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mrsdizzyd
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And this is an institution that is still directly affiliated with the church? Does the church have administrative control of this institution?
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And this is an institution that is still directly affiliated with the church? Does the church have administrative control of this institution?
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MarthaSo
Guest
That is something I don’t know, is there a way to find out?
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phil19034
Guest
Is this a college or a high school? Is it associated with a religious order or no?
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mrsdizzyd
Guest
I don’t know. My first thought would be to either check the school’s about page or contact the diocese and ask.
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MarthaSo
Guest
It’s a college. run by the Congregation of the Mission of the RC Church.
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tad
Guest
That’s an enticing sentiment so it’s understandable how it’s so popular today among Catholics and non-Catholics alike. However, after reading Pope Francis’s address to Indigenous leaders in Bolivia on his Apostolic Journey in 2015 I’m compelled to think differently.
Here I wish to bring up an important issue. Some may rightly say, “When the Pope speaks of colonialism, he overlooks certain actions of the Church”. I say this to you with regret: many grave sins were committed against the native peoples of America in the name of God. My predecessors acknowledged this, CELAM, the Council of Latin American Bishops, has said it, and I too wish to say it. Like Saint John Paul II, I ask that the Church – I repeat what he said – “kneel before God and implore forgiveness for the past and present sins of her sons and daughters”.[6] I would also say, and here I wish to be quite clear, as was Saint John Paul II: I humbly ask forgiveness, not only for the offenses of the Church herself, but also for crimes committed against the native peoples during the so-called conquest of America. Together with this request for forgiveness and in order to be just, I also would like us to remember the thousands of priests and bishops who strongly opposed the logic of the sword with the power of the Cross. There was sin, a great deal of it, for which we did not ask pardon. So for this, we ask forgiveness, I ask forgiveness. But here also, where there was sin, great sin, grace abounded through the men and women who defended the rights of indigenous peoples.
http://w2.vatican.va/content/france...esco_20150709_bolivia-movimenti-popolari.html
Also, it would be easier to look past the sins of the past if Indigenous peoples weren’t still being exploited and marginalized. The ill effects of colonialism are still with us. Not much has changed.
I thought it was incumbent on Catholics to try to reconcile with other groups where we can. As with some protestants, dialogue isn’t always possible, but I think we should at least try to have a better awareness and understanding of NDN issues where we can. As you and Pope Francis affirmed, it wasn’t all bad. As a convert who sees the continuity of the 2000 years of our faith I seriously wonder what those relationships with Indigenous people’s really looked like.
Personally, I think we need to get past the arguments that some NDN’s shared in our brutality or dismiss our actions because they weren’t as bad as the protestants and acknowledge that the actions of our Church are still imprinted on their descendants, that generational trauma is a real thing and justice has not yet been realized.
Tis_Bearself
Patron
First of all, beware of making some assumption that when people don’t share your view, they lack “awareness” or need it raised. I personally am pretty aware of the history on both sides in USA, though I wouldn’t call myself a historian or an expert.
Second, we need to be able to discuss the facts of a situation, which includes violence and barbaric practices done by indigenous people as well as foreign colonialists, in order to put the actions of both sides into proper perspective. It’s not that violence by side A “justifies” violence by side B, but rather that it makes it more understandable how the whole situation occurred. We do ourselves no favors when we overlook the acts of one side, regardless of which side we’re overlooking.
Third, the Pope apologizing on behalf of the Church is his place to do. He is the leader of the Church. He makes statements from a leadership perspective as the head of the Church. This is entirely different from me personally making apologies for Catholicism. I don’t feel the ordinary Catholics in the pews need to go around apologizing for being Catholic, or apologizing for the acts of past Catholics who did bad things, whether it’s colonialists or abusive priests. Apologies if any should come from the leadership.
People constantly would like to undermine our faith by telling us that some Catholics in the past did bad things so our religion is corrupt and we are fostering the corruption. I’m not buying into that. I can pray for sinners and victims, including past sinners and victims, but I don’t see it as my place to apologize for what they did. Likewise, I can try to understand someone else’s perspective and be sensitive to it, but that doesn’t mean I am going to take a lot of blame on myself for something that happened hundreds of years ago. That is unproductive and makes no sense. Literally all of us would be blaming ourselves for past sins of others if that were the case, since I don’t think any historical group has managed to entirely avoid doing rotten things, and most of us would be bearing the sins of multiple historical groups that we have some ancestry in or connection to.
