THE GREAT LIEthe religious roots of colonial slavery

TONY EQUALE

uch of what has become the contours of my life was determined by experiences I had in the Third World ― in Peru and other Latin American countries ― when I was in my twenties. M

I considered myself privileged. In those years, the early ‘60’s, relatively few middle class Americans got to travel outside the lo-calities where they were born. Such an adventure, if not unique, was at least extraordinary. All that changed rapidly during that remarkable decade as the shrinking size of the planet became a practical fact for people everywhere. Barriers like language and culture began to disappear for us along with the mountains and oceans, distances and times that had separated the human race since our diffusion across the earth began. Air travel and instan-taneous communication were making the planet a community, where before it had been only a distant horizon.

In my young life as a true Catholic believer and enthusiast, that adventure took the form of responding to a Papal call to “mis-sion” in Latin America. It was 1964. Others of my generation, with a political focus I would not have until later, were joining the newly created “Peace Corps” and “Vista” volunteers. The Civil Rights movement of American Blacks was in its most successful moment at that time, the great “March on Washington” with King’s “I Have a Dream” speech having taken place in 1963. The Vati-can Council was just ending and augured a Catholic future full of unprecedented change. It was five years after the Cuban revolu-tion and two since the Bay of Pigs. Kennedy had been assassi-nated the year before and now they were expanding Vietnam into a full scale war. The importance of much of that was lost on me. That was the year I went to Peru.

Learning Spanish in preparation for a four month internship in a Catholic parish in Lima, initiated a process of inner expansion that eventually took over my life. The impact of what I saw to-

gether with the unexpected shock of returning home capsized my perceptions and expectations. I never got over it.

I tried to return home that September of 1964. I say, “tried”; in retrospect I realize, Like Charley on the MTA, I never returned.

CULTURE SHOCKI wasn’t off the plane 15 minutes when I was served up the

most extreme visible contrasts imaginable. For, galloping like the horsemen of the Apocalypse alongside my father’s car as he brought me home on the brand new Long Island Expressway, flashed the surreal images of the 1964 World’s Fair being held in Flushing Meadows, Queens, 5 miles from LaGuardia. I had played in that park as a kid, swimming for fifty cents in the Aquashow pool, now the site of Shea Stadium. A previous Fair was held on the same site in 1939, the year I was born.

The World’s Fair was the eighth wonder of the world. Its ex-travagance overwhelmed me; I had never seen anything like it. Dozens of architecturally modern pavilions of stone and steel and glass, with their sweeping buttresses and vaulting spires, whizzed past me a mere 24 hours after I had been sitting in a one-room, dirt-floor, straw-mat hut, someone’s home, on furniture that was an old tire, in the barrio Tres Compuertas, one of the slums of Lima. My father was observing, “All these pavilions are coming down in two years when the Fair is over.”

A First World commonplace, of course; that’s the way “Fairs” are. I sat there choking inwardly, unable to articulate the sense of obscenity that roiled inside me. “There are people who live in straw huts with tires for furniture ... and these enormous concrete structures went up at the cost of millions of dollars, only to come down tomorrow like a canvas tent ... ?” So much money. And not only the buildings. Plenty was spent on highway construction in preparation for the Fair. Money.

Was that a youthful overreaction? I feel inclined to say so, now. But I remember it too well to report it any other way. I was young and as yet unadapted to “reality.” It was enough to cauter-ize my brain with an invincible sense of pathos and contradiction. I saw, for the first time, the twisted face of global injustice. And to unjaded eyes, it is still obscene.

2

Perhaps others could shake it off like a bad dream. I couldn’t. How do I go on living the way we do — now that I know it’s not normal? How do I keep from holding my ears against the voices from the other world that threaten to alienate me from my people and my way of life?

As it happened, I needn’t have wasted time worrying about that last part; it was a foregone conclusion. My worst fears about being alienated were realized; and that provided me with a life-time of involuntary background fidelity. I found it impossible to re-turn to who I was and what I was doing. And I didn’t have the skills or the emotional distance to keep it from separating me from my people ― my family and my friends. ... I spare you the dreary details and myself the risk of imposing today’s confusion onto yesterday’s. No one cares about it now, except to forgive. There are more important things to think about. Anyway, we all know the basic story: it was another commonplace for my generation. Attempting to confront injustice meant the sword of division en-tered our lives, isolating some, challenging many, breaking and defeating others. Alienation is sad and immature, perhaps, but not tragic; betrayal would have been tragic.

No, I never returned. Blissful ignorance is like a castle of ice. Once it melts, it’s gone forever — along with its resident fairy-tale. That didn’t necessarily make me a dynamic reformer or charis-matic communicator; but it did guarantee that I would always be obsessed.

... There, you have it.

MONEYI’ve been back to Latin America many times, Puerto Rico, Me-

xico, Honduras, Nicaragua. And each time when I try to return it’s the same. But never like the first time.

I eventually regained my mouth, if not my cool, and did begin to speak. But I found that on the rare occasions when I spoke in a way that my fellow Americans could actually hear, or would care about these places so far away, they wanted to know what to do — naturally. And I didn’t know what to tell them. Every-one’s knee jerk reaction was money. Of course. But to whom and for what? To my friends in Tres Compuertas? Unthinkable. With money, they’d have to move out of their neighborhood, away from their family and friends. And then what? Wait for the

3

next donation to keep them in their new isolated life, in a “better” neighborhood, living with strangers? To the church, then? To the Maryknoll Fathers in barrio alto Miraflores where the Catholic school was an expensive up-scale private academy for the very rich, providing an ecclesiastical justification for high-class self-segregation? I don’t think so.

The parish I worked in also had a school, attended in this case, not by aristocrats, but certainly by the better-off of that working class barriada known as Porvenir (the “future”). Cre-atively, the American missionary pastor, we’ll call him “Boston” Joe, together with the teachers, attempted to use the school classrooms after-hours to give free education to the poorer kids in the neighborhood. The parents of the regular day kids went bal-listic. Not only did they resent someone getting for free what they had to pay for, they didn’t want their children coming home with lice and scabies from “the filth” that would be sitting in their seats. This “outrageous revolutionary” proposal turned into a major cri-sis. Some people, naturally, threatened to take their children out of school. Eventually there was a negotiated settlement. Joe, in spite of the autocratic Catholic authority system which gave him total power as pastor, was forced to compromise because the parish was dependent on the support of the families of sub-stance.

