When Catholic Nuns Defend A Tribal Mountain Sacred to Pagans, Something Is Wrong

As a mining company prepares to start extracting copper from a “sacred” mountain in Arizona, protesters gathered at the site called Oak Flat. Among them was a small group of elderly Catholic nuns who supported an Apache group’s effort to ban the mine.

The three-day event in July was a tragic case of what has gone wrong inside the progressive sector of the Church. The presence of the nuns indicated a loss of Catholic identity, a misguided social activism and the crafting of unreal narratives.

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Everything about this leftist festival reflected tired class struggle themes as the nuns tried in vain to energize their cause. This was supposed to be a classic case of indigenous peoples rising up against capitalist oppression and ecological spoliation of sacred lands.

Instead, it was an exercise in futility. No one seemed interested. The nuns called for a symbolic spectacle of defiance, but few people showed up for their revolution.

A Much-Needed Copper Mine

The Oak Flat area sits on a mountain that contains the largest copper deposit in North America and the third largest in the world. Activists like the nuns should be behind the mine since the eco-agenda calls for a lot of copper if the U.S. is to reach a net-zero carbon emission goal by 2050. Independent of these eco-goals, America needs this copper for economic development and independence.

However, these activists ignore this need and have opted to save this “sacred” site. They claim it is inhabited by immovable sacred mountain spirits called Ga’an that communicate with tribal members through rituals, superstition and magic.

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Resolution Copper, the mining company that will develop the site, has offered to preserve large areas of cultural significance, even at the cost of not mining half a billion tons of copper ore. However, liberal or tribal activists insist upon no mining near this site, which is not even on an Indian reservation.

A Sixties Protest Gone Awry

The protest seemed choreographed with a forced revolutionary script that no one wanted to follow. Few media outlets took notice. Outsiders had an exaggerated role in organizing the oppressed masses. Large numbers from the nearby Indian communities were notably absent. The effect was that of a sixties protest gone awry. No one seemed to be in the right place.

For example, the main prayer service was written by members of the Loreto Community of nuns in Kentucky (in English), not Apache elders. Land Justice Futures, a network of women religious communities involved in indigenous and black land use causes, played a major role in organizing the event.

The National Catholic Reporter noted that the core group of sixteen organizers had only three indigenous elders. The nuns managed to muster nine sisters from seven congregations, including the Sisters of Mercy, Sisters of Charity, Dominicans of Peace, Sisters of St. Joseph, Sisters of Providence and the Franciscan Sisters of Perpetual Adoration.

Lawn Chair Activists

The representative sisters in attendance were also elders, but of a different sort. Most progressive orders are suffering from a lack of vocations and young novices. Thus, the elderly nuns sat in lawn chairs during the prayer services and other activities. Many held tacky homemade signs with messages like “Nuns Support Apache Religious Freedom” or “Complicit No More.”

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Nuns who could not make it to Oak Flat joined the 100 online participants at the prayer service on the second day. During the protest, people came and went, with a peak of no more than 200 people (most in Western attire) joining the program at any one time.

The lack of enthusiasm for the cause was contagious. The low attendance reflected the opinion of most local Indian people who welcome the copper mine for the improvements and employment opportunities it will bring to the area. Most locals do not worship Indian mountain spirits and have embraced Christianity.

The elderly lawn chair nuns defending pantheistic spirits was a fitting yet almost surreal image of the crisis of faith in progressive institutions. The lonely scene represented a loss of Catholic identity that attracts no one. Such efforts are sterile, uninspiring and doomed to fail.

Repudiation of Missionary Effort

However, the most tragic aspect of the nuns’ protest was their repudiation of the Catholic efforts to evangelize the indigenous populations everywhere and at all times. Outside the Church, the pagan peoples were steeped in superstitions, sin, violence and harmful customs. This included the European peoples who abandoned their worship of ancestral spirits and gods and embraced Christianity after the fall of the Roman Empire.

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The Gospel teachings set these peoples free. Nevertheless, at Oak Flat, the nuns faulted the Church and especially the Doctrine of Discovery (a legal expression coined by the Supreme Court in 1823), conflating it with the Church’s evangelization of the Americas and her encouragement of colonization as a means to Christianize society.

It was especially painful to watch them criticize the policy that led to the superhuman efforts of brave missionaries who brought Christ to the Indian peoples. The nuns failed to acknowledge that the Apache tribe was known as the “Iroquois of the West” and were particularly brutal in attacking peaceful neighboring tribes, raiding missions and martyring missionaries.

A Wrong Missiology

The nuns’ mentality reflects more than just a rejection of these efforts. It questions the Great Commission to “go and teach all nations” (Matt. 28:19). Some progressive currents teach a modern missiology that declares there is no need to baptize and evangelize pagan indigenous peoples, for they already possess “spiritual values.” Such pseudo-missionaries turn their wrath against the Christian West and its civilizing influence upon the world.

The activist nuns at Oak Flat show what happens when progressive ideas dominate an institution. By embracing the defense of pantheistic spirits, anything can be affirmed in dramatic new narratives that attack the Church’s missionary efforts and teaching. These same narratives easily lead to exhausted class struggle themes that call for revolution. Catholic missionaries used to chop down sacred oaks; today’s religious defend them.

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Such subversive calls will never “renew the face of the earth” (Ps. 103:30). The elderly nuns at Oak Flat are the dramatic expression of a tragic trajectory to oblivion.

Originally published in TFP.org.

Photo Credit: © SinaguaWiki, CC BY-SA 4.0

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