ADDEMDUM -- "THE RISE & FALL OF THE HUMAN EMPIRE"

ADDENDUM – “The Rise & Fall of the Human Empire”

We have become a secular society with our civil religion the government and its economic mandates.  Meanwhile, our corporate infrastructure has lost its integrity and the people’s trust.  Rather than challenge this new corporate “Gilded Age,” reminiscent of its appearance in an earlier period in American history when the “Robber Barons” dictated economic reality, today the populace willingly embraces the new “Robber Barons” material and gossipy authority watching their constitutional rights disintegrate before their eyes with no apparent interest in doing anything.  Thirty years ago, I wrote:

Take corporate America. Any large company today is 20 to 30 divisions in search of a corporation. The pendulum of centralization-decentralization is more a yo-yo contest with no clear winners, only painfully confused losers. Meanwhile, this once powerful and energetic nation doesn’t seem to know what is happening or why. The era of free lunch supposedly ended in the 20th century. This century began with such paternal control and submissive obedience has now run amuck. No one (and nothing) is in control (Work Without Managers: A View from the Trenches, 1991, pp. 37-38).

Fast forward and we see government in the early 21st century restoring the free lunch while the sacrosanct functions of the Executive Branch, the Judicial Branch, and the Supreme Court of the federal government seem frozen in inertia compromised by ubiquitous polarity and now unraveling in a worldwide COVID-19 pandemic. Appointed functionaries such as the Center for Disease Control and the National Health Organization hide behind the science that they treat with cavalry inaptitude while failing to manage the situation with any consistency in terms of policy or pronouncements. The vacuum left by incompetent leadership in corporate society has left citizens confused and uncertain as to how to protect themselves and their loved ones.

In this climate, young people ignore the muddle treating their cellphones and laptops as their prayer books having converted to the god of self-interests as millennials and centennials are completely bored with the high jinx of CNN and FOX cable news talking heads who continue to poison the airwaves with their narcissistic polarities. If young people are committed to some church or religion chances are its doctrines have a draconian hold on them which is neither challenged nor acknowledged.

This is to suggest our society is broken. The systemic structures such as the chain of command have lost their impact from parents in the home to academics in the classroom to the corporate governess in enterprise to the military. It happened in ancient Greece. We can still hear the lament of Socrates about children of his times:

“The children now love luxury; they have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for elders and love chatter in place of exercise. Children are now tyrants, not the servants of their households. They no longer rise when elders enter the room. They contradict their parents, chatter before company, gobble up dainties at the table, cross their legs, and tyrannize their teachers.”

The same occurred in ancient Rome, to the Roman Catholic Church, and currently to the Judaic-Christian culture as political correctness, political identity, and critical race theory distracted from pondering our real challenges to cultural integrity which finds society teetering on the precipice of irrelevance, recalling Nobel Laureate poet T. S. Eliot’s suggestion in “The Hollow Men” (1925): ‘This is the way the world ends not with a bang but a whimper.’

It was in this spirit that I penned this ADDENDUM.

A FUNDAMENTAL WAY OF LOOKING AT WHAT WE HAVE BECOME

“Plus ca change, plus c’est la meme chose” – The more things change the more they remain the same thing.

French author, journalist, and critic, Jean-Baptiste Alphonse Karr (1808 – 1890) coined this expression that lives on to the present.

One way of looking at “The Rise & Fall of the Human Empire” is what we call “reality.” Is it not something man has been making up, creating, and inventing since the dawn of man’s consciousness to cope and survive in a dangerous environment?

The shaman was able to bottle man’s fears by making up what natural phenomena meant (sunrise, sunset, thunderstorms, torrential rains, hurricanes, tornadoes, earthquakes, floods, extremely hot and frigid seasons, and so on). Religions were a natural progression from these early disturbing episodes from pagan polytheism to monotheism.

Continuing the idea that monotheism like polytheism is made up consistent with the legacy of the shaman, evidence of monotheism emerges first in Egypt in the 14th-century (1353 – 1336 BCE) during the reign of Akhenaten. The king was known to have worshipped Aten, the sun god, which constituted the first monotheistic religion in the world. Akhenaten’s exclusive worship of the sun god, Aten, led Egyptologists to claim that he created the world's first monotheistic religion. However, modern scholarship notes that Akhenaten's cult drew from aspects of other gods—particularly re-Harakhte, Shu, and Maat—in its imagining and worship of Aten.