Ah yes, money. I was disabused of money early on. Lack of money was not the problem here, and money would not have been a solution.

THE PROBLEMWhat was the problem? I could see from this situation that the

simple issue of “lack” alone did not explain what was so poor about the poverty I was seeing. And the poverty in Porvenir was beyond anything I had imagined. I couldn’t ignore my growing dis-trust of the standard solutions. In those days I spent a great deal of time just trying to sort through my experience, which tended to sit on my stomach like a single piece of undigested food, intact and nauseating. “Lack” was a common denominator I could al-ways start with, but I knew there had to be more.

Then, I had another perplexing experience. Twice a week Joe sent me to the American Embassy in Lima where I was given film on loan to show throughout the barriada — old westerns and

4

American Government documentaries projected on a bedsheet hung on the outside walls of the houses. The poorer areas within Porvenir would be served these shows by turns. Frankly, I don’t think Boston Joe was any more political than I was at the time. I’m sure he thought of it only as providing an entertainment the people would otherwise never get to see. But the films seemed to have a powerful impact. “America is so beautiful,” people would say to me afterward. “Americans are intelligent, educated, organized; we are backward, selfish. Peru is no good; we are no good ...” Poverty had turned into a value judgment on their lives and persons. I was chagrined and argued with them, even while I was convinced the films I was projecting were generating this re-sponse. What was going on here? What was I doing, what were the missionaries doing?

That awful self-denigrating attitude of the people continued to gnaw and increasingly bother me. I ascribed it to the influence of the American films. I knew instantly it wasn’t “humility” on the part of the people, or even their envy or resentment at us, but some-thing else, something pathological. As the years went by I came to realize that attitude was not only found in Porvenir, and not only in Peru. It was a constant wherever I went: Puerto Rico the following year and then among poor blacks and hispanics in Brooklyn where I worked for many years after that. I noticed that the poor people were always putting themselves down, and seri-ously, not just jokingly. It wasn’t for the benefit of white observers like myself, for they did it even when they were by themselves.

In Brooklyn, it became clear that race played a prominent part in this strange phenomenon, certainly for American blacks, less obviously but also for others. Like most whites growing up in New York at that time, I’d had little experience with people of color. Our neighborhoods tended to be ethnic, and later class and race related. But from my awareness of current events in those heydays of Martin Luther King, I thought I knew what the blacks were fighting for and I supported them 100%. From these aroused people I expected indignation, militancy, or perhaps even vengeful reprisal or gold-digging manipulation. But I did not expect self-contempt. I was appalled; and I was mystified.

At the end of the decade, the separatist “black power” move-ment began to compete with the earlier goals of black-white “inte-gration.” Many of my friends had great problems with this. But it

5

struck a responsive chord in me; it seemed to be addressing ex-actly this issue of negative self-image which had become my per-sonal mystery.

In Latin America, before “revolutionary consciousness” be-came a commonly recognized notion, these same self-condemn-ing attitudes were often expressed as a comparison with us whites. First World whites were the paradigm of value against which Latin Americans were judging themselves as sub-standard. I saw that these judgments were correlatives. They occurred to-gether: they adulated us, and disdained themselves.

Of course, if we were also generous and humble and hard working on their behalf, it redounded even more to our larger-than-life image among them. And they showed an extraordinary generosity and hospitality toward us. Many of the missionary types I’d met in Latin America and the inner cities, in my opinion, were hopelessly addicted to this adulation and special treatment. And, sad as it is to say it, many also expressed agreement with the people’s self-disparaging sentiments. They looked down on them.

Later, as I traveled to new places in the ‘80’s — Mexico, Hon-duras, Nicaragua, — I discovered how pervasive this phenome-non was. In the countries I came to know in Latin America, it was my constant experience that people openly mocked their country, or their history, or their race, ethnicity and their way of life, eulo-gizing us as if we were some sort of gods. And this was always accompanied by muted but unmistakable racial overtones. What I heard in Lima was repeated, for 20 years afterward, everywhere I went: “America is beautiful. Americans are intelligent and orga-nized. We are backward, primitive, ignorant, stupid, lazy ...”

RACE AND SLAVERYIt became obvious that such a ubiquitous phenomenon could

not be explained by local or recent conditions. It couldn’t have been the American films, as I first thought. From what the inner city American blacks taught me I began to look in the direction of race, and slavery.

The extraordinary explosion of black self-consciousness un-leashed by the civil rights movement produced an avalanche of discussion and written material during the ‘60’s, exploring the is-sues of the negative imagery about blacks generated by slavery.

6

Blacks and whites both shared this imagery, and during the “inte-gration” years both groups brought an intense energy to examine and resolve the problems it created. Books like “Native Son” and “Black Like Me” expressed the values and aspirations that guided local efforts of all kinds to redress injustice and set things right.

Then, born of the movement’s militancy, black self-awareness reached an intensity of expression that whites had not seen be-fore. Blacks began to say what it seemed they really wanted to say, not what they thought we wanted to hear. “Soul on Ice” epit-omized the self-assertiveness of a new era. This shifted empha-sis away from integration. The novels of James Baldwin, the ide-ology of Malcolm X, H.Rap Brown, Bobby Seale, the Black Pan-thers and the Black Muslims helped evolve a clearer knowledge if not a conviction about what Blacks ultimately identified as the heart of the problem. It was not poverty and it was not “oppor-tunity,” and it certainly was not “integration.” It was that they were despised and rejected, treated as inferior by whites, and consid-ered unworthy of “human” appellation. It wasn’t so much even that they were hated; it’s that they were treated as if they weren’t even there. It wasn’t something they could just shrug off; it was a deformation that lived deep inside them, like a demon needing exorcism. They felt they couldn’t free themselves from these shackles unless they got away from whites, the source of their self-disdain. Poverty only had a supporting role in this; it told them that it must all be true.

