Nowhere Man in Nowhere Land - TWENTY ONE
Christian Missionaries on the New
Frontier!
James Raymond Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
Originally published © September 8, 2016/© August 19, 2021
GOING ETHNOCENTRICALLY INTO THE FUTURE
Beginning with Columbus in 1492 and continuing for nearly 350 years, Spain conquered and settled most of South America, the Caribbean, and the American Southwest. After an initial wave of conquistadors—aided by military advantages and infectious diseases that decimated the native populations— defeated the pre-Columbian civilizations of the Aztecs, Mayans, and Incas, Spain organized a huge imperial system to exploit the land, labor, and mineral wealth of the New World. The Spanish Empire became the largest European empire since ancient Rome, and Spain used the wealth of the Americas to finance nearly endless warfare in Europe, protecting the Americas with a vast navy and powerful army and bringing Roman Catholicism through the missionaries to the New World. While the conquistadors destroyed the institutions and artifacts of societies in the Americas of more than a thousand years, the Soldiers of Christ, or Christian missionaries, took possession of their souls.
WHEN CULTURAL HUBRIS RUNS AWRY
The Spanish Conquistador Francisco Pizarro’s soldiers battling the Incas
The West, in this case, the Spanish Armada, with its cultural sophistication, military prowess, and armed with the stanchion of Christianity, the only true faith, felt it ordained with God’s will to vanquish the infidels of the New World, rid them of their profane customs, primitive culture and pagan gods. Indeed, it was Spain’s manifest destiny to colonize the New World for the crown, country, and God. Enter the Christian missionaries.
The arrival of Europeans in the New World in 1492 changed the Americas forever. Over the course of the next 350 years, Spain ruled a vast empire based on the labor and exploitation of the Indian population. Conquistadors descended on America with hopes of bringing Catholicism to new lands while extracting great riches.
Religion and self-interest combined to create a potent mixture that drew hundreds of thousands of Spaniards across the ocean with hopes of finding riches and winning souls for God. Along with the Spaniards came diseases to which the New World natives had no immunities.
What followed was one of the greatest tragedies in human history as smallpox, influenza and other communicable diseases ravaged the native populations, killing millions.
The Spanish never set out to destroy the people of the New World as their goal was to use Indian labor for their own ends. Almost immediately, an ethical debate arose in Spain on the righteousness of this action. This was the first time any European nation had consciously considered the status of non-Christians.
The traffic of Europeans to the Americas was not a one-way street. The so-called Columbian Exchange brought European goods and ideas to the New World, including the horse, which was not native to the Western Hemisphere, in exchange for new plants and animals to the Old World, including potatoes, corn, tomatoes, and other crops. The world was forever changed by the new horizons opened by Spain's intrepid explorers, despite the misdeeds of Spanish rule in America.
Spanish Conquistadors were primarily poor nobles from the impoverished west and south of Spain and were able to conquer the huge empires of the New World with the help of superior military technology, disease (which weakened Indian resistance), and military tactics including surprise attacks and powerful alliances with local tribes.
Once an area had been conquered, it was partitioned into land grant parcels. More importantly, the Indian people themselves were appropriated along with the grants to the conquistadors. These nobles were given title to the land and its people in return for a promise to teach the natives Christianity. This system was heavily abused, and Indians throughout the Americas were reduced to a condition of virtual slavery.
However, due to natural attrition and harsh misrule, the population of native laborers soon became too small for the voracious Spanish, so they began to import African slaves to work in sugar plantations and silver mines. The introduction of African traditions to the Native Americans and made for a social mixture richer than in almost any other part of the world, although racism continued to play a dark role in the New World.
Colonial society was hierarchical, based upon the amount of non-Spanish blood a person possessed. A complicated system, called the casta, delineated over 100 separate names for groups containing certain levels of Indian and African blood. Jobs, government positions, titles to land, and almost everything else in the Americas functioned according to this system with those at the top getting preference over those lower on the list. Discrimination and repression were features of Spanish colonial rule throughout its history.
