Understanding Anti-
“What is built on the basis of force,
and not on the truth about the equal dignity
of every human being,
begins badly and will end badly.”
Pope Francis
According to the New International AuthenticHealers.org Worldwide Multilingual Dictionary (publication date yet to be determined) federal (Read: White House) anti-DEI campaigns, measures and presidential edicts are intrinsically anti-catholic.
If your blood pressure just soared and/or you’re experiencing heart palpitations, take a very deep breath (Let the folks at Fire Rescue relax; you’ll survive a small dose of truth.), hold it for a count of four, exhale and reread the sentence.
Notice anything?
We were very deliberate.
We didn’t write anti-Catholic, even though anti-DEI violates just about every Roman and Anglican/Episcopalian Catholic Social Justice principle since Pope Leo XIII and 1891.
We wrote “anti-catholic.”
By their very nature, our Anglica/Episcopalian and Roman Catholic Churches (Yes! The Anglican/Episcopalian Churches are Catholic.) cannot be anti-DEI.
We’ll admit – before anyone can criticize – that the next sentence is grammatically incorrect; but it was fun to write. There ain’t nobody nowhere better at an intellectual approach to Catholicism (and a wide world of science and other studies) than Jesuits.
So, to explore catholic, we turned to Jesuitresource.org:
Catholic--The word comes from the Greek meaning "through the whole," that is "universal," "world-wide," "all inclusive." This is the meaning when the word starts with a lower-case c as in "We need to become more catholic in our attitudes." In talking about the "Catholic church" (Catholic with a capital C), members often mean "the pope and the bishops" or "the Vatican." But Vatican Council II, in its Constitution on the Church, used several other terms with inclusive meanings like "the People of God."
People in the West refer to the Catholic church, meaning the Roman Catholic church. But that western usage is not entirely accurate because there are other branches of the Catholic church that are not Roman, but eastern; and they have their own rites of worship, their own theology, and their own church law. This fact was dramatized at Vatican II every time Maximos IV Saigh (1878-1967), the Melkite patriarch of Antioch in Syria, spoke. He kept reminding the bishops about this Catholic diversity and -- refusing to use Latin, the official language of the Council -- always delivered his remarks in French.
So the word Catholic can be ambiguous. Some people, when they hear the word, think "thought control" or "one-issue myopia." Even if there is some justification for their attitude, they are probably operating with little more than a news-media knowledge of Catholicism, with no sense of the rich and diverse Catholic intellectual tradition, the artistic tradition accompanying it, the Catholic social justice tradition since 1891, or the witness of heroic lives lived in the past and especially in our own time.
“All inclusive.” Recognizing the “equality” of all men and women – equity. Marked by “diversity.” Sounds “catholic” and “Catholic” to us.
Just a little bit of history ‘cause we enjoy being historically accurate.
Black (African) slavery was not “introduced” into the continental United States in 1619.
In 1521, Spanish expeditions from Hispaniola (the island of today’s Haiti and Dominican Republic) sought to enslave Indigenous peoples in the Bahamas; finding none, they sailed north to the coast of present-day South Carolina and captured/enslaved sixty Indigenous people before returning to Hispaniola with glowing reports of the promises of the coastal area. In 1526, explorer Lucas Vazquez de Ayllon founded the short-lived settlement of San Miguel de Gualdape – including settler families and their African Black slaves - in today’s South Carolina. In part, the settlement failed because the slaves who could skedaddled.
(The following punctuation is deliberate.) christian nationalism is anti-catholic, anti-Catholic and anti-Christian.
christian nationalists would have us believe that the United States was founded as a Christian [capitalization deliberate] nation. That, whether admitted or not, depends on one’s (or a group’s) definition of “Christian.”
Yale University historian Greg Grandin’s new (2025) America America (There’s an accent mark over the second e., but we’re just not computer savvy.) challenges the Christianity of groups “discovering” the “New World.”
In his opening chapters, Grandin carefully explores
“… the Conquest. The astonishing brutality that Spain, in the first decades of the 1500s, visited on the people of the New Word… The slaughter, which inaugurated what scholars place among the greatest mortality events in human history, forced theologians to consider Catholic claims to universalism with new attention. Many of these clerics wound up defending Spanish rule, not so much dehumanizing America’s native people as refusing to admit they were human at all. Those who died by the Spanish lance, or by European diseases, were of a lesser kind than those people who lived in Europe – defective, not touched by the divine, but rising from the muck and mire. Their dispossession and enslavement were allowed….”
Bartolome de Las Casas (1484-1566) became the theological focal point of battles among Spanish Roman Catholic priests and scholars over the humanity and slavery of Indigenous peoples in the Caribbean and throughout the Spanish-controlled New World.
The son of a merchant, Las Casas was about nine years old when Columbus returned from his first voyage of “discovery” and, on Palm Sunday 1493, paraded seven Taino Indians, festooned with red and green parrots and masks intricately made with tiny shells, through the streets of Seville. While his father and uncle joined Columbus’s second expedition, acquiring land and wealth in Hispaniola, Las Casas began – but did not complete – studies for the priesthood. After receiving his tonsure and minor orders (initial steps toward priesthood), eighteen-year-old Las Casas sailed for the Indies in February 1502, arriving in Santo Domingo two months later.