Others claim the world's first monotheistic God was Zoroastrianism, an ancient Persian religion that may have originated as early as 4,000 years ago. Arguably the world's first monotheistic faith, it's one of the oldest religions still in existence. That said, some claim the first god was Brahma and that the Hindus are the creators of god. Brahma is also known as the Grandfather and later as the equivalent of Prajapati, the primeval first god. In early Hindu sources such as the Mahabharata, Brahma is supreme in the triad of great Hindu gods which includes Shiva and Vishnu.

The point is that Judaic, Christian, and Islamic monotheism are relatively recent in the schemes of things yet consistent with the need for some deity outside ourselves to cope with life in its growing complexity and confusion.

Christianity, we see in these pages, has been self-conscious in its quest for dominance, relevance, and legitimacy. In that sense, it has been like other religions fallen prey too often behaving counter to what it claims its sacred mission.

To sustain its existence, Christianity created the “Divine Right of Kings,” which is a European political doctrine in defense of monarchical absolutism, which asserted that kings derived their authority from God and could not, therefore, be held accountable for their actions by any earthly authority such as a parliament.

Originating in Europe, the divine-right-of-kings can be traced to the medieval conception of God’s award of temporal power to the political ruler, paralleling the award of spiritual power to the church.

By the 16th and 17th centuries, however, the new national monarchs were asserting their authority in matters of both church and state. King James I of England (reigned 1603–1625) was the foremost exponent of the divine right of kings, but the doctrine virtually disappeared from English politics after the Glorious Revolution (1688–1689). It was also called “The Bloodless Revolution,” which took place from 1688 to 1689 in England. It involved the overthrow of the Catholic King James II, who was replaced by his Protestant daughter Mary and her Dutch husband, William of Orange.

In the late 17th and 18th centuries, kings such as Louis XIV (1643–1715) of France continued to profit from the divine-right theory, even though many of them no longer had any truly religious belief. The American Revolution (1775–1783), the French Revolution (1789), and the Napoleonic Wars deprived the doctrine of its remaining credibility.

The bishop Jacques-Benigne Bossuet (1627–1704), one of the principal French theorists of the divine right asserted that the king's person and authority were sacred; that his power was modeled on that of a Father’s and was absolute, deriving from God; and that he was governed by reason (i.e., custom and precedence).

In the middle of the 17th century, the English Royalist squire Sir Robert Filmer likewise held that the state was a family and that the king was a father. He claimed, in an interpretation of biblical Scripture, that Adam was the first king and that Charles I (reigned 1625–1649) ruled England as Adam’s eldest heir. The anti-absolutist philosopher John Locke (1632–1704) wrote his First Treatise of Civil Government (1689) to refute this argument.

The doctrine of divine right can be dangerous for both church and state. For the state, it suggests that secular authority is conferred, and can therefore be removed, by the church. For the church, it implies that kings have a direct relationship to God and may therefore dictate to ecclesiastical rulers such as the Supreme Pontiff of the Roman Catholic Church.

That said the patterns displayed in religions of our time continue to clash culturally with each other and with the West in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Syria, Iraq, and Iran as the West attempts to impose its free enterprise and human rights value system and economic civil religion on them unhappily with the same embarrassing results that occurred with early Christian Missionaries on native Americans in the new world in the 16th century.

The Protestant Reformation ended the dominance of Roman Catholicism and gave birth to free enterprise and capitalism, ending, or so it seemed, European feudalism while European post-World War Two national industrial centers more resembled capitalistic feudalism as I experienced them working for Honeywell in Europe in the 1980s.

Following the idea of everything being made up or opportunistically created as we go along, once Rome fell and the Roman Catholic Church gain new life, the Supreme Pontiff of the Church resembled the Roman Emperor with the Pontiff’s governing Curia resembling the Roman Parliament, the College of Cardinals, Catholic Bishops, Monsignors, Priests, and Monks, the command and control staff of the Roman Army’s Generals, noncommissioned officers, and soldiers.

