Holy Week 2,000 Years Later… Followers Of Christ Still Persecuted, Along With Donald Trump
By DEXTER DUGGAN
A video of people running to escape down a springtime village street, some wearing robes and carrying crosses about four or five feet long.
The accompanying April 4 article in the major Madrid daily El Pais said a Holy Week reenactment of Jesus and Simon of Cyrene, who helped the Lord carry His cross, was under siege. The person playing Jesus and other participants were on the run from the enforcers of the far-left Sandinista government of Nicaragua.
The article was headlined that Sandinista dictator “Daniel Ortega’s Police Hunt Nazarenes on the Streets of Nicaragua.” It said that religious observances were to be confined to churches and their immediate surroundings, even though “[t]he Holy Week processions are the most important of the Catholics. In addition to being very crowded, they are popular traditions.”
The last paragraph of the story about suppressing the Catholic Church said that Nicaraguan leftist dictators “unilaterally suspended diplomatic relations with the Holy See in mid-March, after Pope Francis described the regime as a ‘Hitlerian dictatorship.’
“In 2022 and so far this year, the government expelled from the country the apostolic nuncio, Waldemar Stanislaw Sommertag; cancelled Church agencies and media; and besieged Catholic churches, while 21 religious have been banished, imprisoned, exiled and declared ‘traitors to the homeland’,” El Pais’ article said.
The Sandinistas have been into and out of control of the Nicaraguan government for decades. When they lost, they didn’t shrug their shoulders and say they’d had their chance and now they’d give it a rest. Instead, they got themselves back into power and, as left-wing governments like to do, persecuted Catholics, who serve a different Master.
Early in the twentieth century, to the northwest of Nicaragua, Mexico had a vicious anti-religious government that shut churches and left Catholics hanged from the telegraph poles along railroad tracks. The government-staged execution of 14-year-old Jose Sanchez del Rio, who refused to renounce his faith, gave the Church one of its youngest canonized saints.
Catholics rose up to form the determined Cristero army to fight the Godless Mexican government into backing off. This was commemorated in the 2012 movie For Greater Glory: The True Story of Cristiada.
However, once the twentieth-century’s fearsome National Socialist and Communist governments of Europe went into the trash heap of history, Catholics in the United States and other parts of the Western world took too much for granted.
An article posted January 17 at the Christianity Today website was headlined, “The 50 Countries Where It’s Hardest to Follow Jesus in 2023.”
It began, “More than 5,600 Christians were killed for their faith last year. More than 2,100 churches were attacked or closed. More than 124,000 Christians were forcibly displaced from their homes because of their faith, and almost 15,000 became refugees.”
The article added, “Overall, and same as last year, 360 million Christians live in nations with high levels of persecution or discrimination. That’s one in seven Christians worldwide, including one in five believers in Africa, two in five in Asia, and one in 15 in Latin America.”
Left-wing governments aggressively believe they deserve to be in power and stay in control, and will break any law and violate any standard to get there.
We’re being instructed in that lesson now as Democrat Joe Biden’s Marxist-cuddling administration manipulates elections and also sweeps millions upon millions of illegal immigrants into the U.S. to help facilitate permanent takeover.
The mentally troubled, heavily armed transgender person who reportedly fired 152 shots while murdering six people, including three children, at a Nashville Christian primary school on March 27 is only a taste of what could be unleashed.
With these deaths still fresh, no less than Joe Biden’s press secretary, Karine Jean-Pierre, claimed that it’s transgender people who are threatened. Fox News reported that KJP spoke up for them and cited Biden as a courageous leader for their cause.
Jean-Pierre said that “it is shameful, it is disturbing, and our hearts go out to the those — the trans community as they are under attack right now, but this is a president who has said many times before he has their backs. He will continue to have their backs and he will continue to fight for them, and his record shows that.”
Reporting on critical reactions to her remarks, the Fox News story included radio host Jesse Kelly saying: “Half the pastors in America will give a ‘turn the other cheek’ sermon this Sunday and say things like ‘We don’t get political. We just love everyone.’ Meanwhile, the wolves are coming for the flock.”
