Indians, Afrodescendents and Mission of the Church

 Surely the Latin American bishops in Aparecida, Brazil, when dealing with the central theme of the mission of the Church, must have to face the still unresolved historical question arising from the treatment afforded the native peoples of these lands, and the Afrodescendents. Christianity in general was always sensitive to the poor, but implacable and ethnocentric when it came to cultural otherness. The other (the Indigenous and the Black) was considered an enemy, pagan and infidel. " Just Wars " were waged against the other, and the other was read The Requirement (a document written in Latin, recognizing the king as sovereign and the Pope as the representative of God.)  And if this document was not accepted, forced submission was legitimized.

We must never forget that our society is grounded on great violence: on colonialism that invaded our lands and forced us to speak and to think in the cultural patterns of the invader; on ethnocide and almost total extermination of the indigenous; on slavery that reduced millions of persons to « things »; on the present dependence on metropolitan centers, a dependency that renders our autonomous path difficult, and even tries to do away with us. Social inequalities, discriminatory hierarchies and lack of sensitivity to the common good are still nourished by this perverse cultural substratum.

This is why we were astonished when we heard, even very recently, that the first evangelization was « neither an imposition nor an alienation » and that it would be « backward movement and a regression » to try to rehabilitate the religions of our ancestors. In the face of that we cannot but hear the voice of the victims, echoing into the present, witnesses from the other side of the conquest, such as the voice of the Mayan prophet, Chilam Balam de Chumayel : «¡ Ay !, let us grieve because they arrived... They came to make our flowers whither away, so that only their flower may live... They came to castrate the Sun. »  And their lament continues: « Sadness, Christianity was introduced among us... That was the beginning of our misery, the beginning of our slavery. »

According to Oswald Spengler, in The Decadence of Occident , the Iberian invasion was the greatest genocide in human history. Around 90% of the population was destroyed. Of the 22 million Aztecs in 1519, when Hernan Cortes entered Mexico, by 1600 only one million remained. And the survivors, as expressed by Jon Sobrino, the theologian recently censured by the Vatican, are crucified peoples hanging from the cross. The mission of the Church is to take them down from that cross, and bring them back to life.

But the hope of the Indigenous peoples did not die. In some Andean communities of the ancient Inkas, a ritual of great significance is occasionally celebrated: a condor, the eagle of the Andes, is tied to the back of a wild bull. In front of the multitude a fierce and dramatic fight rages until the condor, with his potent beak, exhausts and brings down the bull. Then, the people feast on the bull. It is a metaphor: the bull is the Spanish colonization and the condor is the Inka people of the Andean Altiplano. A symbolic reversion occurs: yesterday's victor is the vanquished of today. The dream of liberty triumphs, at least symbolically.

The mission of the Church is justice, not charity: to aid in the revival of ancient cultures with their soul that is their religion. And next, it is to establish a dialogue in which each compliments, purifies and mutually evangelizes each other.