Equipped with this new understanding, I took another look at my Latin American experience under the rubric of race and slav-ery. This approach suggested that wherever Latin Americans were mainly mestizo (of mixed indigenous and European race, which was true of most of the countries I was familiar with), they and their ancestors had been subjected to treatment that gave them a sense of inferiority and worthlessness, as slavery had for the American blacks. The historical reality that offered an initial match to those conditions was the Spanish conquista and subse-quent colonial domination of the Amerindian population. But I had never before thought of that transcendent historical event in terms of slavery. I began to re-read history with an eye to this connection. What began to emerge was a story of enslavement and gross mistreatment that shocked me. I was doubly shocked because I also learned that, in spite of an elite education, I was

7

myself completely unaware of it. What I saw unveiled could, with-out a doubt, have been more than sufficient explanation for the self-abasing attitudes still residing in the hearts of modern day Latin Americans.

Things once unintelligible started to make sense. It had al-ways surprised me, for example, that the uneducated indigenous people — those I knew of Aztec, Mayan or Inca descent — were totally unaware of any past civilization that had been theirs. How could such a monumental reality have been lost to memory? I soon realized from my reading that there were many other things they didn’t remember either. They had no community recollection of the depredations perpetrated on their forebears hundreds of years ago by the Spaniards who enslaved them, took their pos-sessions, occupied their lands, exploited their labor, and perma-nently defined them as medias bestias, half-animals, sub-human and intrinsically inferior. Their history, good and bad, had been taken from them along with everything else — but not the nega-tive self-definitions. The definitions remained, mute witnesses to the ravages of the past, like the ruined pyramids of Yucatan that the Mayan people of today stare at in perplexed wonderment.

Giving the matter an historical interpretation of this type was very disturbing for me; it eventually became a blinding, world-shattering illumination. I ultimately realized I was being given a forbidden inside look at the shameful reality of what has been mis-named “the Christian evangelization” of the Americas.

EVANGELIZATION?That was the theme of the 500 year celebrations in Santo

Domingo in 1992 commemorating Columbus’ arrival in the “In-dies.” The Pope was the central figure of those festivities, as the world acknowledged the world-changing significance of Colum-bus’ voyage: the imposition of Christianity on the American conti-nents. The indigenous people who came in great numbers to protest the commorative event had a different opinion from the Pope who told us that, in spite of some unfortunate “mistakes” for which he gave a perfunctory apology, la conquista was a great contribution to humanity.

And before my direct experience in the Third World I would have agreed with him. But the grinding poverty and crippled sense of self-worth which I encountered in different locations and

8

among ethnically diverse Latin American people, coupled with the in-depth education provided for me on the streets of Brooklyn, cast doubt on the accepted meaning of the “missions” of the First World, and that included the one I was part of.

I listened to my people and I read Eldridge Cleaver, and Bar-tolomé De Las Casas, and finally Paolo Freiré. I saw that there was a simple reason why American black self-consciousness had been so helpful to me in understanding Latin American poverty: they were both aspects of the same historical phenomenon — colonial slavery. Freiré, especially, helped me put it all together: Brooklyn and Porvenir, the emerging voice of the American blacks and the still voiceless submission of the poor of Latin America.

Third World self-abasement, he said, was the internalized voice of the oppressor.

THE VOICE OF THE OPPRESSORhe oppressor is a criminal — primarily a thief, then a murderer. But his sins don’t end there. He’s invested in his respectability so first of all he has to lie, both to his victims and to himself about what he’s doing and

why. Once the lie is established, and his premises are in place, he plunders his victims, often with a perfectly clear conscience, perhaps also with their permission, and maybe even, if he’s got a really good story, with their active collaboration.

TThe oppressor is, above all, a liar. That he may also be lying

to himself is of little consolation to his victims. What I was seeing before my eyes was the living embodiment of a Great Lie that had been told the ancestors of these people, passed on from generation to generation. As I read, I saw the Lie born and un-fold in the pages of history which I searched now with a passion for understanding not possible in the inexperience of my student days. It was the story of 16th century Christianity which projected a sacred mythology that justified the actions of the Spanish plun-derers because they were Christian, and denied the humanity of indigenous Americans because they weren’t. It excused exploita-tion as “evangelization,” and it disguised slavery as a Christian training benevolently imposed by the Spaniards to liberate the In-dians from the grip of the Devil. These were lies.

9

In their efforts to deflect blame for these travesties, Christians often utilize a selective scapegoating and claim that the conquis-tadores used religion as a pretext for their rapacity. The fault lies with greedy individuals, not Christianity. If Christianity weren’t available, they say, the colonizers, hell-bent as they were on plunder, would have used another excuse.

That may or may not be so; we’ll never know. What we do know is that in point of fact, Christian ideology was all too avail-able as a justification for exploitation. An obscenity much more nauseating than the pavilions of Flushing Meadows was taking shape as I read. The scope and depth of the rape of the Ameri-cas under the influence of these Christian lies went far beyond anything perpetrated by pagan Rome in the throes of its self-en-gorging blood-lust, or by the demonized Egyptian, Mesopotamian or later Islamic Persian empires. For wherever the Christian con-quest went, it violently extirpated indigenous culture from the hearts of the people and aggressively implanted a second-class European substitute. It was precisely Christianity, because of its absolutist theology and self-divinizing intolerance, that projected its conquest into the very souls of its victims, calling them and thus making them medias bestias.

They called it “mission.” It was the all-embracing and unchal-lengeable vindication, the Perfect Lie, that sustained the most thorough and thoroughly penetrating genocide the world has ever seen.

My reading was focused on the 16th century and Spanish Catholic Christianity, but the fact that similar phenomena oc-curred later under Protestant auspices and by other European nationalities points to a common Christian etiology. Denomina-tional differences, apparently insurmountable obstacles to Chris-tian unity in every other circumstance, seemed to produce little disagreement when it came to the common revulsion Western Christians felt for the Indians and their way of life. One only has to visit an Indian reservation in North America to see the results repeated — and possibly with deeper damage.