Industrialism in the West evolved with craftsmen out of feudalism during the middle ages to form small working groups that differed from the original guilds of merchants. There were no bosses but workers of various skills committed to the same enterprise: i.e., producing wood, metal, glass, and machine parts and finished products such as furniture, evolving to carpenters, sheet metal workers, and tool & die, makers.

With war came the invention of new weapons in the American Civil War including battleships, submarines, and canon power providing new roles for tool & die craftsmen to produce machine parts. In the late 19th century and early 20th century, bicycle mechanic Henry Ford became a successful producer of his Model T Ford, while equally self-educated Thomas Edison was inventing the electric light bulb that led to the public utility.

Henry Ford also used the newly invented assembly line to economically produce his automobiles, cleverly coming up with the idea in January 1914 to increase hourly workers' pay to $5 a day when this was more than twice the weekly pay rate for industrial workers. His motive was to make his model cars within workers’ financial means. He also created an incentive plan. Doubling the average wage helped ensure a stable workforce and directly boosted the sales of his Model T Ford as workers could now afford to buy what they were making. It laid the foundation for an economy driven by consumer demand. As a result, the working middle class took off more than one hundred years ago thanks to Henry Ford.

Thomas Edison exerted a similar influence on modern life. In addition to inventing the incandescent light bulb, he invented the phonograph, and the motion picture camera, as well as improving the telegraph and the telephone. More dramatic still, thanks to Edison, the electrical age began on September 4, 1882. That day, Edison Illuminating Company flipped the switch on his power station on Pearl Street in lower Manhattan, providing electricity to homes at a price comparable to gas. Cleverly, because Edison used 100-volt direct current to power his new light bulbs, customers could be no further than ½ mile from the generator. But he needed a high-profile location to promote the system. Edison chose a site in the heart of New York's financial district, at 255 and 257 Pearl Street.

Henry Ford, Andrew Carnegie, Cornelius Vanderbilt, and John D. Rockefeller, among others, were called “Robber Barons” because they created monopolies in railroads, steel, automobile manufacturing, et al, to control these sources of revenue to result in huge profits while intentionally restricting goods and regulating prices. Author Mark Twain called this period the “Gilded Age,” an era that occurred in the United States during the late 19th century, from the 1870s to about 1900. It was a period of rapid economic growth, especially in the Northern and Western United States.

Continuing our creative thesis, the organizations of these “Robber Barons” in terms of compensation for executives and managers were relatively modest before and during World War Two. Managerial compensation compared to workers was the equivalent of ten times that of American workers – who earned approximately $12.98 per week for 59 hours of work in 1900 or $674.96 a year – or a little less than one-tenth of the $70,000 some executives earned.

Management as a class was a product of WWII. After 1950, management successfully sold the idea to the American public that “it” had won the war by successfully managing logistical support, the timely delivering of supplies and weapons to fighting men at the battlefront, while economically husbanding vital resources to effect a positive outcome of the war, thus implying its extraordinary role in the war’s triumph.

A spate of books after WWII focused fixedly on management in the 1960s – 1980s timeframe to supposedly benefit working men and women in the trenches. To wit:

Robert Blake & Jane Mouton, The Managerial Grid, 1964

Peter Block, The Empowered Manager, 1987

James MacGregor Burns, Leadership, 1978

Saul Gellerman, Why Good Managers Make Bad Ethical Choices, 1985

Paul Hersey & Kenneth Blanchard, Management of Organizational Behavior, 1972

Douglas McGregor, The Human Side of Enterprise, 1960,

Peter Drucker, Management, Tasks, Responsibilities, Practices, 1973, et al

It is clear that management was seen as the parent and workers as its family, an inevitable reflection of the “Divine Rights of Kings” of the middle ages with little sense of, or anticipation of the personal computer, the Internet, the Information Age, much less that one day the majority of American workers would be knowledge workers superseding the position power of management, making management anachronistic and managers atavistic.