Spain's government in Madrid tried hard to govern the New World, despite its distance from Europe. Using a system of viceroyalties and royal courts of appeals, the Spanish Monarchy was able to exercise control over Spanish settlers, even when they didn't want any sort of interference from the central government. The Crown was entitled to one-fifth of all mining profits, and this huge income helped Spain to become the largest and most powerful empire in Europe by 1600.
Religion was mixed with politics to create a hybrid system in what would become the American Southwest: Dominican, Franciscan, and Jesuit missionaries were often left in charge of large areas in what is now Texas, Arizona, New Mexico, and, later, California. With its goal of bringing the Catholic religion to the New World, Spain was also able to use the existing church governments for its political uses. Today, religion and politics continue to mix in Latin America.
The often-heavy-handed rule from Madrid (Spain), and the new ideas of liberty and freedom coming out of the American and French Revolution brought about the wars of Independence in the early nineteenth century.
Simon Bolívar (1783 – 1830), the “Great Liberator,” José de San Martin (1778 – 1850) led the fight for independence, although this was not a fight for Indian rights, or on behalf of the poor. Those who fought for South American independence was called criollos, or American-born descendants of Spaniards. They continued to rule the many new nations of Spanish America for generations. The Spanish left a legacy of cruelty and exploitation in their wake, but they also managed to open the world and increase cultural exchanges to a level never before seen in human history.
INCA EMPIRE – BEFORE & AFTER THE SPANISH CONQUEST
The Incas were part of an empire in pre-Columbian America centered in what is now Peru from 1438 – 1533 C.E., which represented the height of the Inca Civilization. It was known as the “Kingdom of Cusco” before 1438.
Throughout the empire, the Incas used conquest and peaceful assimilation to incorporate large portions of the western part of South America and centered on the Andean mountain range.
Shortly after the Inca Civil War with the Spanish Conquistadors (1529 – 1532), the Inca emperor was captured and killed on the orders of Conquistador Francisco Pizarro, marking the beginning of the Spanish rule.
The remnants of the empire retreated to the remote jungles of Vilcabamba and established the mall Inti). The angles of its base suggest that it served to define the changes of the seasons. Qalla Q'asa, which is built onto a natural spur and overlooks the valley, is known as the citadel.
View from Qalla Q'asa to Andenes
The Inca constructed agricultural terraces on the steep hillside, which are still in use today. They created the terraces by hauling richer topsoil by hand from the lower lands. The terraces enabled the production of surplus food, more than would normally be possible at altitudes as high as 11,000 feet.
With the military, religious, and agricultural structures, the site served at least a triple purpose. Researchers believe that Písac defended the southern entrance to the Sacred Valley, while Choquequirao defended the western entrance, and the fortress at Ollanta Tambo the northern. Inca Pisac controlled a route that connected the Inca Empire with the border of the rain forest (Wikipedia).
In a sketchy way, this gives you a sense of one of the sophisticated civilizations the Spanish (and later Portuguese) Conquistadors encounters as they raced through the Americas. They conquered and plundered in quest of this prize, but it was Old World diseases such as smallpox, typhus, measles, and influenza that wiped out 90% of the indigenous populations in the New World, making it the key factor in the European conquest of the Americas.
But the Incas were not alone in this devastation. They formed a city-state and powerful and wealthy empire in Peru, Bolivia, and Ecuador around the 12th century with Cuzco the capital and major city. They ruled the empire with a centralized government in four provincial sectors. Spanish Conquistadors, led by Francisco Pizarro, conquered most of the Inca Empire in 1533.
The Maya Civilization was located in Central America. It included southern Mexico, Belize, Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras and had existed without interruption from 2500 B.C.E. to 1500 C.E.
Independent of Egypt and the Middle East, the Maya Civilization developed a hieroglyphic writing system. They studied astronomy and mathematics, calculated highly accurate calendars, predicted eclipses, and other astronomical events, and they built elaborate temples and pyramids that are still impressive in their ruins today. The Maya people also had a complex social order.
