The Bullet Rosary

In the confirmation class I taught last year, we read Letter from a Birmingham Jail, the MLK treatise that white people tend to trample on in their rush to talk about the content of their character. King’s target isn’t the hooded Klansman tossing a bomb into a church or the vile police commissioner siccing dogs on children as they march for freedom on Easter Sunday. It’s the moderate clergy who hide behind their affinity for order over love. I wonder what he would have made of the pastor of Lumberton, Tex.’s Infant Jesus Catholic Church when Father Andrew R. Moore posted the picture of a rosary made partially of bullets on Facebook. I wonder what Dr. King would have thought about the idea of praying for God to deliver us from evil while fondling an object whose only purpose is to kill? For that matter, I wonder what Jesus would have thought of saying the words He taught us, using a bullet as a talisman. I wonder what the Holy Mother would have thought about someone describing a rosary as a “weapon,” one to be wielded “against the world and the flesh” as well as Satan.

Christianity has become cheap these days. Too many people equate it with temporal power, the power to bend other men to your will, whether it’s to tell them who they can sleep with, who they can love or who they can vote for. Too many people equate it with money, with success and they equate their monetary success with rightousness. This turns Christianity into political party. It’s turns Christianity not into quest for truth and a path to make this a better world, but into a quest for dominance.

There can be nothing clearer than the Bullet Rosary. We are supposed to ask God to help us forgive those who have done us wrong, to supplicate ourselves at His feet and the feet of those we have offended. A bullet isn’t an instrument of supplication. Christianity isn’t about power, it’s about humility. This isn’t a lesson in which the Catholic Church as immersed itself over the millenia but there is a reason Jesus didn’t wallow in politics. It wasn’t because politics was dirty or too secular. It’s because politics is coercive. Government is inherently limiting of free will. Jesus showed us the path, but he didn’t shove us down it. Without free will there is no virtue and without virtue there is no sin.

The Bullet Rosary isn’t about free will, it’s not about humbling yourself so you may serve others. It’s about strengthening yourself so that you my dominate them. It’s perfectly symbolic of the white supremacy I hope is making its final stand in the United States. It’s a symbol of God’s love, but remember, at the heart of it is a bullet with your name on it if you don’t do what we tell you.

The top post on Father Moore’s Facebook page is a sign in front of his church asking, “Lord please heal our nation.” Immediately under that is a schedule. Penance is 4 p.m. Saturday.