June 4, 2007 VOL. 45, NO. 11Oakland, CA

Pope’s remarks on indigenous
peoples evoke harsh criticism

By Catholic News Service

CARACAS, Venezuela (CNS) -- Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez has demanded that Pope Benedict XVI apologize for saying that Europeans did not impose Catholicism on native Americans.

“As chief of state, I implore His Holiness to offer apologies to the peoples of our America,” Chavez said in a mid-May broadcast over Venezuelan radio and television. “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?”

During his speech inaugurating the May 13-31 Fifth General Conference of the Bishops of Latin America and the Caribbean, Pope Benedict said Catholic missionaries’ early evangelization was not “the imposition of a foreign culture” on the region’s indigenous peoples, but led to “a synthesis between their cultures and the Christian faith.”

In recent years there has been renewed interest in traditional indigenous religions, particularly in Andean and Central American countries; an Indian theology movement of indigenous Catholic theologians also has arisen.

In an apparent reference to more radical movements that promote a revival of indigenous religions, the pope warned that “the utopia of going back to breathe life into the pre-Columbian religions ... would be a step back.”

He underscored the “rich and profound popular religiousness” that grew out of the melding of indigenous and Christian beliefs and is one of the most obvious outward expressions of Catholicism in Latin America. He called that tradition a “precious treasure” that “must be protected, promoted and, when necessary, purified.”

Indigenous groups in Latin America reacted harshly to the pope’s remarks.

“Surely the pope is unaware that representatives of the Catholic Church of that time, with some honorable exceptions, were accomplices and accessories to and beneficiaries of one of the most horrific genocides that humanity has seen,” Ecuarunari, an organization in Ecuador consisting mainly of Quichua people, said in a statement.

The pope’s words also came under scrutiny in Aparecida, Brazil, where more than 150 of the region’s bishops were gathered to define pastoral priorities. In response to repeated questions from journalists, bishops said the most controversial phrase was taken out of context.

“The Holy Father has not forgotten the dark side” of the colonization, when the indigenous experienced “great suffering (and) great injustices,” said Bishop Jose Yanguas Sanz of Cuenca, Spain, who represented his country’s bishops at the meeting.

Nevertheless, he said, 500 years of hindsight make it necessary to “distinguish between colonization or conquest and evangelization. They were contemporary (events), but were essentially different.”

In a statement on the Mexican bishops’ Web site, Bishop Felipe Arizmendi Esquivel of San Cristobal de Las Casas said, “The pope, a theologian by charism, was not offering us a history class, but a theological interpretation of history.”

Because indigenous cultures are “open to other cultures, particularly to the Gospel, it can be said that there was not an imposition of a foreign culture, because everything that is good in them is already a presence of God,” Bishop Arizmendi wrote.

Revisiting the issue at his general audience May 23, Pope Benedict said, “the obligatory mention of the unjustifiable crimes” committed against the continent’s indigenous peoples, “crimes that even then were denounced by missionaries like (Dominican Father) Bartolome de las Casas,” must not prevent people from giving thanks for “the marvelous work carried out by divine grace among those peoples over the course of the centuries.”

In his criticisms, Chavez called the death of native Americans after the European conquest “something much worse than the Holocaust in the Second World War.”
According to many historians, as many as 90 percent 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 labor, in 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 Father de las Casas -- fought to protect the native Americans from murder and exploitation. Later, the papacy created rules to protect native Americans, although these were widely ignored.
In those parts of America conquered and settled by Protestant nations, the history was similar.

In 2002 Chavez, who often refers to history in his speeches, changed the name of the traditional day celebrating the appearance of the Hispanic people after the European-American meeting to the Day of Indigenous Resistance.

He 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.

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