Colonization had shadows, light

Pope fleshes out comments on Church's effect on native people

By CINDY WOODEN
Catholic News Service
Vatican City

Pope Benedict said the colonization of the Americas brought injustices and sufferings to the native peoples, but it also opened the way to the proclamation of the Gospel and a unique "dialogue of faith and culture."

The pope used his May 23 general audience to review what he called his "unforgettable" May 9-13 visit to Brazil.

"My trip first of all had the value of being an act of praise to God for the marvels worked among the peoples of Latin America, for the faith that has animated their lives and cultures for more than 500 years," he said.

The pope said the Catholic faith has and continues to be part of the living history of the Latin American peoples as seen in their "popular piety and art in dialogue with the rich pre-Columbian traditions and then with the multiple influences of Europe and the other continents."

Pope Benedict's comments at the audience appeared to be a response to some criticisms raised over his remarks in Brazil that the Catholic faith was not "the imposition of a foreign culture" on the region's indigenous peoples.

The pope said that in remembering the continent's history, "one cannot ignore the shadows that accompanied the work of the evangelization of the Latin American continent."

"It is not possible, in fact, to forget the sufferings and injustices inflicted by the colonizers on the indigenous populations whose human and basic rights often were trampled," he said.

Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez led the charge of criticism against the pope by demanding that he apologize for saying that Europeans did not impose Catholicism on native Americans.

"How can (the pope) go and say that they came - when they came with rifles to evangelize - that they came with no kind of imposition?" Chavez said in a mid-May broadcast over Venezuelan radio and television.

In his criticisms, Chavez called the death of Aboriginal people after the European conquest "something much worse than the Holocaust in the Second World War."

According to many historians, as many as 90 per cent of the Americas' indigenous people died following the arrival of Europeans. The great majority of those people were killed by common European diseases, such as measles and typhus, against which the Americans had no natural resistance.

However, others were killed by forced labour, massacres and in wars of conquest. On some Caribbean islands, not a single full-blooded native survived the European onslaught.

Invaders from Spain, Portugal and other Catholic nations often used the spreading of Catholicism as justification for their conquests. The popes endorsed the conquest of the Americas, even dividing the New World between Spain and Portugal.

However, some priests - including the famous Dominican Father Bartolome de las Casas - fought to protect the native Americans from murder and exploitation. Later, the papacy created rules to protect indigenous peoples, although these were widely ignored.

In those parts of America conquered and settled by Protestant nations, the history was similar.

Chavez has emphasized expanding the rights of Venezuela's tiny and impoverished indigenous minority and has ordered foreign Protestant missionaries working in indigenous regions to leave the country.

Missionaries blamed

The Chavez government also created a new post of minister for indigenous peoples. The minister, Nizia Maldonado, said the imposition of foreign beliefs had not ceased, citing the activities of "the missionaries who continue working in frontier regions."

At his audience, the pope said, "the obligatory mention of the unjustifiable crimes" committed against the continent's indigenous peoples, "crimes that even then were denounced by missionaries like Bartolome de las Casas" must not prevent people from giving thanks for "the marvellous work carried out by divine grace among those peoples over the course of the centuries."

The Gospel and the local cultures, he said, came together in a "dynamic synthesis" that now forms "the identity of the Latin American people."

Pope Benedict said that in the era of globalization "this Catholic identity presents itself as the most appropriate response, if it is animated by a serious spiritual formation and the principles of the social doctrine of the Church."

Environmental plus

Christian culture, he said, "could give life to a reconciliation between human beings and creation." It could recognize a religious obligation to protect the environment and to share the goods of the earth for the benefit of all humanity.

"Holiness is the true revolution that can transform society and cultures," the pope said.

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