GUAM
Pacific Daily News
Steven Castro McManus September 24, 2016
The long and arduous “mumon linahyan” that has engulfed Guam’s community for a number of years is echoing schisms of another era in history – 1517 to be exact and seems to be resulting in the same kind of reformation that followed. Pope Leo X’s corruption that exploited the faithful seem to have been reborn today in the person of one Archbishop Anthony Apuron. Unfortunately, the people of Guam have been suffering at the hands of this kind of colonial screw balling since Magellan “discovered” Guam in March 1521 and perhaps the passage of Bill 326 is the beginning of a new era.
Leo’s pattern of abuse served only to alienate indigenous peoples and drive them into the arms of another genus of Christianity. The radical ideas of Martin Luther was not just spiritual; it was nationalist in nature. German sentiment against the powerful Italian Medici was fertile soil for a reformation that would give them their own Christianity – thus the Lutheran Church was born. The Scots would get their Presbyterian Church, the English, their Anglican Church and the American colonists their Methodist and Baptist churches. And in each case, better systems of governments ensued.
Is it a coincidence that Guam’s religious rumblings are occurring simultaneously with the islands growing movement toward decolonization? Massachusetts outcast and Rhode Island founder Roger Williams probably wouldn’t think so. His Christian zeal for a better church in 1636 also fashioned a more democratic state that would inform the ideals of the U.S. Constitution more than a hundred years later.
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