The church and colonialism/indigenous societies

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sophia1000

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Hello,

I have been having a hard time with the history of the catholic church and all that it has done and how it’s wrong doings still have present effects in society. To elaborate further on it’s wrong doings, the church’s missionization really bothers me and many others because based on many credible documents that I have read, Native Americans (in California) were raped by Spanish soldiers and there seems to be no advocacy documented against this by the Spanish priests. Missionaries brought diseases, took land from Natives, basically blackmailed Natives to work for them for supply because their food had been diminished due to the hogs brought by the Spaniards. They’re just really dark happenings but all this gets painted over with the idea that Indigenous people needed God because they were referred to (and sadly still are) as savages. It’s quite disgusting, I have a hard time dealing with the fact that this was my church and I have not seen it try to correct these mistakes or acknowledge them. For example, the canonization of Father Junipero Serra… I understand the church contains regular people within it that are capable of doing harm but has the church taken responsibility regarding these issues? Even today, missionization still causes harmful effects on indigenous tribes such as bringing COVID-19 to these indigenous tribes. It’s apalling, these are the last of their people and they are being diminished over what we believe is holy obligation yet these people are dying or being mistreated. Also, a lot of Catholic missionaries try to pass on European ideals onto these indigenous tribes which is honestly gruesome. I think these people need to be left alone at some point, but that may be sacrilegious to say… which is my dilemma. What’s really right and what’s really wrong? Life is too precious and I feel for these underrepresented societies.

I hope that I did not offend anybody with my topic, I am still strong in my Catholic faith but there are a lot of things that don’t sit right with me. I want acknowledgment and representation for my indigenous people. I have article links if anybody would like to read what I am referring to.

Thank you.
 
Speaking as an unbeliever if you are going to be put off a Church because its leaders and members have done bad things well, you’d be better picking a newer Church. Catholics don’t claim to be anything other than sinners.

However, this will not stop innumerable posters responding to you with variants of:
  1. It was all for the good
  2. It wasn’t as bad as that
  3. Everyone else was doing it
  4. It was the custom back then
  5. The victims were even worse
  6. You can’t judge the past by the present
  7. Other people did it to us
  8. Other people were worse
  9. The people doing the murders and genocide did good things too.
And that’s before they get on to explaining that indentured labour was different from chattel slavery, ignoring the fact that indentured labour under coercion is really bad too.
 
You have forgotten #10: Yes, great evils happened. Even if the overall intentions were good, many who tried to do good wound up doing it ‘badly’, many people suffered unnecessarily. Hopefully all people have learned from this. Again, no Catholic is really going to say 1-9 ‘seriously’; what you will have is what people will SAY that Catholics claim.

Because, for example, a Catholic might say, “Yes, we are sorry for the wrongs that were done. We cannot say that individuals did not commit great evils, even if they were not intended (such as the introduction to the New World of ‘Old world’ diseases, brought by all ‘voyagers’ not simply missionaries, with disease transmission and possibilities of epidemics and pandemics not understood on either side). Though there were individuals such as St. Kateri Tekawitha, who embraced Christianity with joy, as well as those who fought Christianity and often died, the individual and collective good that came out of opening up the New World has to be balanced against the many individual and collective evils that came about as well.

Now just because I said that both individual and collective good (as well as evil) came about through the opening of the New World, including through missionaries, I wonder how many will ‘jump’ on the idea that any good whatsoever came about, or who will accuse me of trying the ‘end justifies the means’ argument.

For there are some for whom the ‘good’ of a person finding and loving God is no good at all; for these people, ‘god’ is a fiction and religion is a drug and a canker on society. While they might, some of them, find a good in a material gain (and that too has to be carefully gauged as to whether it is an ‘acceptable gain’ such as the opportunity for an education and a healthier life with no byproducts like drugs or despoiling the rain forests or buying junky US goods), the idea of spiritual gain is anathema, if one pardons the ‘religious’ reference.
 
sophia1000 said:
I hope that I did not offend anybody with my topic, I am still strong in my Catholic faith but there are a lot of things that don’t sit right with me. I want acknowledgment and representation for my indigenous people.
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These shouldn’t sit right with you. Atrocities are atrocities, and we should rightly condemn them no matter who perpetrates them, and most Catholics I know do.
That’s not a great answer. I’m sorry that I don’t know as much about this topic as I probably should. Could you post those articles, actually? I’d like to read them.
 
