Our Catholic Roots presents events, issues, personalities, movements, and controversies that bear directly on the Catholic American experience.

The examination of Our Catholic Roots begins with a brief overview and the first part of the review of the Spanish contribution to bringing the Church to the Americas .

Our Catholic Roots 1492—1865

Foreword
When Columbus "discovered" America in 1492, the Catholic Church was almost fifteen centuries old. And its age was showing. The Church was founded by Christ to bring his Good News to all peoples. The Church, however, was composed of ordinary human beings whose weaknesses often got in the way of their mission. By the early 1500s, most Catholics recognized that major reforms in the Church were needed. Many bishops, priests, sisters, and ordinary Catholic people were living good lives that were faithful to the teachings of Jesus. But ignorance, superstition, and corruption within the Church were too widespread to be hidden or denied. Most educated Catholics admitted the sad fact that too often their Church was preaching the Good News, but not living it. They called for reform, but had to face the fact that some of the people most responsible for the Church's troubles were also very powerful Church leaders.

Thus a fierce internal struggle got under way for control of the Church's soul. It was a terrible tragedy for Christianity that, just when reform from inside the Church was within reach, the more radical reformers lost patience. In protest, they left the Catholic Church and founded their own Christian churches, each with its own particular character and emphasis.

Some protesting, or Protestant, churches took a moderate approach; they changed the Mass from Latin to their native language and made new arrangements for the structure of authority. Other more radical reformers discarded bishops, priests, sacraments, and almost all visible things that had been historically connected with the Church. In Germany, a former Augustinian monk, Martin Luther, led the protestors out of the Catholic Church. Protestors in France, the Netherlands, and Scotland found a leader in the theologian John Calvin. In England, the king himself, Henry VIII, led the whole nation out of the Catholic Church and set up the Church of England.

Shaken by these protests and the crumbling of the Church, the pope convened the Council of Trent (1545-63) to reform the Catholic Church from top to bottom. To combat the Protestant Reformation, he launched the Catholic Counter-reformation. And to lead the Counter-reformation effort, he approved the founding of the Society of Jesus, a company of priests called Jesuits.

The Catholic Church's reform efforts were successful in many countries, and many of the protestors returned, especially in France. But the unity of Christianity had been broken. Rulers of nations all around Europe sought to impose their particular brand of Christianity on their subjects, and many of them died resisting this violation of their consciences. Civil wars and wars between nations were fought with the intent of imposing one Christian faith or another.

The new European colonies in North America were just one more place where the religious battles of Europe were fought out. Three great nations competed for control of this continent. Each one tried to impose on North America its own religious beliefs. The Catholic powers, Spain and France, wrestled first with each other and then with England, the Protestant latecomer. Their battles spanned nearly two centuries, before finally coming to an end. By then, the Protestant English had overwhelmed their Catholic rivals and won most of North America. With that victory, anti-Catholicism, which was as important to the Protestant's religion attitudes as hatred of the devil, took firm root in American soil and became a permanent feature on the American scene.

 

1: The Spanish Contribution (Part 1)

In 1492, Spain was the greatest power in the Western world. It had just driven out the last of the Islamic Moors, who had held parts of its territory for centuries. Its government was strong and united, its economy was healthy and growing, and the Spanish Catholic Church was thriving, undisturbed by the Protestant Reformation. Spain was ready to face the challenges of the New World. Pope Alexander VI, a Spaniard, did his part by recognizing Spain's right to take possession of the whole of the New World except for the tip of Brazil, which he gave to Portugal. And so the Spanish conquests began. Within 40 years, the rich and advanced native American civilizations of Mexico, Central America, and South America had fallen to the Spanish.

North America
Such swift and spectacular success in the southern half of the hemisphere encouraged the Spanish to look to the north in the mid-1500s. Every Spanish expedition that ventured into the North American continent was accompanied by Dominican, Franciscan, or Jesuit missionary priests. It was their responsibility to care for the spiritual needs of the soldiers, and to convert to Christianity any native Americans they might encounter. But the missionaries were not entirely prepared to convert the native Americans. Like almost all Europeans of their day, they had never met up with any cultures different from their own. They were not prepared to understand or appreciate the kinds of religious awareness that many of the native Americans had.