Second, we need to be able to discuss the facts of a situation, which includes violence and barbaric practices done by indigenous people as well as foreign colonialists, in order to put the actions of both sides into proper perspective. It’s not that violence by side A “justifies” violence by side B, but rather that it makes it more understandable how the whole situation occurred. We do ourselves no favors when we overlook the acts of one side, regardless of which side we’re overlooking.
Third, the Pope apologizing on behalf of the Church is his place to do. He is the leader of the Church. He makes statements from a leadership perspective as the head of the Church. This is entirely different from me personally making apologies for Catholicism. I don’t feel the ordinary Catholics in the pews need to go around apologizing for being Catholic, or apologizing for the acts of past Catholics who did bad things, whether it’s colonialists or abusive priests. Apologies if any should come from the leadership.
People constantly would like to undermine our faith by telling us that some Catholics in the past did bad things so our religion is corrupt and we are fostering the corruption. I’m not buying into that. I can pray for sinners and victims, including past sinners and victims, but I don’t see it as my place to apologize for what they did. Likewise, I can try to understand someone else’s perspective and be sensitive to it, but that doesn’t mean I am going to take a lot of blame on myself for something that happened hundreds of years ago. That is unproductive and makes no sense. Literally all of us would be blaming ourselves for past sins of others if that were the case, since I don’t think any historical group has managed to entirely avoid doing rotten things, and most of us would be bearing the sins of multiple historical groups that we have some ancestry in or connection to.
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Thorolfr
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Churches are in a different position from other actors from the past because of the claims that they make about themselves. When they claim that they are somehow guided by God, then bad actions that happened in the past are more difficult to explain, especially when they were perpetrated by people in authority.
To my mind, the issue of slavery is especially problematic for Christianity in general because of the all the scriptural verses that make it sound as if God condoned it. Christians are then put in the position of making apologies for past slavery by saying that slavery back then was not as bad as other kinds of slavery. They try to make distinctions between “chattel slavery” and another kind of slavery that they liken to indentured servanthood. Nevertheless, a man who was captured by the Romans in war and made into a slave who did back breaking work in the mines probably had just as miserable a life as any black slave in the south working in the cotton fields. And texts from the Late Roman Empire in the 2nd and 3rd centuries show that Christians owned slaves and were admonished by their bishops not to beat them too much, but nevertheless agreeing that it was OK to beat disobedient slaves.
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Thorolfr
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This doesn’t mean that these men think they’re women or that this has anything to do with the Transgender issue. It’s just a form of entertainment. As Wikipedia says:
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JimR-OCDS
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What I read from a historian on the subject, was that it wasn’t the Fransicans who kept indigenous people from leaving the mission, but the native’s themselves.
The reason was that some of the natives were sneaking females outside of the mission to be used as prostitutes for the Spanish Soldiers. When they were caught sneaking back in, the natives themselves beat the men who were pimping the girls.
St Serra, had nothing to do with beating as was alleged
Jim
The reason was that some of the natives were sneaking females outside of the mission to be used as prostitutes for the Spanish Soldiers. When they were caught sneaking back in, the natives themselves beat the men who were pimping the girls.
St Serra, had nothing to do with beating as was alleged
Jim
Tis_Bearself
Patron
People back then often had miserable lives in general. Being a slave then probably had tradeoffs that being a slave in the 1800s didn’t. I’m not saying slavery is okay, but the reality is that slavery in Biblical times was largely an accepted way of life. As time goes by, humans learn and evolve and understand it is not a good thing, but learning takes time, sometimes generations.
To give another example, women were often treated as property of their father or husband or any man who laid claim to them then, and had few rights of their own. This too is in the Bible, but over time humans realized this was also not a good thing.
The Bible is in some senses a historical document. The life reflected in it is far from Jesus’ ideal.
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Thorolfr
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But Scripture does more than just turn a blind eye to slavery, not mentioning it and neither condemning it or approving of it. It has God explicitly saying that it’s OK for one human being to own another human being as “a possession” and even for those slaves to be inherited “as property” by the slave owner’s heirs. It has God speaking of people as if they were things:Thorolfr:
People back then often had miserable lives in general. Being a slave then probably had tradeoffs that being a slave in the 1800s didn’t. I’m not saying slavery is okay, but the reality is that slavery in Biblical times was largely an accepted way of life. As time goes by, humans learn and evolve and understand it is not a good thing, but learning takes time, sometimes generations.
To give another example, women were often treated as property of their father or husband or any man who laid claim to them then, and had few rights of their own. This too is in the Bible, but over time humans realized this was also not a good thing.
The Bible is in some senses a historical document. The life reflected in it is far from Jesus’ ideal.
Leviticus 25:44-46:
If all these things in scripture which seem to condone slavery weren’t there, slave owners in the South would have had less of a way of supporting their use of slaves. Instead, they quoted scripture.