That said management’s compensation continued to increase as management became a consortium without precedence multiplying levels of management and creating variable empires within the organization rising to the point where a CEO today can earn as much as 300 times or more in compensation than his or her workers, growing a staggering 940 percent since 1978. Consequently, professionally trained engineers, statisticians, chemists, biologists, and other highly skilled professionals have opted to become pyramid climbers seeking their fortunes as managers leaving their professional credentials behind (see Corporate Sin: Leaderless Leadership & Dissonant Workers, 2nd edition, 2014, The Worker, Alone, Going Against the Grain, 2nd edition, 2012).

Management guru Peter Drucker writes regarding executive compensation:

In the current version of business ethics in the United States, one side has all the obligations and the other side has all the entitlements. This is compatible neither with the ethics of interdependence nor with a universal code of ethics. It corrodes the bond of trust that times superior to subordinate (Peter Drucker: Shaping the Managerial Mind, John E. Flaherty, 1999, p 270).

Some thirty years ago this ethic and trust were already unraveling as the “Rise & Fall” of the corporation was evident in the tea leaves (see Work Without Managers, A View from the Trenches, 2nd edition, 2013).

The Covid-19 Pandemic has accelerated this demise as virtual workers in their homes and not in brick & mortar centers is now a reality. More than 60 percent of professionals now prefer working at home, and 20 percent are willing to take less money to do so, seeing no reason for bosses and the constant disruption of work by managers whose only function seemingly is to get in the way of productive work. We can see how management has mucked up this pandemic from the Center for Disease Control to the National Institute of Health to the President of the United States to the Governors of the fifty states, to the media that takes sides such as CNN and FOX Cable News, leading to the increasing confusion of many Americans, another example of corporate management exceeding its perceptive deft.

At another level, our constitutional government, the Declaration of Independence, the Bill of Rights, the role of elected representatives of our Democratic Republic by the citizens of the United States, the sacrosanct nature of civilian authority over the military and other appointed officials, indeed, the very integrity of the American language and culture, is being compromised at every turn.

New York Times journalist Michael S. Schmidt writes:

The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff twice called his Chinese counterpart in the final months of the Trump administration to reassure him that Donald J. Trump had no plans to attack China to remain in power and that the United States was not collapsing, according to PERIL (2021), a new book by Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Robert Costa.

“Things may look unsteady,” the chairman, Gen. Mark A. Milley, told Gen. Li Zuocheng of China on January 8, two days after Mr. Trump’s supporters stormed the Capitol to try to stop the certification of his election loss and in the second of two such calls. “But that’s the nature of democracy, General Li. We are 100 percent steady. Everything’s fine. But democracy can be sloppy sometimes.”(Published September 14, 2021, Updated September 15, 2021)

Imagine President Harry S. Truman’s Chief of Staff General George C. Marshall warning the Japanese that the president was about to drop the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945 which essentially ended World War Two in the Pacific.

Then remember in the most famous civilian-military confrontation in American history: Truman relieved General Douglas MacArthur of his command of the U.S. forces in Korea. This firing set off a brief uproar among the American public but the president held his ground and weathered the emotional storm. On April 11, 1951, President Truman flew to Korea and met with General MacArthur who was saber-rattling at the time threatening to invade Manchuria and even suggested the possibility of using the atomic bomb against China in Manchuria. Truman aware of the general’s flamboyant comments, said, “I’ll put that egotistical bastard in his place,” and he did flying to Korea and relieving him of his command, demonstrating publically that in America’s democracy civilian authority takes precedence over military authority.

Imagine if General Milley bypassed the President of the United States in 1945 as he did in 2020, with the bogus rationale that he had to console China by promising to forewarn China if the United States should ever plan on launching an attack.

It is only a brief 75 years ago when the President of the United States was clearly in charge, only to find this republic three-quarters of a century spiraling into confusion if not chaos prominently crippled with the COVID-19 pandemic. Indeed, this young nation that will be only 250 years old in 2025 appears to be unraveling as did the empires of Greece, Rome, Egypt, Great Britain, Spain, and the Roman Catholic Church. If there is an iota of truth to the alleged findings of Bob Woodward and Robert Costa in their new book, PERIL, our demise as an empire may be closer than we think, and the reason for this provocative assertion that the civilization we cherish and the Judaic-Christian culture that is our heritage and anchor appears to be unraveling.

