The 500 years since the discovery of America have yielded not only a series of celebratory events spanning across the Atlantic, but also considerable public debate over the benefits, as well as the drawbacks, experienced particularly by some of the most turbulent, in political and economic terms, Spanish-speaking peoples south of the Mexican border.
It was noted that, while the United States of America and Canada, who were colonised by the mostly protestant British settlers, had become powerhouses of civility and prosperity, the same could not be said for some nations in the Catholic part of the American continent.
In particular, the international media, orchestrated by news agencies in the US, loaded the word discovery with “conquest”, and far too many cases of “extermination” and “eradication” of native peoples and civilisations.
These, according to British and American commentators, had occurred at the hands of Catholic colonisers who originated from the then Catholic kingdoms of Spain and Portugal.
The media had adopted the view that the Indios in the Caribbean and South American continent were coerced to convert to the Catholic faith.
Exploitative abuses and disrespectful handling of local customs and lifestyles had indeed occurred and duly highlighted, but with barely a whimper reserved for some Catholic missionaries (for example Bartolomeo de las Casas) who had, in various nations and in various ways, opposed the lamentable deeds perpetrated by some of the now most famous conquistadores.
Following a pre-set ideological agenda is always risky, as it tends to exclude or exaggerate the importance of some facts. These and other similar events need to be contextualised by serious historical perspective.
As a result, the Catholic faith, according to the same commentators, had been responsible for a string of systemic injustices that have left a legacy of underdevelopment and deep divisions.
While the controversy was raging, some dubious practices surfaced: in the process of apportioning large tracts of lands in North America, the original inhabitants, the Indians, had suffered the same fate.
The same treatment was also meted out by British explorers and colonisers in Australia to the local inhabitants, the Aborigines.
The beginnings of Catholicism in the United States of America is revealing.
In his volume The Church in the Eighteenth Century, Daniel-Rops states: Lord Baltimore’s noble endeavour during the 17th century to found a Catholic colony in Maryland came to nothing after his death … Whereas Lord Baltimore had generously thrown open his domains to all Christian creeds, emissaries of the Archbishop of Canterbury applied the anti-papist laws in full.
In 1704, the parliament of Baltimore forbade Catholics to celebrate Mass in public or to educate children. ‘Thus’, says the Protestant historian Bancroft, ‘the Catholics found themselves treated as helots in the country which, in their truly Catholic liberalism, they had made an asylum not only for themselves but also for all persecuted sects’.
In order to justify their hostility towards Catholics, the Protestant masters of the colonies used to say there was every reason to believe that the Papists were secret agents of France and Spain, great Catholic powers whose greed awaited nothing but an opportunity to swallow the free territories of His Majesty (p 332-333).
Of course, Catholics managed to survive. The American Catholic community is about 65 million people, with an ever greater number of “Hispanics”.
In 1789, the proclamation of liberty of conscience marked the conclusion of this historical struggle. But not the end of latent hostilities.