RANTS THINGS THAT PISS ME OFF HOW MANY CHURCHES

My next biggest Rant will be one that is not going to be very popular with a lot of my readers. However I have been holding it inside for years and I feel I must just let it blossom before I explode.I am going to delve into a subject that is taboo in some circles, starts most of our wars and keeps society fragmented into different groups. You guessed it Religion. I consider myself a somewhat spiritual person and I cling to the belief that our spirit will reside somewhere, after death, although I am unsure of where this might be or what form it might take. However this rant is not about beliefs, either mine, yours or someone else’s.

My problem is simple and starts with the question. How many Catholic Churches are needed in the Andes Mountains of Peru (and really in the mountains throughout Latin America)? I will speak specifically to Peru, because I have some limited experience working and travelling throughout Peru and especially into the mountains over the past 40 years. However the same applies to Columbia, Ecuador, Bolivia, Chile, all of Central America and anywhere else in the Andes of South America.

The life in the Peruvian Andes is harsh to say the least and many of the people eke out a subsistence living with very few modern conveniences to help them. Most have food for one meal a day, have very little access to medicines or dentistry, use coca leaves to deaden the aches and pain and to stave off hunger. Yet over the years, every little tiny village in the Andes, and I have passed by hundreds, has a disproportionately sized Catholic Church to the size of the community. Not one church for every 2,3,or4 villages but one for each and every village, no matter how small.

In a place like Pampacolca (birthplace of Bubbaloo’s father) they have 3 Catholic Churches for a community of about 2500 people. In Peru alone, this equates to hundreds and hundreds of churches, and along with that, hundreds and hundreds of priests and their helpers tramping around. My point is that all of this needed to be paid for at the outset and supported financially on an ongoing basis, all of this by people who can barely afford to scratch out a living from the soil. It kills me, especially after visiting the Vatican a few years ago and seeing the opulent display of wealth in the form of gold, art and buildings. Part of it built from funds gathered up in regions such as the Peruvian Andes, where the greatest percentage can ill afford to have the burden of the cost of religion loaded onto their backs.

I once passed by a very small community (maybe 30 houses?) that did not yet have any modern infrastructure in place but they did have a monster church in the process of being built. My heart cried out. I personally feel that religion can be passed on without an unnecessary burden on the poor in regions like the Andes. Maybe I am wrong and missing something, “what say you?”.

This is just an example of a church in the Andes. Adjacent to and just to the left of it were two large houses owned by the family of my wife’s mother. Sometime in the past an uncle gave both of these houses to the church to secure his place in heaven. I hope it worked!