Historical objectivity has never been a strong point among leftist ideologues, as Pope Benedict recently discovered when he ventured to contradict the anti-Catholic myth of a genocidal evangelization in the Americas. Like most good myths, this is a confused mixture of facts and half-truths linked in an implausible chain of causality and intentions. The brutalities committed by the conquistadores are conflated with the commendable actions of Catholic missionaries, and the term “genocide” is abused to refer to the effects of diseases on the indigenous population. The falsity of this myth is amply demonstrated by the visible presence of people of indigenous and mixed races throughout Latin America, often seamlessly integrated into the population, whereas in condescending North America, the Indians are almost all either dead or on reservations.
The Pope’s offending statement was that “The proclamation of Jesus and of his Gospel did not at any point involve an alienation of the pre-Columbus cultures, nor was it the imposition of a foreign culture.” To accuse this erudite pontiff of a gross historical error is to reveal one’s own ignorance, but few leftists could resist the opportunity to trot out the tired old trope of an old man supposedly out of touch with reality. We are to ignore the fact that their supposed genocide rests on the implausible assumption of a pre-Columbian indigenous population many times greater than that of Europe, and also plays fast and loose with causality. It is a clumsy error indeed to say that because missionaries were later followed by opportunistic conquistadores that the former endorsed the actions of the latter. Even if that were the case, it would not affect the truth of the Pope’s statement, lost on careless minds, that evangelization itself did not involve the alienation of pre-Columbian cultures.
A fair-minded person can hardly avoid the conclusion that Catholic missionaries showed tremendous respect for indigenous cultures, in fact to the point that they were sometimes faulted with being too indulgent toward Indian traditions. The leftists ought to be red with shame for their display of historical ignorance, as evidenced by the career of Mexico’s first Archbishop Juan de Zumarraga, who lived among the Indians in friendly communion, as did many of his successors in the secular and regular clergy. Catholic missionaries learned Nahuatl and other indigenous languages, composing grammars and publishing histories in the indigenous tongues. Far from suppressing the indigenous cultures, they gave them a voice through the printed word. At times, they would even appeal on behalf of the Indians to the government, over matters such as relief from obligatory labor in the building of churches, or more famously, against more heinous crimes such as those related by the Jesuit Bartolome de Las Casas. Almost everything we know about crimes against the Indians in Latin America are related by outraged Catholic clerics.
In a twist of cruel hypocrisy, the accounts of Las Casas and others were used by the English as propaganda against their Spanish rivals, even as English pirates raided Spanish galleons with Crown’s blessing, privateers trafficked millions of Africans into slavery, and colonists warred with the Indians, who often sided with French Catholics. To this day, the accounts of Las Casas are cited for rhetorical purposes, without embedding them in the broader historical reality of ordinary relations between the Spanish and Indians, which, if even a tenth as bad as they are portrayed by the left, would never have resulted in a racially integrated Latin America. There would be hardly any mestizos and mulattos, but demographic reality unmistakably proclaims the contrary. In contrast, there was virtually no racial mixing in North America; the Indians practically vanished, and mulattos are such a rarity that there is no word for it in English. Many hand-wringing Caucasians fret over insubstantial disputes over terms like “Indian” or “mulatto”, but a non-bigoted society has no need for sensitivity over arbitrary labels.
Meanwhile, Hugo Chavez tries to appeal to impoverished indigenous peoples by repeating the myth of genocide, while he cynically consolidates his own power and suppresses dissent. We could hardly ask for a better illustration of the insincerity of supposed concern for indigenous peoples, when the real motivation is poorly disguised hatred of the Church. The Church has no army, so it is an easy target for weak-kneed revolutionaries who would certainly lack the temerity of those missionaries who went unarmed among the fiercest Indians of South America to preach the Gospel, even to be killed by their catechumens after years of living among them. For all the modern talk of respecting other cultures, few would have the courage to live this principle to that degree, once again showing how “tolerance” is grounded more in rhetoric than in action.
