacy as Soldiers of God and founded the Society of Jesus, also known as the Jesuit Order. As many of Europe's kings turned against the church that had anointed them with the divine right to rule, a cascade of religious conflicts ensued. Persecuting recusant peasants within their own realms whilst warring with their dissenting royal cousins abroad, each of the variant Christian denominations burned at the stake the 'hell bound heretics' who confessed belief in unofficial doctrine and Europe burst aflame with unending religious strife.
As only 12 nautical miles severs England from Ireland, the peoples of these islands warred with each other since prehistory's antediluvian times. The ornery English birthright of clashing with belligerent Irish oppugnants, survived church encroachment long after druid pagans found Jesus. In allegiance to warring traditions atwixt islands, inimicous Saxon halberd clashes with Celtic held shillelaghs, endured the blessings of an oppressive church's holy ghost dominion. In making himself head of the Anglican church, Henry VIII of England's break from Rome, hardened the distrust atween them as Catholics in Ireland refused conversion to their enemy's apostatic faith and, pledging to war against the anti-papist British, clung to their Latin church all the more.After the Protestant William of Orange prevailed over the Irish King James II in the Battle of the Boyne of 1690, English occupation of Ireland saw the introduction of Penal Laws that denied the Catholics basic rights in their own homeland for centuries. Because the Battle of the Boyne is commemorated by the Orangists with strife rousing parades that celebrate the ascendance of Protestantism over the defeated Irish Catholics in Ireland, Catholic opposition to these emotion charged processions erupted into violence on July 12th every year there were parades.
On the continent, as a result of the Roman church's barbarous Counter Reformation, to free themselves from sectarian oppression, god-fearing pilgrims fled the Catholic Inquisition and Europe's ceaseless religious wars. When Romish conquistadores discovered vast amounts of gold in their South American dominions, they chose to pillage conquered lands rather than establish enduring settlements. French colonials to the north, in what is today Eastern Canada, and the English pilgrims of the thirteen colonies, all discovered fertile land where there was no mineral wealth worth plundering and built cities, roads and colonies instead.
At this time, the Jesuit order of priests, Soldiers of God beneath the pope in Rome, strove to spread Catholic imperium throughout the known world. Due to their duplicitous political cunning and sworn mission to undermine the authority of rulers outside their spiritual salvation's material sway, the Jesuits were often despised among protestants as the vilest examples of Catholic devil popery and in consequence, found themselves expelled from several European kingdoms.
When France and England fought the Seven Years War (1756-1763), they were not just two superpowers contending for supremacy. Some believed they were in a struggle for all the souls of the New World. After the English forces had defeated the French in what is today the Canadian Maritimes, they displaced the foreign speaking Catholics from the region, in what is known as the Expulsion of the Acadians, and resettled this great upheaval throughout the British colonies. As the arrival of francophone Catholics in the Protestant colonies of the British Empire caused civil unrest wherever they landed, the ultimate defeat of the French at the Plains of Abraham, in 1763, burdened the English with the governance of the remaining 70 000 papist settlers that had been abandoned by their routed army. For the following ten years as these disenfranchised Canadiens awaited their fate, it is my conjecture that Pope Clement XIV negotiated with the British crown for the lives of those French Catholics. To appease English fears of rebellion in Lower Canada, the Roman church reached an agreement with London and suppressed the entire Order of Jesuits, in 1773. In exchange for disbanding God's Marines in Rome, the British Parliament's Quebec Act of the following year, 1774, made the French speaking colonials there tax paying, Catholic subjects of the British crown.Shortly thereafter, following the Boston Tea Party, the American Thirteen Colonies to the south, protested against Britain's Insufferable Acts in a list of the most heinous things that the king of England could do to the American people, titled the Declaration of Rights and Grievances, which included among the complaints, the English tolerance of French speaking Catholics in North America. As King George III of England, had been anointed by a spiritually weakened, post Reformation chrism, American rebels questioned the divine rights of kings and overthrew the yoke of England in their fight for independence.
The turn of the 19th century saw steam ships traverse the Atlantic Ocean. In Ireland, wealthy Protestants imported American 'white gold', loom material, to supply the linen factories they had built around the cotton gin, and, in need of cheap labor, hired poor, disenfranchised papists to work them. As these Catholics migrated to cities like Belfast and Dublin, they became important cogs in the economic machinery of the Protestant upper classes, and stoked the virulent antipathy of their poor, laboring Protestant neighbors. Given their new found, economic importance to the English elites in Ireland, the Catholics there regained many of their rights as centuries old Penal Laws were gradually repealed. Seeing poor Irish Catholics receiving wages from Protestants, and gaining freedoms to rise above Ireland's moral economy, the church saw its grip on the hearts of its Irish parishioners weaken.
