Posted on 08/19/2025 1:18:04 PM PDT by ebb tide
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.
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.
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 United States 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.
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.
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 ’60s 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 16 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.
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.”
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.
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.
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” (Matthew 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.
Such subversive calls will never “renew the face of the earth” (Psalm 104:30). The elderly nuns at Oak Flat are the dramatic expression of a tragic trajectory toward oblivion.
Ping
They pray to figurines (aka graven images) for all manner of human concerns so this doesn’t surprise me at all.
I think he got it right, a failed “60’s protest gone awry.” A handful of nuns on lawn chairs. Supporting the Apaches who were a band of marauders throughout the southwest for many years. Protecting “sacred lands,” maybe not knowing that to indigenous tribes the whole world is “sacred” but that doesn’t stop them from using it as they see fit.
Photo....
Needs more explanation unless the test above means this is the pagan symbolism they were defending.
To a casual observer it looks like the group was chanting “Let us not be up that unmentionable sort of creek without a paddle.”
When I moved to spokane, the first person I met was a man in our senior complex who was 1/4 Indian. Very helpful to me, moved furniture, put an area rug down, etc.
We got to be friends, and he drove me to Kalispel, Montana, where his relatives owned a beautiful house. Drove me around the reservation there, told me how poor the Indians were who lived there. Interesting. I basically learned to respect the Indians, Christian or not. They worshipped the same God in a different way.
Man eventually married a wealthy woman and they moved to a reservation, where he died. As for the nuns, no opinion, but I can understand their point of view.
“Something is wrong”
A lot of things have been wrong for decades and it’s getting worse, as in accelerating.
So who gets to decide what is or isn’t sacred? If there is evidence that this area has been considered sacred for centuries, does that not have some validity, or can areas only be considered sacred if it is the right religion or belief? In this case, Christianity.
Spoken like a true pagan.
LOL...nice comeback. I can see that wit is a true strength of yours.
I just prefer not to be a hypocrite. Would you be ok with tearing down a Hindu temple for instance? Because that could be described as a pagan religion.
So if the tearing down of what a group considers to be a sacred site is acceptable in one instance, what's next, and where does it stop? I would figure that people on FreeRepublic could comprehend that. I guess some can't or don't.
If the spirits are immovable, they'll still be there after the copper is extracted, right? Frankly, I don't see the problem here.
If you don't know the answer to that, you could very well be a pagan.
You would probably have no problem with the Aztecs and their human sacrifices to their pagan gods because their "religion" could very well be the "right religion".
Oak flat has THE largest coper deposits in World. Not third largest, but largest.
For long time the Resolution copper CO has been trying to mine it.
Trump 45 gave them all the permits, but Biden rescind them on his 6th day in office.
Resolution Coper has been promising all kind of goodies, so even most enviros are supporting the mine!
But few do not, just because they do oppose any mining!
Because they lost all they attempts, they finally pulled the ultimate trump card - Sacred Indian ground!
It was never sacred and the closest reservation is like 50 miles away. But, they got few Indians to sign up and one of the largest mining project in our lifetime is still in standstill.
Hopefully, Trump 47 will be more successful than the 45th.
Yes, I think it's a fair question to ask. Everybody thinks their religion is the right one. This could be taken as everyone is both equally right and equally wrong.
is it supporting a religion, or supporting one's right to a religion? That's the question that should really be answered.
As for, "1. I am the Lord thy God. Thou shall not have strange gods before Me." A number of religions (Judaism, Sikhism, Islam, Vaishnavism /Hindu) all proclaim one God. So which path is the right one? Again, depending on what side of the fence (religion) one sits on, it's theirs and all the others are wrong.
This is the second time you've asked the same question. Now, I'm convinced you're a pagan.
Arizona is the most weird state in the union. This is where life science professors sent astrophysicists dead squirrels in the mail to protest the siting of the LUCIFER telescope by Jesuits.
Not a pagan. Just not a blind follower of any religion. I figure God has more important things to do besides listening to people whining.
Yet you don’t know which “god” is real.
Gotcha!
Neither do pagans.
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