CONFESSION TO MY READERS

CONFESSION to my readers:



50 years ago CONFIDENT SELLING (1971) was published. The slender volume looked at the business of selling from an entirely different perspective with the seller and buyer as partners, not adversaries. At the time, the rage was WINNING THROUGH INTIMIDATION, which was a national bestseller. CONFIDENT SELLING was written in six weeks in 1969 after returning to the United States from South Africa disillusioned with life and life's purpose. Still young, I resigned from my high-paying job with a wife and four preteen children moved to Florida with no idea what I would do next. Once the first draft of the manuscript was completed, it was sent off to Prentice-Hall, Inc., in Englewood Cliff, New Jersey without preamble and accepted two weeks later. It would be in print for twenty years and go through some thirty to forty printings.



For two years, I read a lot, played tennis and basketball, jogged and swam in the Intercostal Waterway of the Gulf of Mexico. When nearly broke, I went back to school for six years to earn my Master's and Doctorate in social, industrial, organizational psychology. This was a time when graduate students were expected to attend lectures and classes as if still in grammar or high school. I was often absent working as a consultant, as an adjunct professor to several universities, or as a consultant to The Professional Institute of the American Management Association across the country.



Most professors allowed me this latitude as I often wrote for them, and was known for that particular skill. One professor, when I did attend class, before the group of some ten graduate students informed me, "I understand you are quite the writer. Let me inform you if you write the best thesis I have ever read you will receive the lowest grade I have ever given." Then she added, "I suggest you drop this class," which I did. Another professor confessed, “I don’t like you very much. I’d like to fail you in this doctorate seminar but if I did I’d have to fail the other six. So, I reluctantly give you an ‘A’.” This is mentioned because I have constantly gotten into hot water with authority figures, academics being no exception for failure to respect protocol. It is reflected in my published works.



Skipping my second executive career with Honeywell, where I ran into the same experience, I retired once again only now in my fifties, continuing to write, forming my own publishing company writing at my leisure publishing book after book to sometimes alarming response and often not.



December 2012 changed all that. A publisher wrote and followed it up with a call, stating that it wanted to publish nine of my books as second editions and one original unpublished work. At the same time, the Director of Amazon's Kindle called and said Amazon wanted to publish all my works including any novel manuscripts I had written.



Never very computer literate, I had touched the wrong key and lost virtually all my manuscripts that included several novels and short stories. Kindle said, “No problem,” send us copies of your books and we will do the rest, which they did. Alas, I only had one novel which needed work but Kindle said, “Send that manuscript, too.”



From December 2012 until my health broke in 2016, I was at my computer working on these ten books for the publisher, from four to six hours a day, seven days a week. The health problems I am currently experiencing can be traced to that stupidity. Often, Beautiful Betty attempted to prevail but I didn’t listen. Working hard with little interest in what others think has been natural to me since a boy because of my early experience, I suppose, without parents until I was five years old, something I have often written about in my works.



Why be so obsessed? The interesting thing I’ve learned, in my reading, especially concerning philosophers is that they don’t write for an audience but to explore their ideas vis-à-vis their empirical experience.



Psychoanalyst Eric Bernes in “Games People Play,” claims entertainers need hundreds if not thousands of worshipers, most people need reinforcement from a few friends, scientists and philosophers need only one person who understands and appreciates them. Now, with social media on the Internet, people chirp about having scores to hundreds of “friends,” sounding a lot like entertainers. Always being a closet introvert, I have not sought this reaffirmation but have often found it in my reading and that has been sufficient and if not necessary for me.



Curiously, authors are often the poorest critics of their works. That said, the works that I see somewhat in terms of “breakthrough” are CONFIDENT SELLING, WORK WITHOUT MANAGERS, THE WORKER, ALONE, IN THE SHADOW OF THE COURTHOUSE, BE YOUR OWN BEST FRIEND, and this present work, THE RISE & FALL OF THE HUMAN EMPIRE.



