Up Next: The Apostate 2000

This is also known as  Michael Angel, this one is set in the New World, in Borigan AKA Puerto Rico.  Starring Dennis Hopper and Luis Garou and Richard Grieco as Father Michael Killan--who is agnostic. Father Killan's brother, along with another victim, has been killed in a particularly grizzly way--the killer used the victims blood to paint walls and the body.  Father Killan examines the murder scene, and soon gets drawn into the hunt for a serial killer and the mystery of the deadly artist solved. This is another one that I haven't seen, so again we'll see.

Trailer provided by Video Detective

Cathedral In Cuzco Peru

Creepy Catholic Fact 5:  Catholic violence and religious intolerance was not confined to Europe and the Near East, it also made it's way to Africa, flooded the New World and even made it's way to India and as far east as Cambodia and Vietnam.  

Catholic church in Cambodia

In the Portuguese established province of India--Goa, Indian converts to Catholicism were not persecuted by Hindus (unlike sometimes today), but the Church didn't leave them alone.  Despite that converts there, unlike forced converts from Judaism and Islam in Spain, were actually enthusiastic about their new found faith; but that didn't stop the church from establishing an Inquisition in 1580 to root out any converts that were perceived to practice parts of their old religion, despite that the vast majority of them had converted from Hinduism, a religion that the Church had no understanding of at the time. In other words, how would any inquisitor know a Hindu practice when he saw one?  So when in doubt make stuff up!  A common side effect of such "investigations" was that Christian Indians would have their property seized by the church and never returned.  So there was reason to make up stuff.

Se Cathedral, Goa India

Something similar happened in the Caribbean.  The invading Spanish arrived with a Papal indict that said the conquistadors COULD ONLY seize protery and person from the native if the natives were found to be cannibals.  So, of course, there were "cannibals" everywhere, even though most of the stories of Caribbean cannibalism have proven to be nothing by fabrications, and it was far from wide spread, if it ever existed there to begin with.  Under the papal edict, the Spaniards, when they found "cannibals" were allowed to seize whole islands (and some like Hispaniola were huge) and enslave it's native population.  So pervase and perverse were these notions taken back home in Spain, where everyone believed them, that it gave rise to the very word "cannibal."  The name that the Spaniards had for peoples in the lower "Caribbean" was Canibales, from the Native word "Carib" (they were also called "Caribales")--hence "Cannibals" become synomose with human injects humans everywhere in the world.  [Carib, obviously gave it's name to the "Caribbean"]

Aerial view of Cathedral of St. John The Baptist Puerto Rico

Catholic countries in Europe that conquered Africa lands, like those in the New World, used much of the same reasoning to justify their invasion and enslavement of the local populace (although Protestant countries from Europe were just as bad!).  One of the unintended consequences of the importation of a monotheistic religion with a  hierarchy (unlike in Protestant sects) is that local converts became much more likely to turn on unconverted locals, even friends and relatives.  In many locations, the Catholic superstitions became a justification and extension of local superstition---the two fused, and became dangerous (similar things have happened in Haiti which used to "belong" to the French, after the earthquake there, witch hunts became common, with the belief that practitioners of Voodoo had caused the quake--a lot of innocent people have either been beheaded or hacked up with machetes since).  All religions have a dark side, and all religions have those practitioners that are willing to kill for it or in the name of it--very few actually have whole books of rules on how to do that though.

Catholic church in Madagascar