Archbishop's web site Denver Catholic Register Parishes Catholic Pastoral Center
October 4, 2000
Columbus navigated global transformation
By Jesuit Father Charles Polzer
Schemer, dreamer, sailor and saint — all these descriptions and more have clung to the person of Columbus. In the contest of his own times, Columbus proposed outlandish notions to circumvent the Islamic barrier to Oriental trade by sailing due west. In those days, the sheiks of the arid deserts controlled routes to silks and spices, not oil. But the effect was the same on the profit-driven consumer society of western Europe.
Gold was the goal, and the Indies was the place where Spain hoped to strike the mother lode. A fine plan, except for one thing — the giant barrier of the Western Hemisphere at midfield. Columbus was simply not prepared for the discovery he made. He found more islands than mainland, more people than gold, and more frustration than accomplishment. His scheme collapsed in the shallow waters of the Caribbean. But he fashioned a new dream around bringing the gentle peoples of the scattered islands of the Indies to Christianity. It was during these years that Columbus began to sign himself Xtoferens because he considered the bringing of Christ to the new world more significant than bringing gold back to the Spanish crown.
Would the discovery of America have led to the same result if the navigator was not in the employ of Spain? Who can say, but probably not, because among all the European nations in the late 15th century, no other country save Spain held such a messianic vision of itself. The nations of northern Europe had spent themselves in futile Crusades against the Muslim world, but the Spaniards had relentlessly repelled the Moors from their homeland peninsula. So with the advance of Islam stunted, the return of a Christian hegemony in Europe was assured. And across the Atlantic, the New World emerged like a mystical reward for loyalty and sacrifice.
The discovery of America happened in a climate of conquest, Columbus was a navigator, but Cortez, Pizzaro, Coronado and DeSoto would all be conquistadores whose swords subjugated peoples and seized continents. Behind the sword moved the cross, because the crown invited the Church to civilize and Christianize the king's new vassals. For the privilege of naming bishops, the kings of Spain accepted the terms of the Patronato Real, which obligated them to the financial care of the Church. The privilege, granted in the aftermath of the Reconquista, was readily extended to the New World, so the crown paid for the religious who came to baptize and teach the faithful. This was the dawn of a missionary epoch unsurpassed in the annals of Church history. Hundreds of Augustinians, Dominicans, Franciscans and Jeronimites poured into islands, mountains and jungles to create enclaves of neophytes amid throngs of pagan tribes. It was unprecedented.
The cross and the sword?
For five centuries native peoples accepted the waters of baptism poured over them from the shells of Catholic clergymen, and they accepted the coming of the Europeans. Throughout those long centuries, immigrants have surged over open lands to find familiar rituals and sympathetic communities already in place. For a half-millennium, the Church has grown and prospered. But somehow, some have mistakenly come to think the conversion and merging of people was due to the sword wielded in service of the Church. Some still think the Age of America was another Age of Conquest, another Age of Constantine — in hoc signum vinces, as though the cross was a sword gripped in the vigor of faith and sharpened by truth. Some see the missionary epoch on the Americas as a pious form of conquest, to conquer for Christ.
Nothing is further from the truth. The missionary epoch in America was a stupendous exercise in human dedication and unwavering trust in divine grace. Unselfish men left the sophisticated comfort of homes in Europe to preach the Gospel, to forge peace among peoples and to win the world for Christ by winning the hearts of men. Undeniably, power and greed in the exploiters were unwelcome but ready companions, and today the missionary record is being sullied by false accusations because of their close proximity.
Gospel comes to America
To the great credit of the native peoples of the Americas, they recognized the message of the Gospel and welcomed the missionaries even though many religious were brutally slain by leaders whose power was threatened. The native peoples accepted the principles of the Gospel; they shared their lands and wealth. As empires expanded in the hemisphere, missions, the primary zones of contact, sprang up even in the most remote regions.
Over and above the goal of evangelization, the missions protected the rights and property of the native people while they learned the complex patterns of the modern world. No one could wish away the tide of change that washed America in the wake of Columbus voyages. But deeply Christian persons from Bishop Bartolome de Las Casas to Mother Katharine Drexel strove to redress the inequities and injustices of amoral progress. In time, the Spanish and French mission systems that served the purposes of conversion to Christianity became obstacles to secular progress that gloated over choice lands and cheap labor. Then barely three centuries after discovery, the nations of the New World sought independence from insensitive and restrictive European rule. While the United States, with no commitment to native people, formed in the North, the mission systems were collapsing in the South. No longer were there principles and people to protect the Indians. The rest is Hollywood history.
Quite probably, the sword was allowed to take the place of the cross, which has always been a sign of contradiction between the ways of the world and the ways of God. We succumbed to the fallacy that we were to win a kingdom for God by conquering peoples with the force of the sword, not the force of love. Our motto became "to conquer for Christ" and to free ourselves from evil by destroying it, instead of insisting on Christ's invitation to "Follow me, for I am the Way, the Truth and the Life." The truth shall make us free — not the sword.
While the Church celebrated 500 years of evangelization, the U.S. Catholic Conference of Bishops are recommending that we focus on reconciliation as a major theme during this observance, because our record has not always been unsullied as we would wish it to be. The Christian stance is not confrontation but invitation; not accusation, but forgiveness and we give pardon. It will not change history to lament over what happened in the conquest of America, but it will change the future, if the Church reflects on what it has not done for all the immigrants to the New World who come looking for hope and a new life. Until we open ourselves to new generations as the Indians did at the coming of Columbus, we will not discover what Columbus found instead of the Indies.
Columbus did not discover an existing America, because "America" came into being only after Europeans began to realize the meaning of continents unbridled by old forms. America was hope. America was not the Indies; it was more. And this is precisely why the Quincentennial should be focused less on a man than a moment in human history in which greatness became possible in the exchange of wealth and ideas. We have not even begun to realize the enormity of the discovery of the Americas, because we have yet to understand the profound changes it promised.
Jesuit Father Charles Polzer is curator of ethnohistory at The Arizona State Museum in Tucson. For the past 30 years, he has studied the history of the Americas, with special emphasis on Spanish colonialism. In 1989 he was honored by King Juan Carlos in recognition of his work on Spain in the New World.