The Maya people were a religious society and held festivals throughout the year to honor their favorite gods. They sacrificed to the gods and made ritual offerings.
The great cities of this classical period were Tikal and Palenque, which were religious centers. They loved sports and playing ball games and left elaborate ball courts. Most of the people were farmers and lived in small communities. Conquistadors did not destroy this civilization as it mysteriously disappeared around 900 B.C.E. leaving abandoned cities. The Maya people, however, survived continuing to live in Mexico and Central America.
The missionaries brought such kindness with them along with medicines and medical personnel to tend to the sick and dying, but with a definitive agenda: that these natives would be converting to Roman Catholicism.
Pope Alexander VI (1431 – 1503), one of the most controversial popes of the Renaissance having fathered several children with several mistresses, issued a Papal Bull (Inter Caetera), awarding colonial rights over most of the newly discovered lands to Spain and Portugal with the proclamation to Christianize the indigenous populations of the Americas such as the Aztecs, Incas, and Mayas. The state-controlled clerical appointments with no interference from the Vatican.
Spreading Christianity was a top priority, but it went far beyond that. The influence of Franciscans, sometimes seen as a tool of imperialism, enabled other objectives to be in the programming including the Spanish language, culture, and value system to the conquerors with the idea of exercising total political control of the indigenous peoples in the New World.
The goal was to change the agricultural or nomadic Indians into a model to mirror that of the Spanish people and society. Basically, the aim was to urbanize this pastoral society by “offering gifts and persuasion and safety from their enemies.” This protection system was also to ensure the security for the Spanish military operation, believing if the missionaries could make the people more docile and passive they would be less inclined to be warring.
The top agenda of the missionaries was committing these natives to Christianity quickly and efficiently, purging them of their native cultural practices, while giving the impression they were blending their traditional beliefs with common Catholic practices, which of course was a ruse. However, the Spaniards did not impose their language to the degree that the missionaries did their religion.
In fact, the missionary work of the Roman Catholic Church in Quechua, Nahuatl, and Guarani actually contributed to the expansion of these American languages, equipping them with writing systems.
The 1510 Requerimiento, issued in relation to the Spanish invasion of South America, demanded that the local populations accept Spanish rule, and allow preaching to them by Catholic missionaries, on pain of war, slavery or death, although it did not demand conversion. Slavery was part of the local population's culture before the arrival of the conquistadors. Christian missionaries provided existing slaves with an opportunity to escape their situation by seeking out the protection of the missions which was a spur to their conversion.
Kind Ferdinand (1452 – 1516) enacted the Laws of Burgos which resulted in a relaxing of enforcement while he blamed the Church for not doing enough to liberate the Indians when it was only the Church that had raised its voice in defense of the indigenous peoples.
Nevertheless, Amerindian populations suffered serious decline due to new diseases, inadvertently introduced through contact with Europeans, which created a labor vacuum in the New World.
THE FRANCISCANS
In 1522, the first Franciscan missionaries arrived in Mexico. They established schools, model farms, and hospitals. When some Europeans questioned whether the Indians were truly human and worthy of baptism, Pope Paul III (1468 – 1549), who came to the papal throne in 1534 after the “sacking of Rome” in 1527, a very iffy period for the church.
In Pope Paul’s bull of 1537 (Sublimis Deus), he emphatically declared "their souls were as immortal as those of Europeans" and they should neither be robbed nor turned into slaves. The practice, however, persisted.
Over the next 150 years, missions expanded into southwestern North America. Native people were often legally defined as children, and priests took on a paternalistic role, sometimes enforced with corporal punishment.
In America, Junipero Serra, a Franciscan priest, founded a series of missions that became important economic, political, and religious institutions. These missions brought grain, cattle, and a new way of living to the Indian tribes of California. Overland routes were established from New Mexico that resulted in the colonization of San Francisco in 1776 and Los Angeles in 1781. Here too, as in South America, in bringing Western civilization to the area, these missions and the Spanish government were responsible for wiping out nearly a third of the native population, primarily through disease.
