VATICAN CITY — A week intended to promote international Christian unity took a hard Left turn into American politics when a group of Minnesota clergy with ties to Black Lives Matter called on the gathering to “confront oppression,” invoking the January 6 Capitol riot and the death of George Floyd.
The annual Week of Prayer for Christian Unity, a decades-old tradition, kicked off January 18 with a prayer from Pope Francis that God “faithfully and patiently guides His people towards [uniting] in full communion.” The event is led by the Vatican but coordinated with Christian denominations throughout the world, including a contingent from Minnesota this year.
“The Week of Prayer is the perfect time for Christians to recognize that the divisions between our churches and confessions cannot be separated from the divisions within the wider human family,” stated an introductory document prepared in part by members of the Minnesota Council of Churches who described themselves as “leaders, activists and/or pastors.” The document called on attendees to “confront oppression and division amongst humanity.”
The Minnesota group, which included former Minneapolis NAACP President Leslie Redmond, Black Lives Matter Minneapolis-linked pastor DeWayne Davis, and activist Jia Starr Brown, said sessions spent crafting the document “moved through the attack on the United States Capitol, the trial of former officer Derek Chauvin and the anniversary of the murder of George Floyd.”
“When Covid-19 shut down the world in March 2020,” they wrote, “the murder of a young African American man, George Floyd, at the hands of a Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin drew people from all over the world out onto the streets in unity and righteous anger, to protest the injustice they witnessed on their television screens.”
James Lindsay, founder and president of New Discourses and author of “Race Marxism: The Truth About Critical Race Theory and Praxis,” said the Minnesota group appeared to be using the ideal of Christian unity to push a Marxist political agenda.
“This builds the narrative and makes way for the demand: Unity, so long as it’s unity in agreement under their cultic interpretation of history,” said Lindsay, who studied the document. “Unity, so long as it’s under their cultic interpretation of society. Unity, within the church—not under God, but according to consenting to this narrow, damaging, and ultimately cultic misinterpretation of the world.”
Lindsay noted the Minnesota-based group cited the World Council of Churches (WCC), which he called “one of the main centers of religious manipulation and destruction.”
The WCC “is a huge Marxist front operating under the banner of ecumenicism but is, in fact, designed to water down different faiths and blend them in the fashion we’re discussing,” Lindsay said. “The overall objective is to break down the specific faiths so they’re essentially too weak to be distinguishable and then bind them back together under initiatives like equity, inclusion, and sustainability (that is, make them Woke).”
The Daily Wire reached out to Cardinal Kurt Koch, prefect of the Dicastery for Promoting Christian Unity, for comment on the oversight and vetting of contributors to initiatives such as the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity, but did not receive a response by publishing time. The Week of Prayer for Christian Unity concludes on January 25.