I am going to try to write a bit further about the role that religion has likely played in the collective trauma that afflicts many Latin American people. My scope and my knowledge are scant and limited, and really, the purpose of this and other essays on this blog, among other things, is to get a sense of what I already know, and then to work on learning the things I know poorly, inaccurately, or not at all.
As I understand it, the Roman Catholic Church was particularly complicit in the colonization of Latin America. After determining that the so-called "savages" of the New World were indeed human beings, if of a perceived inferior order, the Church would want to be after their souls. This is so problematic and in so many ways that I really don't know where to begin.
I am reminded here of a very futile near-argument I had with a born-again atheist who made some disparaging remarks about the Christian faith based on the Spanish Inquisition, among other things, and not wanting to trouble myself with battling with a closed mind, I politely changed the subject.
This is the approach I generally take now with people like her. So much damage has been done to the beautiful message of the Christian faith by the Church, its purported representative, that one has to very patiently explore, understand and explain things in the most excruciating detail and even then there is no guarantee of being heard or understood.
Before the Church ruined the message of the Gospel of Jesus Christ, here is what it was about:
A small band of followers, empowered by the Holy Spirit, opted to keep alive the message, mission and work that Jesus began through his ministry. It was a message of love, redemption, mercy, justice and spiritual renewal all centred in Jesus as God made manifest in our fallen and broken humanity; God suffering shame, torture and death, and was executed as a common criminal. God breaking asunder the bonds of death as he rose from the dead on the third day. God, still as Jesus, breathing new life, hope, strength and power into his disempowered and frightened disciples. And God breathing anew his presence as the Holy Spirit into his faithful followers on the day of Pentecost.
The early Church, persecuted, despised and unwelcome throughout the Roman Empire, remained strong, thriving and growing despite all the atrocities wrought against it. Not through military might, nor through armed resistance, but through enduring love, forgiveness and prayer did they thrive and grow.
It was alone the presence and fullness of the Holy Spirit that made this possible: I am unable to locate the quote from Blaise Pascal in his Pensees but he did write about how the work of the Holy Spirit in the lives of the early believers transformed their lives to such an intensity where they gladly left everything to live in the fullness of God's love and truth. I would like to embellish this a little. The Early Church knew that God is love because the Spirit of the living God was so present to them. They lived without violence in a state of perpetual ethic.
When the church was legitimized by Constantine the Great and was made the official religion of the Roman Empire it had already lost its spiritual legitimacy. It became, and through the Dark Ages while trying to maintain and preserve some remaining vestige of Western Civilization, a political and military force that gave lip service to the Christ they purported to represent, but really went on to disgrace the name of our Saviour through their acts of cruelty and barbarism against vulnerable people. This isn't to say there weren't any good or godly people left, only that their presence was largely eclipsed and often persecuted by the ugly and unwieldy political and military force it had become. Nothing at all in common with the Christ who became so very poor and vulnerable for us and who identified with the poor, oppressed and despised of the earth.
This is the corrupted and degraded form of Christianity that governed Rome and endorsed the Inquisition and the cruel treatment and genocide against Spanish Jews, Muslims and anyone else who didn't do exactly as they were told. This was the kind of Christianity that controlled and influenced the Spain of Queen Isabel and King Fernando (Isabella and Ferdinand in English). And this is the little shop of horrors that Columbus, Cortez, Pizarro and others brought on their ships to Mexico and South America, giving them license to slaughter the heathen natives and forcibly convert the survivors to a Christian faith that they likely themselves didn't believe in and certainly did not in any way, shape or form, reflect in the way they lived or treated people.
Understanding these things about the Christian church are essential for getting a grasp of the influence and impact of the Catholic religion on the developing cultures of Latin America.
No comments:
Post a Comment