A Somewhat Slanted Look at the History of the Christian Church – Article 45

hiterOne supposes that it is hardly news that there were, travelling with Christopher Columbus (and with other explorers and conquerors), Roman Catholic missionary priests and friars who set out to bring the benefits of Christianity to the local populations. Unfortunately, it’s also common, though erroneous, opinion that the Church set out immediately to forcefully convert the Indians and in fact assist the Spanish in enslaving them. While the motives of some missionaries were, at some times, less than perfectly pure, the truth is way more complicated than that, as the truth tends to be.

If you ask most people who assert the foregoing what their evidence is, they generally recite the history of Spanish missionaries like Fr. Junipero Serra, who established missions all over northern Mexico and even up into southern California. Serra has been roundly criticized for his racism and his methods of conversion, and of late, this has been especially virulent in some Native American communities as they protested Pope Francis’s decision to canonize Fr. Serra, a year or so ago. Well, again, there are way more ways to approach that whole episode than have yet been published in the mainstream media.

In the first place, we must not conflate Serra and Columbus! Serra had not even been born when Columbus died. In fact, Serra set out to convert California almost three hundred years after Columbus sailed on his first voyage of discovery. Columbus sailed at the end of the 15th Century. Fr. Serra marched up California at the very end of the 18th. In the meantime, more than 15,000 Jesuits, Benedictines and Franciscans had come (or been sent) to bring Christianity to the New World. And, that just counts the Roman Catholics. As the Reformation got underway in Europe, all manner of Protestants also sent missionaries, though none in numbers even approaching the Spanish/Roman Catholic effort.