The Spanish story presented a familiar parallelism. It said not only were the Spaniards the agents of God, but that the indige-nous victims were so deeply suffused with the influence of the Devil that their very humanity was irremediably compromised. Mercy, reason, compassion, would serve no purpose. Even the

10

powerful Christian sacraments were of little avail against the Indi-ans’ Satanic perversion. Only the discipline of a lifetime of pene-tential servitude to Christian masters, or failing that, death, could free them from the grip of personified evil.

What a story.

THE LIEThese are not my paranoid projections. The eye witness docu-

mentation from the earliest days of the Spanish invasion and for many decades afterward is extraordinarily profuse and clear. These accounts are riveting. Some of the most poignant testi-mony comes from the personal witness of Bartolomé de las Casas. I read and re-read his work. Through his passion and description, I came to see in vivid colors what I realized were the primordial sources of my own life and times.

As it touched the indigenous communities, the Official Lie be-gan with the physical reading of a proclamation, called El Requer-imiento, “the Requirement,” prepared in 1513 in Spain by a panel of theologians appointed by the king.1 The edict was designed to provide a juridical basis for the armed attack and wholesale slaughter of “those idolatrous Indians.”

It was a long two page document. Read aloud in Spanish or Latin, usually from an inaudible distance and even on occasion from the deck of a ship anchored out of earshot of the shore, it preceded all incursions. The Spaniards were meticulous about following procedure in this matter. With great flowery verbosity and in Iberian legalese, it made the following statement:

God owns the world because he created it. God (Jesus) walked on earth and gave ultimate authority

and ownership to Peter. The Pope is Peter’s successor and he gave these lands to

the kings of Castile and their representatives to whom you now owe total obedience. (This refers specifically to the Bull of “Donation” of Pope Alexander VI, 1493.)

1Lewis Hanke, All Mankind is One. A Study of the Disputation Between Bar-tolomé De Las Casas and Juan Ginés De Sepúlveda on the Religious and Intel-lectual Capacity of the American Indians. No.Illinois U.Press, De Kalb, IL, 1973. p.35

11

If you willingly submit, agree to accept Christianity and promise obedience to the crown, nothing will happen to you.2 But if you resist,

“... We shall take you and your wives and your children and shall make slaves of them, ... And we shall take away your goods, and shall do all the harm and damage that we can ... And we protest that the deaths and losses that shall accrue from this are your fault ...”3

This was a pure formality, for in fact there was no interest whatsoever in actually getting a positive response. The royal his-torian Oviedo claimed only conquest and lifelong subjection would work with the Indians because their sub-human nature made them incapable of being Christians.4

But, according to De las Casas, it was even worse than that. The Spaniards had developed a design for remote governance by torture and terror. The plan was to commit acts of such inhu-man cruelty that it would strike terror in the hearts of the people everywhere. A large and geographically disperse population could thus be ruled with a very small force of armed men. It is a tactic still used in Central America to this day. Native willingness to accept the terms of the Requerimiento would have actually put a crimp in those plans. Delas Casas comments:

.”..[the Spaniards] would find [the Indians] unprepared and they would attack them. Those that couldn’t flee, like women, children and the elderly, they put to the sword because the main thing they were after was to commit outrageous cruelties in order to strike fear everywhere so the people would submit to them.”And then he goes on to say that if they captured males, boys

and grown men, they would cut off both their hands and set them free to seek help in other villages so the news would spread far and wide. They called it “letters,” meaning, “sending a mes-sage.”5

2

?Bartolomé De las Casas, Historia de Las Indias, 1572, III, 57.3

?text found in Hanke, op.cit. p.36. This requerimiento was law and was not re-scinded until 1573., p.120.4

?Hanke, p. 40ff5

?De las Casas, Historia, II, 17.: .”.. hallabanlos descuidados, daban en ellos, y cuantos huir no podían, como mujeres, niños y viejos, metían a espada, porque

12

Terror and torture was the publicly acknowledged tactic of one of Hernán Cortés’ most famous lieutenants, Pedro de Alvarado, whose conquest of Guatemala and El Salvador was accom-plished by the use of almost unspeakable atrocities.6 Some claim that even today in those lands the habitual recourse by the au-thorities to such methods is a direct legacy of the policies of Al-varado. When brought to trial before the Royal Court in Mexico City to answer for those brutalities, he offered a frank admission of his strategy and explained it as a military necessity. The Real Audiencia of New Spain found his defense acceptable; and he was exonerated.7

THE ENCOMIENDA SYSTEM The “conquest” of the Americas was justified on religious

grounds from the very start. The 1493 Papal Bull of “Donation” mentioned above, prepared at the request of Spain immediately upon Columbus’ return, lays the foundations of the Requerim-iento. It arbitrarily grants to the kings of Castile total ownership over Columbus’ newly discovered lands; it obliges the Kings to christianize all the people in these domains; and it recognizes the right of the Spanish sovereigns to take adequate compensation from the “beneficiaries” for the arduous and expensive work of evangelization.8

What constitutes premeditation? Please note the year: 1493And the method of evangelization they devised was, not coin-

cidentally, a perfect match for this transparent hypocrisy. It was a system called encomienda. The way it worked was this: a large number of Indians were encomendados, “entrusted” to a Spanish landowner (often on the very lands that had once been theirs) for the supposed purpose of training them in the faith — in return for

lo principal que pretendían era hacer grandes crueldades y estragos, para me-ter miedo por toda la tierra y viniesen a darse. Todos los que tomaban a vida, como los mancebos y hombres grandes, cortaban ambas a dos manos y envia-ban, como se dijo, con cartas.”6

?John Edwin Fagg, Latin America, A General History, Macmillan, NY, 1963, p.149.7

?Related in a private conversation in 1987 with historian Gudrun Lenkersdorf, then living in Mexico City, citing her research into the annals of the proceed-ings of the Real Audiencia of New Spain. I do not have that reference.8

?De las Casas, Historia, I, 79

13

which they and their offspring were to work for him for the rest of their lives.

