Before becoming a Roman Catholic, I was in a conventional, Mainline Protestant denomination. Thirty or so years ago, I read about SWAPO, which stood for the SouthWest Africa People’s Organization. They were a Communist group whose armed forces were directed to destabilize Southwest Africa. Among their marching orders was a directive to kill as many Christian missionaries as possible. That way, there would be no hospitals, schools, or other institutions to which anyone could turn for help.
As I got involved in my local church, I found that our congregation was required to send money to our denomination’s headquarters. There, it was pooled with similar monies from thousands of other individual churches. Our headquarters, in turn, made frequent donations to the World Council of Churches. The WCC was proud, I discovered, of their donations to SWAPO.
Frequently, our Sunday services would include talks by missionaries, some of whom were working in Southwest Africa. We were always encouraged to support those missionaries.
We all knew, if only subconsciously, that part of the money we donated to our local church each week went to the church headquarters. We did not know that they sent part of it to the World Council of Churches. None of us knew that they, in turn, were proud to pass on some of that money to SWAPO. They used part of that money to buy bullets with which to shoot missionaries.
About the time I understood this, I realized Who had said “A house divided cannot stand.”, and began the journey to Roman Catholicism.
One gift that the Roman Catholic Church bestows is that I no longer have to worry about my donations being used to destroy my neighbors.
