Revolt of the Janitors: On the Detroit Massacre, by Darrick Taylor

By Darrick Taylor, Crisis Magazine, Aug. 5, 2025

Darrick Taylor earned his PhD in History from the University of Kansas. He lives in Central Florida and teaches at Santa Fe College in Gainesville, FL. He also produces a podcast, Controversies in Church History, dealing with controversial episodes in the history of the Catholic Church.

This is not a gentlemanly dispute that can be resolved by gestures of charity and humility. The Church is divided between people who have long ceased to believe in anything resembling the Catholic Faith, and those who still adhere to it. 

My father grew up in Florida, and most of his friends were Cuban. He often heard from them how wonderful Cuba had been before Fidel Castro’s revolution. My father once asked one of his friends how Castro managed to take over the county. He told him it was simple: first they would take over a factory. Then, they would remove the manager of the factory and replace him with the janitor. The reason for this was that the janitor could never become the manager in normal times but only because of the revolution. Thus, the janitor would defend the revolution to the death, so as to keep his new position of power at all costs.

This is how the Castro regime has survived in Cuba. There is only one problem, however. Revolutionaries are a rare breed. Disciplined, high-functioning, cunning, and, above all, fanatically devoted to the cause for its own sake, they are simply too few in number. True revolutionaries are always few in number. A handful can make a revolution, but they cannot see it to fruition. …

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