De las Casas fought this for 30 years, saying it was being used as a cover for slavery. (But notice, he never publicly ques-tioned the sincerity of the law). In 1542 his struggles seemed to bear fruit. The King issued “New Laws” which ended en-comienda and limited Indian servitude to the lifetime of the en-comendero. But under pressure from the irate slaveholders of the New World the King reversed his decision the very next year, and ordered the encomienda be maintained in perpetuity.9 To this obvious royal acquiescence to slavery, De las Casas was careful to say nothing.

Evangelization, indeed. In fact, within 40 years, the encomi-enda system was applied with such savagery that it eventuated in the complete extermination of the Indians on Hispaniola, — now the Dominican Republic and Haiti — which the King’s chronicler Oviedo explained as “divine punishment [of the Indians] on ac-count of their crimes and abominable customs.”10

That the Indians began to abort their pregnancies, kill their in-fants and commit suicide themselves rather than continue to live under the intolerable treatment of the Christians,11 became, for those blinded by conceit, a further proof that the Indians were medias bestias, half-animals. Oviedo actually claimed the Indi-ans were doing such unimaginable things in order to torment the Spaniards.12

After 60 years of contact with the Indians, the halls of the Royal “Council of the Indies” in Spain still rang, incredibly, with ar-gument as to whether those people had souls, whether they were human beings, or whether like dogs and beasts of burden it was God’s will that they stay bound to the Spaniards in a state of per-

9

?Hanke, p.22, but see also p.60 where he says the reversal took place in 1545. The system continued into the 18th century, cf EB, 1979 ed. micropedia, vol III, p.88710

?Hanke, p.4111

?Bartolomé de Las Casas, A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies, 1542, Penguin, 1992, p.30: .”.. [the Indians] were in such despair that they took their own lives. Men and women hanged themselves and even strung up their own children. ... countless thousands died in this way.”12

? Hanke, p.44

14

manent subjugation. An official debate on this question actually took place beginning in 1550 before a theological commission of the Council between the 78 year old De las Casas and a throne appointed canon lawyer named Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda. The debate went on over two years. Historians say De Las Casas carried the day, but not surprisingly, no official winner was de-clared.13

All that De las Casas’ unacknowledged victory achieved, how-ever, was the grudging agreement that the Indians should be christianized. This was a triumph for the “liberal” position. For the contention of the “hard-liners” like Oviedo and Sepúlveda, was that the Indians were animals and incapable of being Chris-tians. What lurked behind their argument was an attempt to re-tain a justification for slavery. Medieval tradition, on which these debates were based, frowned upon the enslavement of Chris-tians, and hence the slave holders, in spite of the clear mandate of the 1493 Papal Bull (and a second, in 153714) to christianize the indigenous people, took a dim view of conversion.15 They did not want the Indians to become Christian.

Undeterred by their tacit defeat, the hard-liners took a fallback position and simply restated their argument saying the demon-possessed Indians, in practice, had to be conquered and sub-jected by force first, in order to insure their proper acceptance of Christianity, so deep was their decadence. In the short run, De las Casas’ victory did little to change what had become traditional Christian behavior in the New World.16

These sentiments were still in published evidence from as late as 1693, a century and a half later. Diego de Vargas Zapata Lu-ján Ponce de Leon, in requesting military support for the expedi-tion to “re-christianize” the Santa Fe pueblos after the successful Indian rebellion of 1680, wrote unashamedly to his king, “you might as well try to convert Jews without the Inquisition as Indi-

13

? Cf Hanke, p.113ff : There was no official pronouncement of victory. But, 1) De las Casas was not brought before the Inquisition after what he said in the debate, p.94; and 2) Sepúlveda had his book confiscated., p.63.14

?see fn 1815

?Hanke, footnote, p.4816

?ibid.

15

ans without soldiers.” During that “mission,” a large percentage of the indigenous population was mercilessly slaughtered. The dead included a great number who committed suicide, Masada style, rather than submit themselves once again to the “economy of salvation” presided over by the Christians of New Spain.17

EUROPEAN CHRISTIANITYBut even in the long run, we have to realize that the efforts of

the great De las Casas himself, in the context of the lights of post-medieval Christianity, supported the cultural obliteration of the Amerindians and the extraordinary civilizations they had built. Whatever his personal actions might have done to preserve na-tive life, the public policies he espoused unavoidably entailed the destruction, specifically, of the religion and political autonomy of the Indigenous Americans, and along with that, their music, art, poetry, intellectual endeavors, social structure and family life.

We have to realize De las Casas never denied that the Span-ish sovereigns had legitimate authority in the Americas. Nor did he argue for the political or religious independence of the Indians. His only contention was that Spanish dominion was based on the “donation” of the Pope which was made for the exclusive purpose of Christian evangelization.18 He claimed encomienda had been abused, he forbade it in his own diocese in Chiapas, but he did not impugn the intentions of the king who created and maintained it; nor did he denounce State sponsored evangelization, and that rendered his sincere appeal for non-coercive voluntary conver-sion, utterly naïve.

De las Casas, whatever his virtues, was a European Christian. His premises, which included the absolute necessity of Christian faith for salvation, and the obligations of the State to promote it, were not capable of preventing the native Americans’ demise as Aztec or Mayan or Inca, and their complete absorption into Iberian culture. Today we call that “genocide.”

This is of much more than historical interest. For that core ec-clesiastical doctrine which underlay the travesty — extra eccle-siam nulla salus — so central to Catholicism’s self-divinizing self-

17

?Great River, Paul Horgan, p.316.18

?Anthony Pagden, “Introduction” to Bartolomé de Las Casas, A Short Account ... op.cit. p.xvi

16

definition, has never been repudiated. Admittedly it’s been rein-terpreted to include the possibility of salvation for “non-Catholics.” But the Catholic Church still proclaims its own absolute supremacy over all other traditions and denominations, and arro-gates to itself alone the right to judge whatever of truth is to be found in them. This was declared assertively and with great can-dor as recently as September of 2000, in the teaching of the Holy Office called Dominus Jesus, which received world-wide notoriety for its unexpected atavism.