Over the next four years and before returning to Spain for his ordination, he witnessed two Spanish massacres of Indigenous communities and was horrified by the disruption of native life caused by Spanish slave owners mining for gold. Ordained to the priesthood in 1507, Las Casas, who became an advocate in Rome for Columbus’s descendants, returned to Hispaniola – where he owned land and slaves – in 1509. In 1514, after years of witnessing Spanish abuse of Hispaniola’s natives, Las Casas renounced his ownership of Indigenous slaves and his family’s businesses. He later wrote that the blinders fell from his eyes and he saw that everything the Spaniards had done in the Indies - the brutal exploitation and decimation of the innocent populations, with no recognition of their humanity - was not only completely wrong but moral sin.
If the indigenous were not fully human, they could be enslaved and treated as beasts of burden, helping the Spaniards secure the wealth that had drawn them to the New World. Further, Spain would be justified in conquering – annihilating - the Indians militarily, allowing the Spaniards to spread the Gospel by force and, therefore, more effectively and efficiently. If the indigenous were fully human, however, even if they practiced human sacrifice and idolatry, Spanish warfare against them could not be justified.
A Dominican friar, Las Casas was consecrated bishop of Chiapas (Mexico) in March 1544 and quickly alienate many by refusing absolution to slave owners – even on their deathbeds - unless they set free all their slaves and returned properties to the Indigenous peoples. He also threatened that anyone who mistreated Indians within his jurisdiction would be excommunicated.
After riots against him broke out and attempts were made on his life, Las Casas was summoned to a Mexico City meeting of the bishops of New Spain in January 1946; he never returned to his diocese. Las Casas stood at the epicenter of controversy, arguing that preaching of the Gospel among the Indigenous people must be carried out peacefully and by example, as Christ had done; their enslavement and brutal treatment was morally censurable.
Las Casas spent the rest of his life campaigning against the exploitation – and extermination through disease and slavery – of the Indigenous peoples of Spain’s New World settlements.
In 1546, he expressed his judgment of the Spain’s (and Spaniards’) treatment of the Indigenous people of Spanish America. In his final published work, he sounded a desperate alarm against the consequences of Europeans’ pursuit of the wealth of the Americas:
“They have all been, in every case, extremely reluctant to give up the position and the wealth they have won for themselves during their lives of crime, and unwilling, also, to free the natives they have acquired and condemned to perpetual slavery. Now they have sheathed their swords and no longer murder the natives on sight, they have got into the habit of killing them slowly with hard labour and the imposition of other intolerable and totally unmerited vexations… [E]veryone, young and old alike, who journeys to the New World is either openly or in secret a fortune-hunter, albeit that some are worse than others, and all such fortunes are made at the expense of the local people. That they serve their own ends while pretending to serve those of the Crown is something that not only damages the Spanish interest but also brings dishonour on the name of God and on that of the King.
Las Casas completed the Prologo of his Historia de las Indias in 1562 with instructions that it not be published until four decades after his death. He noted:
“If God determines to destroy Spain, it may be seen that it is because of the destruction that we have wrought in the Indies and His just reason for it may be clearly evident.”
He died in Madrid in 1566 – 53 years before the introduction of the first Black slaves to England’s North American colonies.
If you believe that slaughter and slavery (are/were) in some way “christian,” that exclusion and persecution of anyone who doesn’t believe or pray or look as you do is not only right but part of the role of government, that’s your right.
But…
Please don’t call that belief Christian.
Anti-DEI - with its appeal to others’ fears and a yearning for the world of the 1950s (when everyone knew and stayed in “their place”) - may garner votes. But it is contrary to the Gospel and it sure ain’t Catholic.
Eight of the thirteen British colonies had official or “established” churches (“denominations” or “religions”) and colonists who dissented or sought to practice or proselytize a different version of Christianity (or, God forbid, a non-Christian belief) were either persecuted or driven out. In the British colonies, restrictions (or outright persecution) of Roman Catholics was ubiquitous, while Virginia was established specifically as a Roman Catholic colony.
Between 1680 and 1760 Anglicanism (Church of England/Episcopalian) and Congregationalism, an offshoot of the English Puritan movement, established themselves as the main organized denominations in most of the colonies. By the late eighteenth century, Protestant Christianity was giving rise to movements that included the Baptists, Methodists, Quakers, Unitarians and other denominations frequently referred to as “Dissenters,” who were often viewed as unfaithful troublemakers upsetting the social order.
The Borthwick Institute for Archives of the University of York reports:
“The Society of Friends (known as the Quakers) became involved in political and social movements during the eighteenth century. In particular, they were the first religious movement to condemn slavery and would not allow their members to own slaves. They were to play a prominent role in the Anti-Slavery Society.”
Mexican artist Felix Parra commemorates de las Casas as savior of Indigenous peoples.
While the chattel slavery of Black Africans and their descendants was essentially universal in colonial America, Grandin offers insight into a slavery too often overlooked by most Americans – that of America’s Indigenous people. As colonists cleared forests to make room for towns and farms and moved further and further west, the elimination of Native Americans – either by massacre or through slavery – became essential and expected.
Over the 160 years since the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment and the 162 years since Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation, the governing bodies of almost all of the nation’s major religions have issued apologies for their roles in slavery.
Nonetheless, just as deliberate efforts to eradicate and/or enslave the Indigenous populations are a part of the religious history of the New World, Diversity, Equity and Inclusion must be seen as part of their ministry and identity in the third decade of the twenty-first century.
Anti-DEI attitudes and behaviors are anti-Christian, anti-Catholic and anti-catholic.