Readers have misread the EPILOGUE to this work, which I am not surprised because it looks at some of our most cherished beliefs in a different light. This, I believe, is less true of the PROLOGUE, which I end this missive:



Over the past 500 years, or since the shocking discovery of America, man has been at times on a rollercoaster climbing slowly, then rapidly descending taking tortuous turns at breathtaking speeds to end up pretty much where he started, only to believe because of his “cut & control” progress to be in a different place and space. He sees what he has gained but not what he has lost. Some might say this has been a five hundred year retreat from a God-centered to a man-centered universe, and with all that man has and has accomplished, that man finds himself in a place and space, not all that reassuring. Another metaphor might be that of a locomotive that must first overcome enormous inertia to establish some momentum, but once that is accomplished the momentum builds to acceleration that keeps quickening which becomes impossible to control, but nobody minds as they race past landmarks and sacred markings that they once cherished not realizing they are running from themselves as “Nowhere Man” to a place just over the horizon called “Nowhere Land.”

Jim

EPILOGUE to "The Rise & Fall Human Empire"

EPILOGUE to “The Rise & Fall of the Human Empire”

We are anything if not an interesting species.  We invent words that lead to language, thinking in these words that lead to thoughts, selective thoughts that become philosophies, building our lives around these philosophies into religions, treating these religions as sanctuaries of truth, then fighting to the death to defend these religions as truth personified when they are inventions of our imaginings to protect us from ourselves.

From the opening chapters of our existence those many millenniums ago, we have felt self-conscious and vulnerable to the forces outside, a gift of our consciousness.  Alas, we have always been fearful of the unknown and the unknowable, consumed with self-doubt, wondering why we are here, and why we have been separated from the animal kingdom of Mother Nature that terrifies us, problems these other species don't experience as they simply exist instinctively.

To combat this self-doubt and these misgivings, these fears, and this sense of loneliness, we have created an artificial world that we treat as reality out of these words.  This includes God that we have invented as He must exist in our consciousness as absurd as that seems to many in this "Secular Age" of postmodernity.

It was the seventeenth-century French philosopher, theologian, mathematician, and physicist, Blaise Pascal (1623 - 1662), who posited the philosophical wager that human beings gamble with their lives that God either exists or does not.  Since we do not know whether God exists then we should play it safe rather than risk being sorry.   

[Being born during The Great Depression as an Irish Roman Catholic by the good Sisters of St. Francis, my long life has often played havoc with these early certainties.  I am a renegade Catholic, but a Catholic nonetheless, thankful that I had this early nurturing which has served me well in my many careers.  I confess to being a Catholic writer seeing life through that specific filter with that inevitable perspective.  Ideas have always fascinated me, even controversial ones.  That said, I have no inclination to be either a proselytizer or crusader.  My hope is only to stimulate thought in others to be better in touch with themselves.  Nor do I believe the "Good Books" were the works of other than men divinely inspired as they may be.  In this "Secular Age," we are constantly bombarded with extraneous multi-faceted stimulation telling us what to think, what to believe, value, and how to behave.  Our consciousness with its curiosity is without barriers less we construct them around ourselves.]   

Words are our most sophisticated invention.  We have created societies and civilizations out of words from primitive to modern, from pagan gods to the monotheistic God of Christianity, Judaism, and Islam.  We see the same God at the helm to guide our species through life and to safety.  Yet, each of these religions treats their monotheistic God as different and as more divine than the others, warring endlessly with each other.

Pagan religions made human sacrifices.  Christianity makes symbolically cannibalistic sacrifices in the changing of bread and wine into the body and blood of Jesus Christ (transubstantiation), while the purpose of both pagan and Christian rituals are to pay homage to their polytheistic gods or monotheistic God. 

With words, we have created sacred books such as the Bible, the Torah, and the Koran to preserve and reinforce our dependence on The Word to protect and secure our existence beyond our mortality.  We have gone to war with others of our species for failure to acknowledge and follow the beliefs of The Word or for our failure to conduct our lives consistent with The Word.

As evidence of the power of The Word, we have built magnificent churches, temples, synagogues, and cathedrals displaying our ingenuity centuries before the science of architecture and engineering had reached the heights it enjoys today, physical evidence that our species is in touch with the Almighty.

