“The real scandal is not that money can be created out of nothing, but that the debts of conquest can be endlessly repackaged as development, forgiveness, or dialogue. The machine keeps running, and we call it history.”
David Graeber “Debt: The First 5000 Years“
The Catholic Church, The Catholic Church, once the spiritual arm of colonial conquest (think of it as the original multinational), is now stuck in a PR nightmare—issuing statements about justice while the business of domination has simply upgraded to version 2.0. Neocolonialism: the same extraction, but with more contracts and fewer muskets.
Picture this: history isn’t a chain of events but a long series of cover-ups, swapping violence for debt, guilt for social programs, and every once in a while, an apology.
Meanwhile, in Burkina Faso, a president materializes from the dialectic of history, bishops mumble about social good (just loud enough to not be heard in Rome), and AI—our shiny new omniscient oracle—churns out dialogues between these players.
Ironically, these made-up conversations make more sense than the official ones.
Ibrahim Traoré:: “They say the market creates value from nothing, but it seems to me it only transforms the violence of the past into the interest payments of the present. Is this what they call progress?”
Pope Leo VIII: “Once, we believed that gold was the foundation of all things. Now we see that belief itself is the true currency. But belief enforced at gunpoint is indistinguishable from fear. The miracle of compound interest is that it multiplies both.”
Ibrahim Traoré:: “They say the world is ending, but for us, the world ended when the first contract was signed in a language our ancestors could not read.”
Pope Leo VIII: “Perhaps the end of times is not a cataclysm, but the slow realization that the future has already been mortgaged. The apocalypse is simply the moment when the bill comes due.”
Ibrahim Traoré:
Let us speak plainly. The mines are still open. The forests still fall. The contracts, written in languages our ancestors could not read, remain binding. This is not just the story of colonialism-it is the ongoing logic of extraction, the transformation of land, life, and labor into profit for others. And who sanctified this process? Who gave it moral cover, if not the Church?
Pope Leo VIII:
It would be dishonest to deny the Church’s role. For centuries, we blessed the banners of conquistadors, anointed the heads of kings who saw the world as a warehouse of souls and silver. We justified conquest as salvation, extraction as providence. The cross and the sword traveled together, and the ledgers of sin were balanced against the ledgers of gold1.
Ibrahim Traoré:
You speak of ledgers. But what of the people who became entries in those books? The Church’s blessing turned violence into virtue, dispossession into divine order. Even now, the logic persists: charity is offered in place of restitution, and the wounds of extraction are treated with sermons on patience.
Pope Leo VIII:
Repentance without restitution is just another form of public relations. The Church must do more than apologize-it must refuse to bless the machinery of extraction, even when it is painted with the language of aid. If we are to speak of forgiveness, let it be as the beginning of dismantling, not the end of accountability1.
Ibrahim Traoré:
But the machinery is relentless. It does not pause for prayers or confessions. It hums with the logic of profit, indifferent to the suffering it leaves in its wake. The world is told to move on, but the ground beneath our feet still trembles. How can the Church claim innocence when it helped design the very system that now devours us?
Pope Leo VIII:
The Church’s complicity in colonialism is written into the very architecture of our institutions. We did not merely stand by; we provided the rituals, the justifications, the paperwork. Extractivism was not just an economic project-it was a moral one, and we were its priests1. To atone is not to ask forgiveness, but to dismantle the altar upon which the world’s wealth was sacrificed.
Ibrahim Traoré:
Then let us begin with truth. Extraction is not just a matter of minerals and markets-it is the ongoing theft of memory, dignity, and possibility. If the Church is serious about repentance, it must join us in refusing the terms of the old contracts, in breaking the machinery, in returning what was taken.
Pope Leo VIII:
To refuse extraction is to refuse the logic that made the Church rich and powerful. It is to risk everything for the chance to begin again. But perhaps true faith is nothing less.