Only in the 19th century, after the breakdown of most Spanish and Portuguese colonies, was the Vatican able to take charge of Catholic missionary activities through its Propaganda Fide organization and challenge Spanish and Portuguese draconian policies. Pope Gregory XVI (1765 – 1846) took on the “mad monarchs” of his time, and for it is considered one of the most effective popes in Catholic history. He entered the monastery as a boy and was a staunch defender of Catholic orthodoxy in his early life as a cleric, but became – perhaps because the times demanded it – a political conservative and an adept politician.
Born into the post-French Revolution period, he saw the devastation inflicted in the New World on the church by colonializing governments, haunted by the kidnapping of Pope Pius VII (1742 – 1823) from 1809 to 1812 by Napoleon, while himself a rising cleric in the Catholic hierarchy, he proved a different kind of pope when he came to the papal throne in 1831.
But before that time, there was Pope Leo VII (1760 – 1829), who came to the papal throne in 1823 and was pontiff to his death in 1829. The church had not recovered from the shock of Napoleon and the emperor’s violation of the sanctity of Rome and the Vatican. Perhaps that explains why Pope Leo was so harsh and insensitive to the laity. In any case, he was a very unpopular pope, only to die to be succeeded by Pope Pius VIII, who reigned only from 1829 to 1830 accomplishing very little and being remembered for nothing.
Pope Gregory XVI, a priest, and a Franciscan was unusual in the way he took control from the first, but also in being the last pope to rise to the papal throne who was not a bishop.
From the beginning Pope Gregory challenged the Spanish and Portuguese policy in the New World with his Propaganda Fide organization, appointing his own bishops to the colonies, condemning slavery and the slave trade, and doing so in a Papal Bull In Supremo Apostolatus, and approved the ordination of native clergy in the face of government racism. Despite these advances, the populations of the Americas continued to suffer sharp declines from exposure to European diseases.
It was a time of upheaval with a “war of terror” on the streets of Paris from 1830 to 1848. Pope Gregory was in the middle of this mix with his own “war of terror.” He quite famously opposed gas lights and railways, fearing the rise of a liberal middle-class elite in the Papal States, and opposed political concessions, making him one of the most hated men in Europe in leftist circles. Infuriating Irish Catholics in Ireland urging them to be loyal to their Protestant British monarch. His bottom line was absolute opposition to revolution given its history in his lifetime. Rare (in my experience as a Roman Catholic) was his telling statement on liberalism:
“This shameful font of indifferentism gives rise to that absurd and erroneous proposition which claims that liberty of conscience must be maintained for everyone. It spreads ruin in sacred and civic affairs, though some repeat over and over again with the greatest impudence that some advantage accrues to religion from it. ‘But the death of the soul is worse than freedom of error,’ so says Augustine. When all restraints are removed by which men are kept on the narrow path of truth, their nature, which is already inclined to evil, propels them to ruin.”
One can imagine how this threw the Church Fathers into moaning apoplexy.
THE JESUITS
Jesuit missionaries in the Americas were controversial in Europe, especially in Spain and Portugal in as much as Jesuits were disinclined to take orders from governments when such governments saw their cavalier disregard as interference with their colonial enterprises.
From the beginning, Jesuits were often the only force standing between Native Americans and slavery. Throughout South America, but especially in present-day Brazil and Paraguay, they formed Christian Naïve American city-states called “reductions.” These were societies set up according to an idealized theocratic model.
It is partly because the Jesuits such as Antonio Ruiz de Montoya (1585 – 1652) were willing to sacrifice life and limb to prevent Spanish and Portuguese colonizers from enslaving the natives. Other Jesuits, such as Manuel da Nobrega (1517 – 1570) and Jose de Anchieta (1534 – 1597) were critical in Indian pacification leading to the establishment of stable colonial settlements in the colonies. They founded several towns in Brazil in the 16th century, long before the Franciscans arrived. Among these towns were Sao Paulo and Rio de Janeiro. Using a feather rather than a sword, their efforts were influential in pacification, religious conversions, and education of Indian nations.
