Pope Benedict XVI on the imposition of Christianity in the Americas during his trip to Brazil this passed week:
"In effect, the proclamation of Jesus and of his Gospel did not at any point involve an alienation of the pre-Columbus cultures, nor was it the imposition of a foreign culture," he said.
What do we take from this quote? Is Ratzinger intentionally lying here? He knows the history from the likes of the eyewitness Bartolome de las Casas:
"After the wars and the killings had ended, when usually there survived only some boys, some women, and children, these survivors were distributed among the Christians to be slaves. The repartimiento or distribution was made according to the rank and importance of the Christian to whom the Indians were allocated, one of them being given thirty, another forty, still another, one or two hundred, and besides the rank of the Christian there was also to be considered in what favor he stood with the tyrant they called Governor. The pretext was that these allocated Indians were to be instructed in the articles of the Christian Faith. As if those Christians who were as a rule foolish and cruel and greedy and vicious could be caretakers of souls! And the care they took was to send the men to the mines to dig for gold, which is intolerable labor, and to send the women into the fields of the big ranches to hoe and till the land, work suitable for strong men. Nor to either the men or the women did they give any food except herbs and legumes, things of little substance. The milk in the breasts of the women with infants dried up and thus in a short while the infants perished. And since men and women were separated, there could be no marital relations. And the men died in the mines and the women died on the ranches from the same causes, exhaustion and hunger. And thus was depopulated that island which had been densely populated."
Source: Bartoleme de Las Casas, Brief Account of the Devastation of the Indies. (1542)
The Pope's quote is the moral equivalent of Holocaust denial.
Here's the full text.
4 comments:
bad translation?
"proclamation" is detached from all the stuff that went with it (wars, slavery, etc.)?
"did not" does not mean what he thinks it means?
He actually said "Alien Nation" in reference to the short-lived 80s TV series?
ifs
Have you been drinking rotten milk this evening?
CF
I loved Mick Jagger in that show...
ifs
My guess is that the Pope my be signalling a subtle shift in Catholic theology toward Mormonism. Chritianity wasn't foreign to these folks if Jesus had, as the LDS's believe, already been by to chat. Maybe Ratzinger is trying to get in good with future Pres. Romney.
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