This paper sketches a Political Theology of Colonial Duress by intersecting two seemingly separate issues: (1) Sexualized Violence in the Catholic Church, and (2) Holocaust Memory Practices in Germany. While these two cases may appear unconnected at first, we can identify a distinct set of political-theological practices within and across them that allows us to understand them as specific trans/formations of enduring coloniality. As a crucial overlapping pattern appears a "desire for transcendence" (Yountae) that translates into discursive strategies of self-sacralization. Allowing the hegemonic community in each case to lay a claim to innocence vis à vis a history of violence, it buttresses its social status in an intersection with other hierarchies of distinction. Hence, even in purportedly secularized spaces, theological notions are implicated in the discursive maintainance of colonial power by providing conceptual resources for productions of colonial 'innocence'. Some attention to these dyamics has been paid by scholars from formerly colonized regions. In the political and academic discourses on the privileged sites of colonial order, however, colonial duress is largely unacknowledged. The paper argues that the key hurdle that occludes colonial duress is a critical gap in the field of theology: theology itself remains largely unexamined as a site where coloniality is reproduced and concealed. Dominant theological approaches assume a "pure" Christianity outside histories of violence, perpetuating colonial innocence and obscuring theology's role in sustaining coloniality. The paper argues that this gap can only be addressed if theology critically confronts its colonial entanglements. Rejecting the search for a "better" theology that transcends coloniality, it instead suggests to adopt recursivity—the idea that colonial power persists through adaptive feedback loops—to rearticulate theology as a self-critical practice engaging with enduring colonial privilege.