The Catholic Church and Vodou

The Catholic Church depraved (and still distorts) Vodou practices in often the same way that it has twisted other indigenous apparitional practices, by demonizing them as vicious and as servants of the devil. The historic come to between the perform and the troops machine in compoundism was tight the military functioned as an encircle of the church and the church as an arm of the military except in individual cases where, on all side, on that point were people of scruples and compassion who attempted to resist. The majority didnt resist, however, and both colonial and religious officers worked hard to regularise the publics look at on Vodou as a way to isolate Haiti and the religion, and many an(prenominal) of those beliefs they generated live on today. The Haitian Catholic Church accepts Vodou, and has so for over thirty years, and estimates argon that between 50 per centum to 95 percent of Haitians both practice or interact with Vodou. Nonetheless today, if y ou are a non-Haitian and have heard of Vodou, you in all probability think of all the supposedly negative things so unremarkably associated with the religion: witchcraft, hexes, sacrifices, and the like. The reason for these thoughts, nearly of which are in particular not true, lies mostly with the Catholic Church and U.S. Military.\nFrom the beginning of compound Haiti, Catholicism was the Islands formalised religion. It didnt matter that there were around half a million enslaved Africans working and brisk in the French dependance with the majority practicing Vodou, it was still banned. The church viewed the spreading of Catholicism to Haitian slaves as equivalent with acculturation and as Gods work, so they maligned Vodou as much as possible to gauge to gain little Frenchman.What they didnt realize was that the more they suppress Vodou, the more steam Vodou picked up, with priests load-bearing(a) rebellions until eventually the Haitians came together and overthrew the Fr ench, congruous the first free caustic nation in the occidental H...