Reading: Catholic Conquest of Latin America

Christian History Magazine, Issue 35

Cross and Sword: Catholic Conquest of Latin America

By Pablo A. Deiros

The Spain that sought political conquest also served as powerful patron of the Christian religion.

IN CENTRAL AND SOUTH AMERICA —an expanse two times as large as the continental United States—Spain and Portugal tried to build empires. Conquering so vast a continent seems an impossible enterprise. Only people of great ambitions could have the firmness of decision and the mystical push to face such a challenge.

The Spanish had that kind of firmness and mystical push. The Spain that sought political conquest also served as powerful patron of the Christian religion. Consequently, the vast expanse that saw cruelties of conquest and exploitation (which still affect Latin America) also witnessed heroic faith and spiritual zeal (which still cradle the popular piety and culture of these lands).

So this question puzzles us: How could one nation conquer the New World using both faith and violence, without apparent contradiction?

The Crusades Continued

The Crusades against Islam, begun in 1096, marked the first time the people of medieval Europe attempted to act together in a Christian cause. Most of the Crusades ended in defeat, however, and the eastern campaigns were interrupted about the year 1291.

But on the western borders of Christendom the conflict with Islamic power continued for two more centuries. On the Iberian Peninsula—home of modern Spain and Portugal—the battle against Islam had started in the eighth century and continued to the fifteenth century. During eight long centuries of struggle against the Muslims, military tenacity and religious zeal melted together.

This combination of elements—political and religious—rendered possible Spain’s conquest of the Americas. One writer put it this way: “The religious unity became a political program and national unity a religious passion.”

John A. Mackay, in his The Other Spanish Christ, adds this: “The new [world] crusaders were enlisted from knights and monks who thronged the Peninsula. The souls of those classic personages had so intermingled in the long wars against the Moor, . . . that the typical resultant was an ascetic paladin and a martial monk. There was a monk in every helmet and a knight in every cowl.”

With the same zeal and spirit shown in the Peninsula, then, these frontier fighters crusaded against the native empires of the Americas. Subduing pagan people was considered the necessary preliminary to converting them. “Who doubts that the gunpowder against the Indians is incense to the Lord?” said one sixteenth-century Spaniard.

Rugged Character

How could 180,000 Spanish explorers and conquerors skirt the shores from Greenland to Cape Horn to Oregon, explore large sections of both Americas, found more than two hundred settlements, and transplant bodily to more than half the New World their language, religion, social customs, and political institutions? These accomplishments can be understood only by comprehending the complex genius of those who came from the Iberian Peninsula.

As one scholar put it, “They brought the Spaniard’s intense awareness of his dignity as an individual, his quick appreciation of the dramatic and heroic, his keen sense of personal honor. They were on fire with an almost fanatical religious belief in divine mission and protection. . . . And they settled the New World with an imperial disregard for relative distances, perils, and hardships for which the modern world has no equal.”

The early arrivals to New England were ordinary citizens. The early arrivals to New Spain, besides priests, were usually Spanish soldiers, conquistadores. To understand these fierce soldier/explorers is to understand the nature of the conquest.

Hernando Cortés and Francisco Pizarro led tiny bands of men against the huge Aztec and Inca empires. They could perform this incredible feat because they were unusually brave, resourceful, and religious. They were equally eager to spread the gospel, conquer new lands for their king, and to get rich. They had no difficulty combining these surprisingly different motives.

Love and Cruelty

Since the early years of the Conquest, Spanish action in the Americas has caused hard discussions. The issue remains complex.

For some historians, Spanish colonization was an enterprise of pillage, inflamed and inflated by religious fanaticism and martial vanity. Other scholars point to the humanitarian laws of the Indies, the merciful attitude of more than one conquistador, and particularly the self-denying service of many priests. They intend to prove the enlightened nature of the Spanish conquest and colonial system.

In the end, we must recognize in the Spanish heritage—and the dynamic individuals who incarnated it—the spirits of both war and compassion.

Dr. Pablo A. Deiros is pastor of Central Baptist Church in Buenos Aires, Argentina, and director of post-graduate studies at the International Baptist Theological Seminary in Buenos Aires.

Lights in the Darkness

By Justo L. González

As sincere believers marched to subjugate a continent, other Christians had to oppose them.