The Jesuit Reductions were a particular version of the general Catholic strategy without the hard club of dogma. It was effectively used in the 17th and 18th centuries of building reductions to Christianize the indigenous populations of the Americas more efficiently than the absolutism to be practiced later.
[When I was a young chemical engineer in the field for Nalco Chemical Company, my next-door neighbor was a civil engineer with a large national firm building highways across the nation. He was from Bolivia, and remembered fondly the Jesuits who taught him, but had little affection for Roman Catholicism and clerics that tried to force dogma down his constitution.]
The work of the reductions created the Catholic order of the Jesuits in South America in inhabited areas of Tupi-Guarani, which corresponds to modern-day Paraguay. Later reductions were extended to Argentina, Brazil, Bolivia, and Uruguay. Jesuits have a popular history of fairness and consistency and follow-through in their practices, especially among the disenfranchised. The current Pope of the Roman Catholic Church Pope Francis I (born 1936) is the first Jesuit to rise to the papal throne and is as controversial with the establishment as were his predecessors those centuries ago, and truly a breath of fresh air in the tradition of Pope Gregory XVI.
Where these Jesuit reductions differed from the reductions in other regions was consistent with Jesuit philosophy: Indian natives were expected to adopt Christianity but not European culture. Under the Jesuit leadership of the Indians, the reductions achieved a high degree of autonomy within the Spanish and Portuguese empires.
With the use of Indian labor, the reductions became economically successful. When their existence was threatened by the incursions of the Bandeirante (Portuguese for “those who carry the flag) slave traders, Indian militia were created that fought effectively against these fortune-hunting Portuguese settlers in Brazil.
The resistance by the Jesuit reductions to slave raids, as well as their high degree of autonomy and economic success, have been cited as contributing factors to the expulsion of the Jesuits from the Americas in 1767. Jesuit reductions present a controversial chapter of the evangelical history of the Americas and are variously described as jungle utopias or as theocratic regimes of terror.
The suppression of the Jesuits in the Portuguese Empire (1759) and the Spanish Empire (1767) was precipitated by a series of political moves rather than a theological dispute. Monarchs were attempting to solidify their power and centralize their authority in the secular realm, viewing Jesuits as being too liberal, international, and too allied to the papacy. What’s more, monarchs found Jesuits too autonomous and territorial.
That said the papacy threw the Jesuit order under the bus. Pope Clement XIV issued a papal bull (Dominus ac Redemptor) on July 21, 1773, suppressing the Society of Jesus. The Jesuits took refuge in non-Catholic nations, particularly in Prussia and Russia where the order was either ignored or formally rejected. The Jesuits were allowed to return to many places starting in the late 19th century.
ASSIMILATION
The conquest of the conquistadors was immediately accompanied by the evangelization of the indigenous peoples with a clearly Catholic phenomenon to mystically materialize. This helped to solidify the conquest of the minds and hearts of the natives.
The Virgin of Guadalupe is one of Mexico’s oldest religious images. The Virgin Mother of Jesus is said to have appeared to Juan Diego (1474 – 1548) in 1531. News of the 1534 apparition on Tepeyac Hill spread quickly through Mexico; and in the seven years that followed, 1532 through 1538, the Indian people accepted the Spaniards, and 8 million people were converted to the Catholic faith. Thereafter, the Aztecs no longer practiced human sacrifice or native forms of worship.
In 2001 the Italian “Movement of Love” was created, an evangelization project launched in 32 states. A year later, Juan Diego was beatified in 1990 and canonized a saint by Pope John Paul II (1920 – 2005) in 2002, the first Roman Catholic indigenous saint from the Americas.