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Tis_Bearself
Patron
Leviticus and the other Scripture containing Mosaic Jewish law contains many other rules that made sense at the time in their historical context, but do not today. There is one about not wearing clothing of two mixed fibers, and another about a weird test to see if a woman committed adultery, and food prohibitions. We are not expected to follow rules today that clearly do not apply or have usefulness to our culture. The Vatican has done a good job of setting forth what we need to follow. We do not rely on those old Scriptures and our interpretations of them, certainly not to justify slavery when the Church teaches us respect for human dignity.
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Thorolfr
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Regulations about what kinds of material your clothes can be made of seem different to me than what Leviticus says about slavery. If our Christian God is the same as the God of the Old Testament, I still don’t understand how God could ever have thought that it was OK for one human being to own another. Everyone claims that God doesn’t change. I also don’t understand why people say that what God said 2000 or 3000 years ago about homosexuality, for example, still applies today but what God said back then about slavery doesn’t apply any more.
And it’s not just the Old Testament that says troubling things about slavery:
And it’s not just the Old Testament that says troubling things about slavery:
If being a slave was a good thing 2000 years ago since it allowed people to suffer unjustly like Christ, then why isn’t it still a good thing today? It even says that people have been “called” to be slaves.
So, if it was good to honor slave owners back then, why isn’t it still good to honor slave owners?
This stuff on slavery in scripture is one of the things that causes me the most doubts about being a Christian.
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Tis_Bearself
Patron
They are both regulations and they are both in Leviticus. Along with the ones about menstruating women being unclean.
Sorry, but all I’m seeing is that you have seized upon one rule that you have decided is more crucial than all the other rules so you can conveniently ignore the historical context of the OT rules.
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Thorolfr
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So, how do you explain what Scripture says about slavery in the New Testament? Should slaves in the Old South have also honored their masters and obeyed them with fear and trembling even when those masters treated them harshly? And since most slave owners in the South were Christians, was it required for their slaves to “not be disrespectful to them on the ground that they are members of the church”? Were those slaves who attempted to escape committing a sin by not staying with their masters and serving them obediently?
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Thorolfr
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There’s a reason that Native Americans in the US were not converted to Christianity to the same extent as those in Latin America and that’s because most of the ones in the US were pushed onto reservations whereas the ones in Latin America were assimilated and forced to convert and there were stiff punishments if any backsliding was discovered.
A good account of the Spanish conquest of the Yucatan is Inga Clendinan, Ambivalent Conquest: Maya and Spaniard in Yucatan, 1517-1570 (Cambridge University Press, 1987). She describes what happened to some backsliding Mayan Indians in 1561 when Diego de Landa (later Bishop of the Yucatan) was elected head (Provincial) of the Franciscans in Yucatan. Shortly after De Landa took up his post, it was discovered that some of the Mayan Indians who had been forced to convert had been secretly keeping some idols from their old religion. De Landa therefore conducted an inquisition. According to a Spanish eyewitness (See Clendinan, Ambivalent Conquest, page 74):
Clendinan then goes on to say (p. 76):
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JimG
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Of course, missionaries from Europe who came with the explorers were looking to save souls, just as St Paul’s mission trips to Gentile lands were for the purpose of saving souls.
The Missionary Zeal of Christopher Columbus
The Missionary Zeal of Christopher Columbus
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Mike_from_NJ
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I find that when people start using the term Mosaic Law to defend controversial concepts it’s a way to suggest that the laws derive more from Moses than from God. The passages in Leviticus and Exodus regarding slavery are said to come straight from the mouth of God.
On top of that, the rules in Exodus 21 (which are abominable under any context) are layed out in the very same speech where God introduces the Ten Commandments in Exodus 20. Surely we can’t brush them aside like other items in that speech based on squeamishness.
Has it though? We can look at the papal bull of Sublimus Dei in 1537 which the Church forbade enslaving the peoples of the Americas. Great, right? Not so fast. The bull was annulled a year later at the behest of the King of Spain. When it came time to stand up for what is right the Church chose capitulation. We then look at the many other bulls by the Church which allowed slavery and it’s safe to say that it has not done a good job of setting forth what we need to follow.
But the Church – which in the modern day is rightly against slavery – isn’t about finding the right interpretation for this Scriptures, it’s about ignoring them. Those Scriptures can’t be manipulated in such a way that they can be seen as right or good. No amount of doublespeak can alter the words that treat slaves as property to also make them say they respect human dignity.
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theCardinalbird
Guest
Are you saying that after this bull the Church allowed slavery?
Because it did not
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