IT WAS of the bleakest times in the history of Christianity. In the name of Christ, thousands were slaughtered, millions enslaved, entire civilizations wiped out.

When the first Europeans settled in Hispaniola, there were some 100,000 native inhabitants on the island. Half a century later, there were scarcely 500. In Mexico, in seventy-five years the population declined from more than 23 million to 1.4 million; in Peru, in fifty years, from 9 million to 1.3 million. Military conquest, new diseases, wanton slaughter, forced labor, poor nutrition, and mass suicides contributed to these gruesome statistics. Behind all of it, as ultimate justification for the enterprise, stood the name of Christ.

In the name of Christ, natives were dispossessed of their lands by means of the Requerimiento. This document informed the native owners and rulers of these lands that Christ’s vicar on earth had granted these lands to the crown of Castile. They could accept and submit to this, or be declared rebel subjects and destroyed by force of arms.

In the name of Christ, the natives were dispossessed of their freedom by means of the encomiendas. The crown entrusted natives—sometimes hundreds of them—to a Spanish conquistador to be taught the rudiments of the Christian faith. In exchange, the natives were to work for the conquistador—the encomendero. The system soon became a veiled form of slavery. Even worse, some encomenderos left the natives underfed and overworked to the point of death.

It was also in the name of Christ that native women were baptized before being raped or taken as concubines against their will. After all, Saint Paul had clearly said, “Do not be unequally yoked together with unbelievers.”

The explorers and conquistadors were not hypocrites who pretended to have faith. On the contrary, they were sincere believers. Columbus himself was something of a mystic. Hernando Cortés attended mass regularly—and especially before taking military action against the natives. The last action of Francisco Pizarro, perhaps the cruelest of the major conquistadors, was to draw a cross with his blood so he could die gazing upon it.

From their perspective, they were serving Christ by bringing millions to faith in him. They were serving the church by expanding her boundaries as never before. If, in the process, some were made to suffer, that was nothing compared to the sufferings of hell from which the natives were being saved. If, in the process, those who were bringing such great benefits to these lands became masters of the lands and their inhabitants, that was not to be begrudged. After all, “The laborer is worthy of his hire.”

Protest Erupts

That, however, was not the total picture. Many, because of their faith and their commitment to Jesus Christ, saw things differently.

Foremost among these were the Dominicans in Hispaniola. Their order had been founded by Dominic (1170–1221), who saw voluntary poverty as a means to render credible his friars’ preaching. This attitude set apart his followers, when the Albigensians, among others, were cruelly being forced by the church to recant heresy. Now in Hispaniola, Dominic’s spiritual descendants came to the conclusion that the often-cruel encomiendas were not proper means to bring the natives to Christ.

On December 21, 1511, Dominican Antonio de Montesinos mounted the pulpit. His text was Matthew 3:3, “A voice crying in the wilderness.” He said the conscience of theencomenderos seemed to be as sterile as a desert. But even in the desert the voice of God must be proclaimed:

“I have climbed to this pulpit to let you know of your sins, for I am the voice of Christ crying in the desert of this island, and therefore, you must not listen to me indifferently, but with all your heart and all your senses. . . . This voice tells you that you are in mortal sin; that you not only are in it, but live in it and die in it, and this because of the cruelty and tyranny that you bring to bear on these innocent people.

“Pray tell, by what right do you wage your odious wars on people who dwelt in quiet and peace on their own lands? [By what right have you] destroyed countless numbers of them with unparalleled murders and destruction? Why do you oppress and exploit them, without even giving them enough to eat, or caring for them when they become ill as a result of your exploitation? They die, or rather, you kill them, so that you may extract and obtain more and more gold every day. . . .

“Are they not human? Have they no souls? Are you not required to love them as you love yourselves? How can you remain in such profound moral lethargy? I assure you, in your present state you can no more be saved than Moors or Turks who do not have and even reject the faith of Jesus Christ!”

Montesinos’s audience sat almost too stunned to celebrate the Mass. Then they recovered their wits and angrily demanded a retraction. But the encomenderos soon learned that Montesinos’s sermon had been previously reviewed and signed by the other Dominicans in Hispaniola. Furthermore, their vicar, Pedro de Cordoba, followed Montesinos’s sermon with harsher action: All encomenderos would be excommunicated until their Indians were freed.