If we were to widen our scope and look at the development of this doctrine among modern Christian fundamentalists, we would see that it is held with equal tenacity and proclaimed with great vigor among them. “Outside the Church there is no salvation,” has been translated, “If you do not proclaim Jesus your personal Savior publicly in the Christian congregation, you cannot be saved.” Being good, they say without hesitation, is not good enough. This claim to indispensability, in one form or another, is endemic to traditional Christianity. Projections of the overwhelm-ing growth of fundamentalist thinking in all Christian denomina-tions throughout the world, bodes an ominous future with this kind of attitude in the ascendancy.19

STRATEGY OR BLINDNESS?De las Casas was trenchant in the condemnation of his fellow

Spaniards who enslaved and brutalized the Indians. He accused them of depravity, greedy self-interest and, ironically for me, dis-obedience to the commands of Christian authority. One may per-haps ask why he never attacked the legal fictions for slavery pro-vided by Church and Crown. Had he decided that this was a tac-tic necessary to engage King and Pope in the pursuit of his goals? Whatever the reason, he never challenged the validity of their laws, nor denounced the authorities’ hypocritical complicity in the enslavement process, nor the general toleration of these atrocities by the Catholic Christian society in which he lived.

In the Short Account, written in 1542 as a personal letter to Prince Charles, De Las Casas expresses great indignation that the conquistadores would dare to thank God and sing Te Deums after their successful attacks on the defenseless Indians. He of-

19

?Philip Jenkins, “The Next Christianity,” The Atlantic Monthly, October 2002.

17

fered it as a proof of their utter corruption.20 But what he fails to see, or admit, is that these men praise God sincerely and lobby openly for slavery with their sovereign because, as a matter of fact, they are functioning within the acceptable parameters of the religious and moral standards of their time. They were engaging in legitimate debate. Their patent good faith challenges the tradi-tional perspective initiated by De Las Casas himself and still in vogue, as evidenced by the “apologies” of today’s Pope, which lays the blame for this unmitigated collective outrage on the “sin-ful excesses” of individual Christians rather than the values and beliefs of European Christianity itself. We may be inclined to for-give De las Casas, whose humanity shone through the crust of his official loyalties, but this, too, is a lie.

I don’t see how another pretext could have accomplished the plans of Kings and Pope with such relentless efficiency as chris-tian ideology. It’s difficult to avoid concluding that colonialism and the peculiar racist slavery it created was the legitimate child of European Christianity.

Europe had seen colonialism before. The Greeks and Phoeni-cians settled the shores of the Mediterranean from 800 to 300 BCE displacing the local populations to create new city-states for themselves. And the West had seen slavery before. The entire ancient world for three thousand years, from the earliest dynas-ties of Egypt to the fall of Rome, functioned on the slave labor of war captives, impressed citizenry or unfortunate debtors. But never before had there been a mass enslavement of primitive people, crassly erected on the utter denial of their humanity, metaphysical and moral, that ultimately correlated to the color of their skin. The world had seen primitive people before, but it had never judged their “backwardness” as “Satanic.” Such a phe-nomenon had to wait for the unique justification provided by Christian theological ideology.

Christians explained their brilliant innovation in servitude by saying the backwardness of brown skinned Indians (and Africans) proved they were not people; they were sub-human, half-animals, “heathen” whose humanity had been thoroughly corrupted be-cause they were unbaptized, therefore reprobate, therefore “un-der the control of Satan.”21 It was an extreme but logical corol-lary of the “doctrine of Original Sin.” The dark race = animal = 20

?De las Casas, Short Account, p.7021

18

devil was a virtually universal ssociation throughout the colonial era, transcending all geographic, denominational and ethnic boundaries of the Christian colonizers and applied with remark-able uniformity to all the non-Caucasian people they encoun-tered. This seems to point to a common source in the European Christian mindset, the few official documents to the contrary not-withstanding.22 Thus was Christian racism born; something new under the sun.

One may be inclined to fantasize and ask: was all this in-evitable? What would the history of the world have been if De las Casas’ hopes for “Their Most Catholic Majesties” and their Chris-tian people had been more than an idealist’s dream, today merely the source of a retrospective snicker? Is it possible that the Catholic Portuguese, had they been under the influence of a “hu-man” Christianity (that in fact did not exist), might never have or-ganized and sustained a lucrative slave-trade of black tribespeo-ple from their colonies in Africa that went on for over 400 years? Isn’t it, furthermore, probable that without that flourishing com-merce in free African labor, the cotton and sugar cane plantations of the New World, in the American South and in the Caribbean, would never have been able to base their operations on slavery? If the 16th century colonizers had from the start set in place pat-terns of basic human decency, wouldn’t the world be a different place — I’m tempted to say, almost unrecognizably different?

But someone else, equally, may respond without cynicism: isn’t there a reason why a “human” christianity is only a dream and a fantasy, then as now? Given the ideological context cre-ated by a thousand years of Catholic Ecclesiastical formation, wasn’t what actually happened, inevitable?

So, here was the fruit of my reading: the Spanish plunder of the Americas, which created a model of racist slavery for all of Europe to follow, was not the work of greedy, undisciplined and defiant underlings. It was prepared and permitted at the highest ?This is passim in Hanke in his characterization of the Oviedo and Sepúlveda position.22

?Specifically the Bull Sublimis Deus of Paul III, 1537, reproduced in Hanke, p.21. Fagg, op.cit., p.103, says that in spite of official pronouncements “Most of the Spanish settlers in the Americas and some of their partisans at home continued to believe the natives were little better than talking animals who could never fit into a Europeanized society except as inferiors.”

19

levels of Christian authority, and derived its energy, its legitimacy and its lasting historical significance from the central doctrines of Christian belief.

A LAMENTATIONatholic Christianity was much more than my career; it was my life. You may not be able to appreciate how incapacitating this awareness would be for me. I re-sisted it; so it grew slowly, along with an increasing

docket of evidence against Catholic claims to exclusive ecclesias-tical “truth.” At some point, not chronologically logical, it reached a “critical mass” and turned off the energy source of my adult life. This now unchanneled momentum sent me careening in a direc-tionless plunge through darkness. I dis-integrated.