The Rise & Fall of the Human Empire is a modest attempt to show how the use of words has led to language than to mature ideas,  We have in turn built our lives around ideas only to have them come crashing down due to man's shortsightedness.  From the dawn of consciousness, we have progressed and periodically regressed but always remaining optimistic, even utopian, in the worst of times, believing we are equal to the challenge.

Anthropologists claim language was first a form of gossip built around the primitive anxieties of love and hate, envy and jealousy, fear and loathing, loneliness and isolation.  It was neither an instrumental nor a terminal device of consciousness but simply a spontaneous intuitive response to ill-defined needs that have come to dominate our unconscious behavior.  This was displayed in another sense during "The Hunting & Gathering" period some 3,000 years ago, a time when men would band together to forage for food by killing animals much larger, agile, powerful, and menacing.  These men invented crude weapons and used cunning to trap and subdue these prey.  This success led to their survival and enhanced their sense of power using their consciousness.

Men and women next became farmers learning to till the soil and seed plants to provide food in abundance to supplement the need to kill animals exclusively for food, even leading to the domesticated of animals as beasts of burden, which led to the formation of small groups becoming larger groups and then small colonies. 

These developments radically changed social existence as close-knit groups led to the formation of families transferring dominance of the group from women to men.  Every aspect of human existence has evolved progressively and mainly spontaneously and situationally.  This was true of the family, the home, the nature of morality and ethics as they were all inventions of "Men of Ideas" and over time reified into conventions, then defended as if designed by God as the case may be. 

As farms, land became property, ownership of property became wealth, which led to power and dominance of the most resourceful property owners.  At the same time, farmers who perfected weapons for hunting now employed these weapons to defend their property.

"Men of Words" and "Men of Ideas" escalated into prominence.  First as servants to landowners then monarchs and kings who seldom had the time or inclination to learn how to read or write as they saw themselves as "Men of Action," depending upon these clerks to ensure their legitimacy and to sustain their dominance by keeping their ledgers and tracking their logistics.  

On the pages of this book, we see the rise and fall of empires and civilizations: the Greek Civilization and the Roman Empire, the Catholic Church, the Spanish and British Empires. 

We also see men of words as philosophers, theologians, economists, and psychologists providing "Men of Action" with the rationale to legitimize their prominence and dominance.  

War is the leading catalyst to the Industrial Revolution, the Age of Faith, the Scientific Revolution, the Renaissance, the Reformation, the Age of Enlightenment, the Technology Revolution, and now the Information Age while the Secular Age as such is not defined.

Doubt and misgivings are often the spark to lift our species out of its comfort zone to eventually soar.  We seldom think of motivation being so mundane, but it was quite apparent in the monasteries of the Middle Ages when monks with too much time on their hands followed their curiosity to the dismay of the Catholic Church, a curiosity that led to science, philosophy, and psychology.  Words and ideas are present and mutually interdependent in this narrative over mainly the last 500 years.

Words have led to systems of thought, and these systems have led to constructs by which we now live called by their advocates in a political sense as democracies, oligarchies, and theocracies, and institutionally as universities, corporations, think tanks, governments, and other citadels of intrigue.   

With these many millenniums as our history, we are running out of room, running out of water, running out of food, and running out of fresh air to breathe that continues unabated unless and until we change our ways of thinking, behaving, and living.

The irony is that with our species exalted consciousness and problem-solving capabilities we have become slaves to our appetites, and want our cake and eat it, too.  This has unwittingly placed the survival of our species in jeopardy, as we are still obsessed with the new, failing to see with every new thing, something is lost with “cut & control” finality.

This observer has enjoyed a long life born when President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Adolph Hitler were coming to power which was in the era of The Great Depression, and on the eve of what would become the Second World War in which over one hundred million would perish.  It is this shortsightedness that I have come to identify our species with as NOWHERE MAN seeing him ineluctably moving into NOWHERE LAND.  And for that reason, I have written this book. 

[In the first sixteen years of this new century, I worked off and on to create 24 essays.  Philosopher and novelist, Charles D. Hayes suggested that I post these as 24 individual essays on Amazon's Kindle, which I did in 2016, and now is this book.  The title is credited to Ken Shelton, author, publisher, consultant, and friend who is familiar with my work.]