Many European missionaries to America lacked a full appreciation of the non-European cultures they found. Unfortunately, this blindness often hampered their missionary activity among the Native Americans, who had their own culture and system of religious beliefs. Today, missionaries are guided by the words issued by Vatican Council II in 1966. Concerning other cultures, the decrees on the missions says: ... "Their customs, outlook on life, and social order can be reconciled with the manner of living taught by divine revelation."

Native Americans
Though they were very primitive and had never heard of Christ, the Native Americans had a natural sense of God's closeness to them. They showed this most clearly by their reverence for nature, and by their elaborate ceremonies for every occasion. To the missionaries all of this was very strange and different. It seemed more like superstition and idolatry than healthy religion. And they were partly correct. The missionaries had a sincere zeal to save the souls of the "Indians" by teaching them the Good News about the one and only God and his Son Jesus Christ. But they insisted that the Native Americans abandon all their own religious customs and observe only the religious customs and practices of European Catholicism. The cost of conversion was high for these simple people. Sometimes they resorted to violence rather than surrender their heritage. The cost was high, too, for the missionaries who had given up all that was comfortable, familiar, and safe in order to share their faith in a loving God.

Wherever they worked among the Native Americans, the missionaries found their task complicated by endless difficulties. Just as in Spain, the Church and the missionaries were subject to the civil authorities. These rulers often had little concern for the Indians. There were rarely enough supplies to support the missionaries. They had to teach themselves the local languages before they could teach the Native Americans about Christ. The Spanish soldiers were constantly taking advantage of the Indians in one way or another, sometimes harming them physically, and often even killing or enslaving them.

From time to time, when the oppression became too great to bear, bloody conflicts erupted, almost always leaving the missionaries caught in the middle. At the urging of the missionaries, the pope himself, Paul III, wrote an official letter begging all Christians to recognize that the Native Americans were fellow human beings, children of God with a natural right to decent lives. However, few but the missionaries were listening, and the senseless brutality continued.

 

A diocese is a territorial subdivision of the Catholic Church. It has boundaries fixed by bishop who is appointed by the pope. The bishop is assisted by diocesan priests whose assignments are always within the boundaries of their home diocese. Dioceses are divided Into parishes which are led by pastors and have boundaries fixed by the bishop. Most diocesan priests are assigned by their bishops to serve in parishes.

Florida
Florida is a peninsula which extends to within ninety miles of the island of Cuba, an early Spanish conquest. So Florida was a natural first stop in North America, and the starting point for many later Spanish explorations into the interior of the continent. The first attempt to convert the North American Indians came in 1549 when Father Luis Cancer and another Dominican came ashore at Tampa Bay. Unaware that the Indians had already had some very unpleasant contacts with Spanish soldiers, Father Cancer walked straight into their midst to greet them. He was slain while his friends stood powerless aboard the ship.

After such a miserable beginning, sixteen more years passed before North America's first permanent settlement and first parish church were established by the Spanish at St. Augustine, Florida. The Franciscans who took charge of the church in Florida labored mightily for two centuries, building missions throughout the area to minister to the Indians. But in the end, it came to nothing.

Long conflict with Protestant England finally forced Spain to give up Florida in 1763 and to abandon the Catholic Indian missions there. The brief return of the Spanish from 1784 to 1819 changed nothing. Occasionally, a priest would come from New Orleans to care for Florida's tiny population of Spanish Catholics. However, the English-speaking Protestant immigrants who followed them soon erased most of the traces of two centuries of Catholic missionary work.

Terms

reform: an improvement brought about by correcting an error or abolishing an abuse.

conversion: the act of changing a person's religion

Questions for Reflection

During the Second Vatican Council, Pope John XXIII said the Church is permanently in need of reform. What are your thoughts about this statement?

How would you describe the treatment of the Native Americans by the missionaries? How would you describe the treatment of the missionaries by the Native Americans?

 

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