Saint Juan Diego is said to have been granted an apparition of the Virgin Mary on four separate occasions in December 1531 at the hill of Tepeyac, then outside but now well within metropolitan Mexico City.
The Basilica of Guadalupe, located at the foot of the hill of Tepeyac, claims to possess Juan Diego's mantle or cloak on which an image of the Virgin is said to have been impressed by a miracle as a pledge of the authenticity of the apparitions. These apparitions and the imparting of the miraculous images (together known as the Guadalupe event) are the basis of the cult of Our Lady of Guadalupe. This cult is ubiquitous in Mexico and prevalent throughout the Spanish-speaking Americas, and increasingly worldwide. As a result, the Basilica of Guadalupe is now the world's major center of pilgrimage for Roman Catholics, receiving 22 million visitors in 2010.
Guadalupe is often considered a mixture of the cultures which blend to form Mexico, both racially and religiously. Guadalupe is sometimes called the “first Mexican,” as Guadalupe brings together people of distinct cultural heritages, while at the same time affirming their distinctness.
One theory is that the Virgin of Guadalupe was presented to the Aztecs as a Christianized Tonantzin, or necessary for the clergymen to convert the indigenous people to the Catholic faith. The missionaries literally built their first churches with the rubble and the columns of the ancient pagan temples, so they often borrowed pagan customs for their own cult purposes.
Such Virgins appeared in most of the other evangelized countries, mixing Catholicism with the local customs. The Basilica of Our Lady of Copacabana was built in Bolivia, near the Isla del Sol where the Sun God was believed to be born, in the 16th century, to commemorate the apparition of the Virgin of Copacabana. . In Cuba, the Virgin named Caridad del Cobre was allegedly seen at the beginning of the 16th century, a case consigned in the Archivo General de Indias. In
Brazil, Our Lady of Aparecida was declared in 1929 official Patron Saint of the country by Pope Pius XI (1857 – 1939). In Argentina, there is Our Lady of Lujan. In other cases, the appearance of the Virgin was reported by an indigenous person, for example, Virgen de Los Angeles in Costa Rica.
ASSESSMENT OF MISSIONARIES
For most of the history of post-colonial Latin America, religious rights have been regularly violated, and even now, tensions and conflict in the area of religion remain. Religious human rights, in the sense of freedom to exercise and practice one's religion, are almost universally guaranteed in the laws and constitutions of Latin America today, although they are not universally observed in practice. Moreover, it has taken Latin America much longer than other parts of the West to adopt religious freedom in theory and in practice, and the habit of respect for those rights is only gradually being developed.
The slowness to embrace religious freedom in Latin America is related to its colonial heritage and to its post-colonial history. The Aztec and the Inca both made substantial use of religion to support their authority and power. This pre-existing role of religion in pre-Columbian culture made it relatively easy for the Spanish conquistadors to replace native religious structures with those of a Catholicism that was closely linked to the Spanish throne.
Anti-clericalism was an integral feature of 19th-century liberalism in Latin America. This anti-clericalism was based on the idea that the clergy (especially the prelates who ran the administrative offices of the Church) were hindering social progress in areas such as public education and economic development. The Catholic Church was one of the largest land-owning groups in most of Latin America's countries. As a result, the Church tended to be rather conservative politically.
Beginning in the 1820s, a succession of liberal regimes came to power in Latin America. Some members of these liberal regimes sought to imitate the Spain of the 1830s (and revolutionary France of a half-century earlier) in expropriating the wealth of the Catholic Church, and in imitating the 18th-century benevolent despots in restricting or prohibiting the religious institutes.
As a result, a number of these liberal regimes expropriated Church property and tried to bring education, marriage, and burial under secular authority. The confiscation of Church properties and changes in the scope of religious liberties (in general, increasing the rights of non-Catholics and non-observant Catholics, while licensing or prohibiting the institutes) generally accompanied secularists, and later, which has gone on to this day.
NEXT – NWL - PART TWENTY-TWO - MEDICINE EMPOWERED
No comments:
Post a Comment