YOUR ANCESTORS SAW THIS MASK AND REJOICED.
YOU SEE IT AND TREMBLE.

YOUR ANCESTORS SAW THIS MASK AND REJOICED.
YOU SEE IT AND TREMBLE.

They saw feast, beauty, celebration, community and joy.

You see danger, evil, demons and death.

What happened to you?

Did your ancestors suddenly become foolish?

Did the mask become evil?

Or were you taught to fear what your ancestors once celebrated?

Perhaps the deepest victory of cultural destruction is not carting away the artworks

It is making you despise what once made you whole.

When Pope John Paul II and Pope Francis spoke about the cultural destruction and mistakes that accompanied missionary activity, this is precisely the kind of wound they were calling us to acknowledge and heal.

The Church does not have to defend every mistake of the past. Where the Gospel became entangled with cultural destruction, those errors must be confronted and corrected.

That is not a rejection of or fighting Christianity.

It is taking seriously the call of the Church to purify what went wrong.

And that is what I am doing here.

I am not asking you to worship the past.
I am asking you to stop fearing it.

The question is no longer:

“Why were my ancestors doing this?”

Ask instead:

“WHO TAUGHT ME TO BE AFRAID OF IT?”

Because conditioning can be unlearned.

What was destroyed in you can be healed.
What was demonised can be understood again.
What was forgotten can be remembered.