The press secretary for Arizona’s far-left, specially selected Democrat governor, Katie Hobbs, apparently quickly seconded the March 27 gun violence later that same day by tweeting a GIF of a movie-character woman pointing two handguns. The press secretary captioned the image, “Us when we see transphobes.”
Two days later, Hobbs’ office got around to issuing a news release that mildly said Hobbs “has received and accepted the resignation of the Press Secretary.” No strong language by Hobbs against her aide’s incitement, or even a statement that the aide was fired. She just somehow had handed in her resignation.
Did the radically pro-abortion Hobbs fear potential backlash by her own radical base if she had firmly rejected such incitement?
After all, last summer thousands of pro-abortionists besieged the Arizona State Capitol, pounding on exterior glass doors at night while the state Senate was in session, but being driven off when state troopers fired tear gas into the exterior plaza from the second floor.
The abortion fans were protesting the U.S. Supreme Court having reversed the imaginary constitutional “right” to permissive abortion with its 2022 Dobbs opinion.
Some Arizona troopers in riot gear stood inside the lobby, prepared to act if the rioters broke in.
However, dominant media didn’t condemn this as a dangerous “insurrection.” Nor did they seem much troubled by incidents such as a leftist planning the assassination of pro-life Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh at his home, or pro-life centers for pregnant mothers being firebombed or otherwise vandalized.
If such media truly sought to highlight dangers to civil society, their own side of politics provided plenty of examples to publicize. But shining a light in that direction would be disloyal to the total social “transformation” proclaimed beginning with left-wing Barack Obama.
Donald Trump has told Americans repeatedly that he’s hardly alone on the left’s list of targets. “They’re not coming after me; they’re coming after you,” and he’s just in the way, he says.
Showman Trump couldn’t have planned the timing better, but he wasn’t the one who chose Holy Week to be arraigned by Manhattan Democrat District Attorney Alvin Bragg, an unscrupulous extremist who would smash any standard, and did, in his frenzied — and campaign-promised — persecution of the 45th president and billionaire champion of ordinary voters.
Trump isn’t just the president immediately before vote-twisting Democrat Biden; Trump also currently is the leading Republican in the opinion polls to take on Biden, or whomever else the Democrats end up with, to run in 2024. So Bragg is trying to undercut the GOP in favor of his own radical political party.
With the theme of unjust persecution during Holy Week, cartoonist Todd Schowalter drew Jesus telling Trump, “Trust me! Being unjustly crucified can lead to a much bigger following!” Which indeed seemed to be the case for people rallying to what they viewed as the unjustly persecuted Trump.
On April 5 the Washington Examiner’s chief political correspondent, Byron York, posted that anti-Trump forces had got their hopes up that Bragg’s indictment would mean big trouble for Trump, then were disappointed at how weak the case was.
York wrote that “critics noted that the expected main charge, falsification of business records, is a misdemeanor with a long-passed two-year statute of limitations. Democratic prosecutor Alvin Bragg, it was said, would try to inflate that misdemeanor into a felony by alleging that Trump falsified business records to cover up another crime.
“But nobody could quite figure out what that other crime would be,” York continued. “Would it be a federal campaign finance violation? If so, how could Bragg, a local prosecutor, prosecute a federal offense? Would it be a violation of New York state election law? If so, how could Bragg apply that to a presidential election? It all seemed very problematic.”
Citing disappointed Trump-haters, York included The Washington Post’s Ruth Marcus, who “hopes prosecutors win, even though the case is weak, ‘because a failure to secure a conviction will only inflame Trump and his supporters in their claims that the criminal justice system is being weaponized against them.’
“Still,” York added, “Marcus conceded the New York case is deeply flawed. ‘The indictment unsealed on Tuesday [April 4] is disturbingly unilluminating,’ she wrote, ‘and the theory on which it rests is debatable at best, unnervingly flimsy at worst’.”