When the United States's last remaining Revolutionary War heroes began to pass away in the 1830s, the younger, native born generation, so strove to honor the living memories of America's founding fathers, they competed to emulate the patriotic valor of their dying elders. Consequently, having inherited England's fear and distrust of Catholics, the sprawling young nation developed a strong anti Irish immigration sentiment that grew more envenomed every year, until a nativist political movement began winning elections arguing for their deportation. As tolerance of papists within the British Empire was considered cause for revolution in 1776, Old World hatreds between the English and the Irish were set aflame in America, seventy years later, when a wave of nativist, anti-immigration nationalism was heightened by the passing of their last remaining War of Independence veterans. Given the political, anti-papist reality of the mid 19th century in the United States, the Catholic church had reason to feel threatened in America.
In the years leading up to 1845 and the Irish Potato Famine, there had been several blights throughout Europe. Migrating westwards from Prussia and Germany through the Netherlands and Denmark, a European potato blight struck Belgium, then spread across France and the UK before Ireland was shaken by a blight of its own. Modern forensic science today, has tracked the potato blight which caused the Great Hunger and discovered it did not come from Belgium, Germany or France. DNA testing has proven that the Irish Potato Famine which killed a million people in 1845, originally came from Mexico, a former Spanish colony, run amok with Catholics. Spreading from America's coastal dwelling Irish population's nearest convenient throw afield, to drifting downwind of Antwerp in Europe, the effects of God's steamship delivered, potato seed canker, foreshadowed Ireland's approaching blight.
As the 'Hidden Jesuits', still extant after the Order's official suppression, can be expected to have helped defend a British North America which had enshrined law to formally tolerate Catholics against the invading forces of an openly, anti-catholic United States, during the war of 1812, the Jesuit Order was quietly reinstated in 1814. Provided with the means, motive and opportunity, Catholic agency chose a mountainous region of Mexico with a climate similar to Ireland, in order to grow, pick and harvest the ideal potato blight intended to devastate Ireland's preeminent subsistence crop. If Rome's tentative position in America was a prime motive for this crime, and its millennia long spiritual ascendance over Europe had blessed it with ample means to execute its murderous intent, the invention of the steamship provided the Latin church with requisite opportunity.
Thus, through selective breeding of the optimal potato blight, destined to thrive in Irish wet climes, the church delivered a curated rot by steamship across the Atlantic Ocean to bring about a devastating famine that ultimately murdered a million blameless Irelanders and sent one million more Irish, read Catholic, refugees to the United States. The details of this monstrous plot to sacrifice so many faithful, in the fall of 1845, for the sole benefit of the church, was not likely known to Pope Gregory XVI as his antipathy towards modernity, science and the steam engine died with him in the spring of '46. As expected, given the extent of the ecological disaster which the blight caused on the Emerald Island, American anti-immigration sentiment weakened before the evidence of mass starvation. And, making exception for the plight of the emaciated Irish refugees landing on their shores, the massive influx of migrant Catholics into New England effectively unelected nativism in the 19th century United States. Boston's demographics changed from ten Protestants for every Catholic before the famine, to a one to one ratio within the ten years it took for that city to build a new county jail in order to deal with the social upheaval such a mass migration is bound to incite. And, as this unprecedented human inpouring occurred only twenty years before the Civil War, the first American born generation of famine immigrants, dutifully enlisted in the Union Army to bravely defend their country, fighting in distinguished Irish regiments. After Irish-American patriots had won the war, along with their fellow Union soldiers, the northern movement of emancipated, black slaves, erased the harshest of sentiments which the nativists held against them before the nation had erupted in its internecine conflict.
The Catholic church of the 21st century has hundreds of respected denominations with which to compete for the souls of its parishioners and is not the same oppressive, monolithic church of pre-Reformation Europe. Pope Francis believed in human caused global warming. Publishing his climate change encyclical, Laudato Si, in 2015, Francis was so adamant a moral herald in his fight against global warming that the Vatican is projected to become a lodestar carbon neutral state. Through a tacit trust in what Saint Augustine referred to as God's Second Book, constant inquest into the steadfast laws of matter has given us jet planes, microwaves and the foreknowledge of our own destruction. Certain that the unfettered consumption which is whelming this planet's fragile ecosystem is directly proportional to humanity's explosive growth, we must accept birth control as a limit to the strains of overpopulation, that we may avoid history's pestilence, war and famines past. The first American born pope, Leo XIV, was elected pontiff over 1.3 billion Catholics in 2025. As he shares his predecessor's concerns for the impacts which climate change poses to the planet's most vulnerable, it demonstrates what great strides the millennia old church has made in the four centuries since it condemned Copernicus.
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