Could I just point out that aboriginal peoples were treated MUCH better by the French, Portuguese, and Spanish colonial authorities, than any of them were under Protestant ones like the English? Somehow, the fact that Paraguay and Mexico have mixed race majorities, and Brazil has a mixed race plurality seems to be forgotten these days.
 
FiveLinden said:
Speaking as an unbeliever if you are going to be put off a Church because its leaders and members have done bad things well, you’d be better picking a newer Church. Catholics don’t claim to be anything other than sinners.

However, this will not stop innumerable posters responding to you with variants of:
  1. It was all for the good
  2. It wasn’t as bad as that
  3. Everyone else was doing it
  4. It was the custom back then
  5. The victims were even worse
  6. You can’t judge the past by the present
  7. Other people did it to us
  8. Other people were worse
  9. The people doing the murders and genocide did good things too.
And that’s before they get on to explaining that indentured labour was different from chattel slavery, ignoring the fact that indentured labour under coercion is really bad too.
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Well, if someone gets to play a judge and a prosecutor, what is supposed to be so wrong with playing a defence lawyer?

So, we get to look for something that creates a reasonable doubt that a crime has been committed, for something that shows that a crime was actually less severe than it is claimed, for extenuating circumstances.
sophia1000 said:
Missionaries brought diseases,
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sophia1000 said:
Even today, missionization still causes harmful effects on indigenous tribes such as bringing COVID-19 to these indigenous tribes. It’s apalling, these are the last of their people and they are being diminished over what we believe is holy obligation yet these people are dying or being mistreated.
Click to expand...
And there were no diseases and no oppression there until the missionaries came…?

So, you should look at two possible scenarios.
  1. Missionaries come.
  2. Missionaries do not come.
Let’s compare them (using scenario 2 as baseline). In scenario 1 on minus side you have spread of some diseases, loss of some cultures, oppression by some governments. On the plus side you have more modern medicine, Catholic faith, stopped oppression by other governments.

So, can you explain how you value those things, if you think scenario 1 is not better?

For example, are you sure a risk of loss of earthly life is not worth it, if you get eternal life instead?
 
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MPat said:
And there were no diseases and no oppression there until the missionaries came…?
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Just because someone else did something bad doesn’t excuse the actions of some missionaries.
MPat said:
So, you should look at two possible scenarios.
  1. Missionaries come.
  2. Missionaries do not come.
Let’s compare them (using scenario 2 as baseline). In scenario 1 on minus side you have spread of some diseases, loss of some cultures, oppression by some governments. On the plus side you have more modern medicine, Catholic faith, stopped oppression by local governments.
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Those are significant cons that you’re glossing over there. Why shouldn’t they strive to ensure that their diseases were under control, or that the cultures of the people they were visiting were preserved and ensure that the people that they were preaching to would be free from oppression? That’d be some good mission work right there. It’s not like those concepts were foreign ideas at the time either.
I’m not saying that all the missionaries are villainous or anything, but there are numerous significant instances where mission trips resulted in an overall negative impact for the very people that the missionaries were claiming to save. There are also numerous incidents where missionaries did undeniable good and established thriving relationships with the people they were preaching to.

In short, like most historical events, it’s a mixed bag, and in my opinion defending the negative consequences or atrocities that originated with missionaries is simply not a good thing.

That’s about the limit of my historical knowledge on this topic though, so someone please correct me, because I know I missed something.
 
OK, there is another perspective to share. Unlike an atheist posted hypothetical arguments, I will reply with history. Nietzche, Freud, Marx and Darwin wrote at the end of a century as reflections of the sentiments of the elite at the time. All advocated the world was better without God, more compassionate and humane the world would be without religion.

Less than fifty years later, after their writings took hold there were Nazi and Communist revolutions. Atheists like Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot and Hitler killed millions in the name of secularism. Again, I include the Nazis who flew the Swastika, a symbol in Buddhism and Hinduism, and not the cross as evidence their religion was race. Again, this is noted by famous writer and Holocaust Survivor Eli Weizel in his preface to his book Night. You can check for yourself in the preface on Amazon, he also notes a Catholic who helps him get his book published in France.

So, as I have pointed out to Atheist before this isn’t John Lennon’s Imagine, a world of secularism isn’t a kind and gentle fellowship of man that resembles ethical humanism or equality. The reality is the alternative to our Church is Social Darwinism, Authoritarianism, a Will to Power, and a greater Stratification of the world.