U.S. Sen. Marco Rubio (R., Fla.) made a video saying, in part, “And what really is damaging is that the charges here are absurd. You’re talking about a misdemeanor, if proven, a misdemeanor that had an expired statute of limitation.
“So this prosecutor has decided to link it to a federal charge,” Rubio said, “an election-law charge, that the federal government decided not to pursue. And all of it built on the testimony of [Michael Cohen] a convicted liar!”
David Harsanyi, a senior editor at The Federalist website, mocked claims that justice is being done against Republican Trump. Under the April 4 headline “No One Is Above the Law? Give Me A Break,” Harsanyi cited Democrats and their allies who fly free of culpability.
“Plenty of people are ‘above the law’.” Harsanyi wrote. “James Clapper, who lied under oath to Congress about spying on the American people, is above the law. John Brennan, who lied about a domestic spying operation on Senate staffers, is above the law. Unlike Trump advisor Peter Navarro, Obama’s Attorney General Eric Holder was never going to be handcuffed and thrown in prison for ignoring a congressional subpoena. He is above the law.
“Trump’s 2016 opponent, Hillary Clinton, is also above the law,” Harsanyi continued. “The then-Secretary of State set up a private server in her home to circumvent transparency surrounding her slush-fund foundation. She sent 110 emails containing marked classified information, and 36 of those emails contained secret information.
“Eight of the email chains contained ‘top secret’ information. Every one of those instances was a potential felony punishable with up to 10 years in prison,” he wrote, but then-FBI Director James Comey “concocted a new standard to protect Clinton because she is above the law. When Hillary’s husband, also above the law, perjured himself under oath, Democrats argued that puritanical conservatives were only pursuing Bill because of some trumped-up charge over ‘sex’.”
They Want Power
Meanwhile, back to Arizona and the issue of being above the law, Katie Hobbs was due in Maricopa County Superior Court on April 6, the day this hardcopy issue of The Wanderer went to press, because of her refusing to follow the death warrant issued by the Arizona Supreme Court for the April 6 scheduled execution of a first-degree murderer who confessed in 2004.
Hobbs, who promotes unlimited abortion of defenseless infants, claimed that the state needs to study the death-penalty process for adults convicted of serious crimes, and in the meantime would have no executions.
Even though the state high court actually then ruled that Hobbs wasn’t required to have the execution, the murder victim’s family said the delay was an injustice against them.
The Associated Press reported on April 1 that Superior Court Judge Frank Moskowitz said that “Hobbs and Ryan Thornell, the state’s prison director, must show up to explain why the court shouldn’t issue an order against them on the grounds they are violating the constitutional rights of victims entitled to prompt justice.”
Also, Hobbs continued to issue vetoes against bills from the Republican-majority legislature, vetoing 29 of them by April 5 during the legislative session that began in January.
Morning radio talk host James T. Harris (KFYI Phoenix, 550 AM) denounced Hobbs’ “insane veto spree,” discussing the topic with GOP State Rep. Leo Biasiucci on April 4.
After Biasiucci said he doesn’t think Hobbs knows what she’s doing, Harris pressed that if this is done on purpose, what’s her objective? Biasiucci recalled Hobbs’ early proclaimed goal of flipping the state legislature to Democrat majorities, so “she’s trying to make things as bad as possible.”
Harris, likening Hobbs to Joe Biden, said that “Democrats don’t give a hot damn about what you think. They want power.”
Howard Fischer reported for Capitol Media Services on April 3 that “[t]he Democratic governor rejected HB2427, a proposal by Rep. Matt Gress, R-Phoenix, that would have increased the maximum possible penalty for aggravated assault in a domestic-violence situation if the assailant knew or had reason to know the victim was pregnant….
“‘With pregnancy comes risk,’ Gress said. ‘And many women report it’s actually when they become pregnant that abuse starts or becomes intensified’….
“The legislation also drew opposition from Planned Parenthood,” the story said. “There was concern the bill could be seen as a way to try to grant separate legal status to an unborn child, which could undermine abortion rights. Heightening the group’s concern is that this isn’t Gress’ only such effort. He is sponsoring several measures that could have the same impact.”