CSuch occurrences are rarely graceful. I don’t apologize. It’s

who I was.For traditional Catholicism, the Christ-event is definitively re-

produced only in the Church — nowhere else. Therefore the Church is the only way to God, the only way. This belief in its own uniqueness and indispensability lies at the very heart of Catholic Christianity. It explains Catholicism’s mystical, almost magical rituality; it corresponds to its claims to apostolic inheri-tance which it expresses in a rigid hierarchical authoritarianism; and it explains the Church’s brazen assertions of its own intrinsic salvific power which border on self-divinization. To discover that it was that very foundational identity that was also at the root of the racist divisions that I believe threaten to destroy the human species, was to see Catholic claims vitiated at their core. A Church that was capable of complicity in the perpetration of such inexcusable inhumanity as occurred in the conquista, with such damaging consequences across the centuries, may still qualify as a penitent religious community, blind and groping like any other; but it can no longer claim to be the “only true Church,” the very voice of God on earth, whose magisterium is “infallible,” making it alone the expert in what is good and holy for all of humankind. And once these claims are voided, the excuse for its tyrannical authoritarianism and its demand for universal unquestioning credal-moral submission vanishes.

20

I was Catholic. For many years I was unable to articulate this devastating insight, even for myself. As I see it now, the fog be-gan to lift only after the sun came out; only after a new religious integration emerged in my life could I safely embrace such an up-ended interpretation of the past. In the meantime, from a reli-gious point of view, I was immobilized.

Paralysis was itself a response. I understood that later. Sub-conscious and involuntary as it was, it meant at a minimum I had to stop doing what I was doing. Not the most effective, but clearly not counter-intuitive either. Maybe at the time, it was the most my “background fidelity” could muster.But then, you may say to me, “you took the teaching too seri-ously, too literally. You didn’t have an independent sense of yourself. That was your mistake,” you may say.

Ah yes; that was “my” mistake.

THE PEDAGOGY OF THE OPPRESSEDut while I flailed aimlessly in my confusion, others, like Brazilian educator Paolo Freiré, used the insight into class-related disability — the self-abasing attitudes of the poor — to generate a focused program of correc-

tive action especially applicable to the Latin American situation. B

Freiré proposed “concientization” or what today we call “raising consciousness,” in order to cure people infected with that classic self-destructive contagion. His proposal was something of a cross between Marx and Freud. On the one hand, he subscribed to a philosophical position that said debilitating poverty correlates with an alienated sense of self. In Europe, where race and reli-gion were generally not a local issue, Marx attributed it to the op-pressive work conditions created by wage-slavery. Freiré in the Americas, however, also had the false colonial definitions to call upon as explanation. These definitions were the operational for-mulas of the oppressors, accepted as true by larger society and internalized subconsciously by the oppressed who were members

21

of that same society.23 These formulas defined the victims as in-ferior and incapable of independence, requiring obsequiousness and service offered to their superiors as a condition of their sur-vival. They were lies.

The antidote to this false consciousness, this lie, Freiré said, was knowledge of the truth ― the identification of the lie as a lie and its consignment to the realm of fantasy, myth and malicious calumny.24 This was reminiscent of Freudian psycho-analytical therapy. But it was a special knowledge fully appropriated only in the action of self-empowerment and group organization among the oppressed themselves. Thus the victims freed themselves from collaborating in their own servitude (and at the same time freed the oppressor from his depredations). The pedagogy of the oppressed that derived from this theory had one unambiguous goal: liberation for all.

Freiré’s method was to use adult literacy training as a tool for a self-appreciation that empowered the victim and challenged the exploiters. For great numbers of Third World poor, the ability to read and write was a skill they had been systematically denied. It had become a status symbol. It stood at the boundary dividing the classes. To cross that line was to defy the definitions of the Great Lie. Freiré imbedded a message in the revolutionary action of learning to read. “If you can read, you can think. You are as human as any human — Spanish, Portuguese, American, prince or pope. You have been lied to ... you are not an animal-demon, stupid, lazy, selfish, self-indulgent. You are fully human — fright-ened maybe, but intelligent, courageous and powerful.” This pro-gram, like the original message of Jesus himself, challenged the Great Lie.

LEARNING TO STOPBut coming to respect the healthy instinct that lay behind my

paralysis also suggested another element of the strategy. And that was simply, to stop. The films in Porvenir, harmless as they may have seemed, came to stand as a symbol for me of the process of repressive indoctrination, a function of the Great Lie. The presence of First World missionaries in latin america today 23

?Paolo Freiré, Pedagy of the Oppressed, tr. Ramos, Continuum, NY, 1968, pas-sim, & p.16624

?ibid. p.40

22

(and that included other “crusaders” such as Peace Corps volun-teers and NGO development workers) amounted to the same continued propaganda.

It was my experience that most of these First Worlders be-lieved themselves to be unquestionably superior to the local peo-ple, and they took little pains to hide it. They would openly ex-press sentiments that echoed the negative attitudes cited above. They said Latin Americans were undisciplined, emotional if not ir-rational, and acted like children. They were liars and petty thieves. You couldn’t rely on their word to show up at a meeting or to do what they promised; and they were perpetually late. (“Phonies,” one missionary called them.) They treated their own people like dirt. They were sexually profligate, drunks, incestu-ous and cowards. Does this sound familiar? Certainly to De las Casas it would. All this I saw and heard.

And then, I rarely met a First World person who lived simply, without servants or a life-style that reflected middle-class Amer-ica. Those few that made it a point to live like the local people, the missionaries loudly berated for “going native” and considered them emotionally unstable. Invariably, the homes of the NGO personnel were in up-scale neighborhoods and, like the rectories of the missionaries, equipped as close to US standards as the available in-country resources would permit. Very often they would be attended by a small army of servants who cooked, cleaned, gardened and chauffeured for them. They would justify this “un-American” use of servants by pointing out, at a couple of dollars a day, how ridiculously cheap it was.

“What’s wrong with living like this?,” they would say, “we pay and treat the people well; and we’re too busy with our important work to be doing all that servile labor which here has to be done mostly by hand.”