Again our record as Catholics may be blemished. And I will shock you, even today there are racists in the Catholic Church who don’t see their black, brown or Asian brother as an equal. If you spend enough time here you may find that the Catholicism you know is at odds with the Catholicism others know. I ask you to maintain perspective and not lose Faith. From my travels in life and living in the real world not the online echo chamber Catholics are one of the most accepting and loving people to meet.

Finally, in Latin America there are many apparitions of Mary including the famous case of Juan Diego. For the Vietnamese the Mother has appeared as the Lady of Le Vang. So, once again while the Catholic Church is not perfect and currently there are racists in it we are the most diverse Church out there. Also, we were pivotal in the Civil Rights movement.
 
ImQuiet said:
Why shouldn’t they strive to ensure that their diseases were under control, or that the cultures of the people they were visiting were preserved and ensure that the people that they were preaching to would be free from oppression?
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You know, all that is easier said than done.

It is easy to sit on an armchair and talk how great it would have been if missionaries would have prevented spread of diseases. But, as we can see, even now, knowing much more about Medicine and Biology, we still were not able to prevent a pandemic.

It is also easy to talk how great it would have been to preserve different cultures. But, as we can see, merely listing some examples of what was actually lost (and should have been saved) is already much harder (since you have given no examples). It is going to be even harder to propose some methods that would have corrected that, and still harder to implement them.

As for oppression, it is also nice to avoid it, but not so easy to arrange things to achieve that. And still harder to do so when a “candidate oppressor” has an army, and you do not.

And then we come back to “Economics”. Were the gains more valuable than the losses? I think that they were. And (for now) no one here has offered a consistent way to evaluate things that would make a contrary answer possible.
ImQuiet said:
Just because someone else did something bad doesn’t excuse the actions of some missionaries.
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Just because something turned out imperfectly does not mean that we have to hurry to judge other people (in this case the missionaries) without looking for extenuating circumstances and the like.
 
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Weren’t the diseases mostly brought here by accident and the immune systems of the indigenous just weren’t able to handle them?
 
RepetantCatholic said:
Nietzche, Freud, Marx and Darwin wrote at the end of a century as reflections of the sentiments of the elite at the time. All advocated the world was better without God, more compassionate and humane the world would be without religion
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What you say is simply not true of Darwin.
 
RepetantCatholic said:
Atheists like Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot and Hitler killed millions in the name of secularism.
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Hitler was not an atheist. He remained nominally a Catholic and believed in a force called ‘destiny’ that guided human affairs. None of these people killed even a single person ‘in the same of secularism’. ‘Secularism’ promotes a separation of Church and State. Stalin, Mao and Hitler integrated religion into the state. Not sure about Pol Pot.
 
sophia1000 said:
It’s quite disgusting, I have a hard time dealing with the fact that this was my church and I have not seen it try to correct these mistakes or acknowledge them. For example, the canonization of Father Junipero Serra… I understand the church contains regular people within it that are capable of doing harm but has the church taken responsibility regarding these issues?
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As far as I can tell only certain individuals are responsible.
 
StudentMI said:
Weren’t the diseases mostly brought here by accident and the immune systems of the indigenous just weren’t able to handle them?
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This. Germs weren’t discovered until much much later. To claim colonists were practicing germ warfare to the natives is absurd.
 
Ugh, here is Eli Weizels Night

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0071VUXXA/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?_encoding=UTF8&btkr=1

You could read the Preface for free where he tells you the religion of the Nazis. But I have nothing more to say other than yes I did provide you with a scary thought. The world has Evil people in it some religious, many not religious. I as a religious man live in no fear but on the strength of my Faith. So, I am grateful in developing a relationship with the Holy Spirit. So, every day is a gift even though again I may be martyred in my lifetime.
 
FiveLinden said:
However, this will not stop innumerable posters responding to you with variants of:
  1. It was all for the good
  2. It wasn’t as bad as that
  3. Everyone else was doing it
  4. It was the custom back then
  5. The victims were even worse
  6. You can’t judge the past by the present
  7. Other people did it to us
  8. Other people were worse
  9. The people doing the murders and genocide did good things too.
Click to expand...
I’m not sure what this fallacy is called in English, but in my language it’s known as the “Domination technique”. What you’re doing here is simply taking the moral high ground on anyone who might disagree with you, without actually arguing their points. That’s a shameful way to start off a discussion.
 
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