Leonardo Boff - Justice, not Charity
Not long ago, I had a post about the Pope's remarks on the Church's mission in Latin America when he visited Brazil (Some Films for the Pope). Today I came across an online journal published by the Jesuits of Latin America - Mirada Global - and saw an article, The Forsaken Ones by Leonardo Boff, that touched on this subject. Here below is a little of it ...
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Surely when the Latin American bishops in Aparecida, Brazil, had to deal with the central issue of the mission of the Church, they must have faced the still unresolved historical question arising from the treatment afforded the native peoples of these lands, and the Afro descendents. Christianity in general was always sensitive to the poor, but implacable and ethnocentric when it came to cultural otherness. The other (the Indigenous and the Black) was considered an enemy, pagan and infidel. “Just wars” were waged against them and they were read The Requirement (a document written in Latin, recognizing the king as sovereign and the Pope as the representative of God), and if the document was not accepted, forced submission was legitimized. We must never forget that our society is based on great violence: on colonialism ........
This is why we were astonished when we quite recently heard that the first evangelization was “neither an imposition nor an alienation” and that trying to rehabilitate the religions of our ancestors would be “a backward movement and a regression”. Confronted with this, we cannot but hear the voice of the victims echoing into the present, witnesses of the other side of the conquest, such as the voice of the Mayan prophet, Chilam Balam de Chumayel: “Oh!, let us grieve because they arrived... They came to make our flowers whither away, so that only their flower may live... They came to castrate the sun.” And their lamentation continues: “Sadness was introduced among us, Christianity... That was the beginning of our misery, the beginning of our slavery.”
According to Oswald Spengler in The Decline of the West, the Iberian invasion was the greatest genocide in human history. Destruction amounted to around 90% of the population. Of the 22 million Aztecs in 1519, when Hernán Cortés entered Mexico, by only one million was left by 1600. And the survivors, as expressed by the theologian Jon Sobrino, are crucified peoples hanging from the cross. The mission of the Church is to take them down from that cross, and bring them back to life ........
The mission of the Church is one of justice, not charity: to reinforce the rescue of ancient cultures with their soul that is their religion, and after that, to establish a dialogue in which both parties’ complements, purifies and mutually evangelizes one other.
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Surely when the Latin American bishops in Aparecida, Brazil, had to deal with the central issue of the mission of the Church, they must have faced the still unresolved historical question arising from the treatment afforded the native peoples of these lands, and the Afro descendents. Christianity in general was always sensitive to the poor, but implacable and ethnocentric when it came to cultural otherness. The other (the Indigenous and the Black) was considered an enemy, pagan and infidel. “Just wars” were waged against them and they were read The Requirement (a document written in Latin, recognizing the king as sovereign and the Pope as the representative of God), and if the document was not accepted, forced submission was legitimized. We must never forget that our society is based on great violence: on colonialism ........
This is why we were astonished when we quite recently heard that the first evangelization was “neither an imposition nor an alienation” and that trying to rehabilitate the religions of our ancestors would be “a backward movement and a regression”. Confronted with this, we cannot but hear the voice of the victims echoing into the present, witnesses of the other side of the conquest, such as the voice of the Mayan prophet, Chilam Balam de Chumayel: “Oh!, let us grieve because they arrived... They came to make our flowers whither away, so that only their flower may live... They came to castrate the sun.” And their lamentation continues: “Sadness was introduced among us, Christianity... That was the beginning of our misery, the beginning of our slavery.”
According to Oswald Spengler in The Decline of the West, the Iberian invasion was the greatest genocide in human history. Destruction amounted to around 90% of the population. Of the 22 million Aztecs in 1519, when Hernán Cortés entered Mexico, by only one million was left by 1600. And the survivors, as expressed by the theologian Jon Sobrino, are crucified peoples hanging from the cross. The mission of the Church is to take them down from that cross, and bring them back to life ........
The mission of the Church is one of justice, not charity: to reinforce the rescue of ancient cultures with their soul that is their religion, and after that, to establish a dialogue in which both parties’ complements, purifies and mutually evangelizes one other.
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posted by crystal | 11:38 AM
6 Comments:
Wow, powerfully put. I'm always amazed at how far poeple wishing to defend the Church at all cost, are willing to put their heads in the sand when it comes to the true effects of colonialism and the often active role the Church hierarchy played in it. I make a distinction between the hierarchy itself and the missionaries in particular, many of whom spoke out against oppresive policies to their own detriment.
Hi Cura,
yes, from what little I've read, the missions were often a refuge and protection from secular slavery and other bad stuff, not to mention the positive benefits. I'm not sure how historically accurate the movie The Mission was, but it gave what I thought was a good example of the good missions did.
From what I know of the history of the times, the missionaries themselves tended to be quite polarized (and thus wonderfully and distressingly human) between those who did much good and those who did some pretty horrible things. In general those who did good found themselevs often at odds with their Church while the latter took what the Church was saying and 'ran with it' so-to-speak.
That reminds me of St. Peter Claver SJ, who helped slaves brought to the new world. Almost everyone thought he was wrong to give the sacraments to "creatures" but the Jesuit Order backed him up.
What a tragic history Latin America has.
There are a few things I'd offer in meager defense of the Spanish, however. Much of that population decimation was the result of disease, which you might say was inadvertant, and even if they wanted to prevent the spread of disease, they wouldn't have known how.
Furthermore, the way I learned it in public school, the Spaniard in the New World did not consider the Native American beneath marrying, which is why Latin America has such a large, mixed "mestizo" community. They also didn't consider them to be beneath evangelizing. The English on the other hand, largely considered the Native American to be almost sub-human, and no "self-respecting" Englishman would take a squaw as a wife. Very few groups considered the Indians worth evangelizing, as they were "obviously" damned savages. Instead of mixing with the native population, the English were more likely wont to keep pushing them west or to simply exterminate them.
The saga of the Native American population in Latin America was tragic, but they have not been exterminated as race, as they have been, for all intents and purposes, in North America.
Hi Jeff,
it is interesting, the differences in how the Native Americans were treated in Soth America, North America (and Canada?). Speaking of the English and marrying, that makes me think of Pocahontas and Englishman John Rolfe. When I was writing about that movie, The New World, I saw this at Wikipedia ...
He [Rolfe] was a pious man who agonized over the potential moral repercussions of marrying a heathen. In a long letter to the governor requesting permission to wed her, he expressed both his love for her and his belief that he would be saving her soul. He claimed he was not motivated by "the unbridled desire of carnal affection, but for the good of this plantation, for the honor of our country, for the Glory of God, for my own salvation… namely Pocahontas, to whom my hearty and best thoughts are, and have been a long time so entangled, and enthralled in so intricate a labyrinth that I was even a-wearied to unwind myself thereout." Pocahontas's own feelings about Rolfe and the marriage are unknown.
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