 

 

 

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

Over the course of 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 the Conquistador Francisco Pizarro, marking the beginning of Spanish rule.

The remnants of the empire retreated to the remote jungles of Vilcabamba and established the small Neo-Inca State, which was conquered by the Spanish in 1572.

View from Qalla Q'asa to Andenes

The Ruins of Pisac sit atop a hill at the entrance to the valley. The ruins are separated along the ridge into four groups: P'isaqa, Inti Watana, Qalla Q'asa, and Kinchiraqay.

Inti Watana group includes the Temple of the Sun, baths, altars, water fountains, a ceremonial platform, and an Inti Watana, a volcanic outcrop carved into a "hitching post for the Sun" (or 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.

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 Ollantaytambo 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 is 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.

Aztec Ruins after disappearing civilization

After the fall of Inca city of Tahuantinsuyu, the new Spanish rulers suppressed the people and their traditions throughout the Americas. Many aspects of the Inca culture, for example, were systematically destroyed including its sophisticated farming system. The Spanish forced every family to supply one member of the family to labor in the gold and silver mines or work on a Spanish plantation. When a family member died, and many such laborers did in a year or two, the family was forced to provide another family member.

Interestingly, the major languages of the Incas were Quechua and Aymara, which somehow survived to this day despite the Catholic Church’s attempt to evangelize the people into Spanish. Indigenous languages with the Maya and Aztecs managed to survive but in less in their original form.

ENTER CHRISTIAN MISSIONARIES IN SOUTH AMERICA

Christians enter South America

There is a humane and inhumane interpretation of the second wave of Spanish colonization in the Americas led by the missionaries. Through conquest and brutal occupation, along with the disease that the Conquistadors brought with them from Europe to a native population without the immune system to fight these diseases, the people who were still alive were vulnerable to any kind of kindness.

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 the 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.

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 play 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 Aztecs were a people who created a presence in the Valley of Mexico around the 12th century and quickly rose to become the dominant power in Mesoamerica. The capital was Tenochtitlan which was built on the raised island of Lake Texcoco. The Aztecs were aggressive warriors and demanded tribute from other city-states in Mesoamerica. A religious society, the Aztecs practiced human sacrifice as part of their religious ritual, as did other civilizations in Mesoamerica.

The Aztec nation was at the peak of its power when it was destroyed by the Spanish Conquistador Hernan Cortes and his army. Once in power, Cortes built Mexico City on Aztec ruins of the destroyed Tenochtitlan.

After the fall of the Inca city of Tahuantinsuyu, the new Spanish rulers suppressed the people and their traditions throughout the Americas. Many aspects of the Inca culture, for example, were systematically destroyed including its sophisticated farming system. The Spanish forced every family to supply one member of the family to labor in the gold and silver mines or work on a Spanish plantation. When a family member died, and many such laborers did in a year or two, the family was forced to provide another family member.

Interestingly, the major languages of the Incas were Quechua and Aymara, which somehow survived to this day despite the Catholic Church’s attempt to evangelize the people into Spanish. Indigenous languages with the Maya and Aztecs managed to survive but in less in their original form.

ENTER CHRISTIAN MISSIONARIES IN SOUTH AMERICA

There is a humane and an inhumane interpretation of the second wave of Spanish colonization in the Americas led by the missionaries. Through conquest and brutal occupation, along with the disease that the Conquistadors brought with them from Europe to a native population without the immune system to fight these diseases, the people who were still alive were vulnerable to any kind of kindness.

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,

Antonio de Montesinos, the Dominican friar, preached against slavery of indigenous people

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 although it did not demand conversion. Slavery was part of the local population's culture before the arrival of the conquistadors.  

On December 1511, the Dominican friar Antonio de Montesinos openly rebuked the Spanish authorities governing Hispaniola for their mistreatment of the American natives, telling them "... you are in a mortal sin ... for the cruelty and tyranny you use in dealing with these innocent people".

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 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:

Pope Gregory XVI condemned slavery and backed it with an aggressive pontificate.

“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.”

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 id 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 Tepayac 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.

Virgin of Guadalupe

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.

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.

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