The encomenderos protested before the crown. King Ferdinand was incensed. On March 20, 1512, he wrote to Columbus: “I have seen the sermon to which you refer . . . and although he [Montesinos] was always a scandalous preacher, I am much surprised by what he said, which has no basis in theology, or canon or civil law, as all the learned declare, and I agree.”

The Dominicans in Hispaniola did not flinch. Their provincial (immediate superior) in Spain ordered them to recant. They stood firm. Eventually, the matter came to a debate before the king, and Montesinos himself participated. As a result of that debate, a special commission issued seven principles for the treatment of the natives, and these principles became law in December 1512.

Given the settlers’ greed and the difficulty of communicating over long distances, these laws were never obeyed (or, as the Spaniards said at the time, they were obedecidas y no cuinplidas, “obeyed but not done”). Therefore, the protest continued.

Spreading Opposition

The best-known leader in this second stage of the protest was Bartolomé de Las Casas, also a Dominican. Las Casas had once owned an encomienda but had relinquished it to protest the system’s abuses. He lived almost a century and traveled repeatedly across the Atlantic, going before the royal court to plead the case of the natives. He attempted to obtain new laws and rulings, then returned to the colonies—only to discover the settlers had found new ways to disobey and continue their exploitation of the natives.

The fame of Las Casas has eclipsed that of others who took a similar stance. Decades later in Chile, for example, stood another Dominican, Gil Gonzalez de San Nicholas. Gonzalez declared that anyone who waged war against the natives (in this case, the Araucanians of southern Chile) in order to take their lands should be excommunicated and denied confession. His fellow Dominicans agreed with him, and the Franciscans followed suit. As a result, the war effort faltered for lack of soldiers, and the Araucanians had a brief respite. Eventually, Gonzalez was silenced through a subterfuge, being declared a heretic on an unrelated matter.

In Paraguay, when European settlers began invading to capture slaves, the Jesuits armed the Indians and even organized them into an army that won several important victories against the slave hunters. According to an unsympathetic witness, the attitude of these Jesuits cost the crown forty million pesos—the tax due if the settlers had been allowed to exploit the lands and the natives.

As a result, according to another witness, “[The settlers] hate the Fathers of the Company [the Jesuits], because they are convinced that it is the Jesuits that keep them from all the profit that they could obtain for their farms and settlements from [the work of] the Indians of Paraguay.”

The list could be prolonged endlessly. Many early saints of South America—Luis Beltron, Toribio de Mogrovejo, Francisco Solano as well as hundreds of lesser figures were noted for defending the natives. Later, with the coming of black slaves, another generation of saints came to their defense: Pedro Claver and Martin de Porres, himself a mulatto.

In Spain, the question of natives’ rights in the “Indies” gave rise to a vigorous debate. Foremost among those who participated was Francisco de Vitoria, a Dominican professor at the University of Salamanca, who defended the natives as legitimate owners of their lands and possessions.

Light in Darkness

It is said that Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor and the Spanish king, because of concern about Conquest abuses, considered abandoning the American enterprise. While that report is probably exaggerated, it indicates the impact of these voices of protest. Undoubtedly, some natives enjoyed a brief respite thanks to the work of the “lights in the darkness.”

Yet the Conquest continued. To this day the native inhabitants of these regions continue to be exploited and harassed out of their ancestral lands. The protest over the natives’ treatment was seldom translated into practical action, except in limited areas for a short time.

Still, the light shone in the darkness. It is true that the exploitation and immense cruelties of the Conquest were done in the name of Christ, but it is also true that some in the same Name chose to live in solidarity with the exploited, and they persisted in their denunciations even before kings and prelates. If it is true that the Spanish Catholic church generally acquiesced in and supported one of the most inhumane episodes in history, it is also true that it produced internal protest and self-criticism.

Protestant Europeans later launched similar colonial enterprises in the Western Hemisphere. They were similarly inhumane toward native Americans. In those ventures, though, the earlier level of internal protest was never matched.

Dr. Justo L. González is adjunct professor of theology at Columbia Theological Seminary in Decatur, Georgia; and a member of the editorial advisory board of Christian History. Among his numerous books, in both Spanish and English is The Story of Christianity (Harper &Row 1985).