To my mind, it all served to keep intact the traditional divisions of superiority and inferiority — and made great display of the priv-ileged conveniences that were beyond the means of all but the wealthiest of the local people. It said to the people, intentionally or not, “our lifestyle is better than yours because we are superior to you.” Lifestyle became part of the perpetual propaganda, one of the serial episodes of the films of Porvenir.

As far as the religious message was concerned, the North American missionaries that I knew in the ‘60’s, generally did little

23

more than repeat the ideological story-line the people had been hearing from the Spaniards for centuries. Catholicism, after all, did not vary much from country to country and it had virtually not changed in 500 years. That story-line was a familiar one. It fo-cused on people’s natural inclination to sin, the impending pun-ishment of an angry father-God (held precariously in check by Je-sus’ death), and the salvific effect of adherence to a behavioral code established by the proper authority. There was little in this story to communicate the abiding sense of human worth that, in my opinion, lay at the core of Jesus’ message — a message that had to be muffled by overlays of ecclesiastical mystification, or else it would directly contradict the Great Lie.

LIBERATION THEOLOGY“Liberation theology” entered the scene later, and presented a

very different face. I came in direct contact with it in Central America in the mid-eighties, 20 years after my first experiences in Lima. The “liberation” leaders, clergy and laity, men and women, proposed to live as poorly as the people; their fundamental mes-sage, like that of Freiré, was insight, personal empowerment and community organization. Class lines were being erased and a new Christianity, born in a new Catacombs, began to emerge from the cracks in the massive stonework of the colonial Church. But dramatic and influential as it was (there were even some bishops who embraced its vision and that frightened the powers in Washington), it was never accepted by church authorities and so it never permanently transformed the traditional image and message of the Church in Latin America. Rome, for its part, con-sidered the movement anathema, not surprisingly in agreement with Washington, even silencing some of its better known propo-nents.

Many of us “progressives” who worked in Latin America during that time, tended to associate exclusively with this reform sector and may have developed a skewed view of exactly how extensive it was. The traditional church authorities, with the active support of the Vatican and the neo-conservative (what latins call “neo-lib-eral”) ideological warriors of the Reagan era, effectively marginated liberation theology and its associated movement of Christian base communities and quarantined it from the main-stream. The Catholic hierarchy officially characterized the libera-

24

tion movement as the ephemeral product of a dissident, even schismatic minority led by rabid radicals whose respect for the partisans of armed revolutionary struggle favored class-warfare instead of Christian reconciliation.

Hierarchical criticism tolerated and at times even excused the murderous intervention of the Latin American military, guardians of the status quo, who were supported, equipped and often trained by the United States. People fingered as “Liberation” leaders, clergy and laity, university professors, even bishops, were persecuted and assassinated in great numbers, with the tacit acceptance of the highest church authorities. In some in-stances the murder of priests went without a word of protest from the local bishop. Others, like the Jesuit professors in El Salvador, were pulled from their beds at 2 in the morning and killed in 1989 by an elite battalion of the Salvadoran army trained in Fort Ben-ning, Georgia, in a program that functions to this day.

These martyrdoms, like those of the Roman persecutions of the early church, notwithstanding their enduring transcendent wit-ness, were ultimately swallowed up by the preference of the Church Institution to associate with authority and power. The blood of the martyrs who refused to bow before the self-divinizing Roman theocracy was, ironically, the seed of what later became the “Catholic” Church, a Roman Imperial Adjunct. Invested as the official cult by Constantine, the Catholic Church became the “Department of State Religion” for the Roman Empire, the guar-antor of the sacred mystique of Roman power. Ecclesiastical Christianity thus was made an integral part of the Roman Imperial project. Once it had donned the mantle of Roman Divinity, the Church never took it off. Endowed with such unchallenged power, the Church became implacably intolerant, crushing all other rivals with the legions of Rome.25

It was only then that there appeared as “doctrine,” what had before been only a simple acclamation, a call for unity in time of persecution, now destined to endure through the centuries as a literal, divisive and oppressive dogma: extra ecclesiam nulla salus

25

?Adolf Harnack, Outlines of the History of Dogma, Beacon, Boston, 1957 (1893), pp.354-63, discusses basic elements of Augustine’s doctrine on the Church, its theocratic implications, and the coercive obligations of the Chris-tian State.

25

(“outside the church there is no salvation”).26 It became a state-ment of universal Roman control, not of God’s universal love for humankind. Ecclesiastical theology adapted to its new official status. The sacraments, the hierarchy and all other core features of Christian life were re-cast for use by the now Official Roman Imperial Church and set in rigid, fixed, quasi-physical categories every bit as monolithic and unchangeable as the Empire to which the Church had wedded itself.

It was entirely appropriate that the “evangelization” of the Americas carried out under these auspices would be called con-quista.

THE MISSIONARY ENTERPRISEDefenders of traditional Catholic missionary work in the ‘60’s

claimed that church dogma and moral codes, even if they were authoritarian, did not favor one group over another. But while that might be true in homogeneous middle class US, the Latin American Church continued to be managed by an aristocratic hi-erarchy that supported ruling-class interests. Their example, in turn, encouraged a class consciousness among the people. That helped me understand the school crisis in Porvenir.

This imbalance reflected the class relationships of the feudal society of the past, and that was exactly the source of the prob-lem. The Latin American poor labored under a deprecatory self-definition that was being perpetuated by the attitudes of a colo-nial religious mentality. This meant the Church traditionally con-demned the poor in advance as the source of their own poverty — that they were lazy, self-indulgent and refused to cooperate with the (officialist) solutions offered. Where have we heard this before?

We have to remember, feudal class differences were qualita-tive. In that world, aristocrats ruled because they were consid-

26

?Officially used by the “magisterium” at the IVth Lateran Council, 1215. (Denzinger-Schönmetzer: ¶802, p.260.) The phrase is traceable to Cyprian of Carthage (d.258) as a call for Church unity during the recriminations following of the Decian persecution in which many Christians had lapsed. Cf also on a different note, Harnack, Outlines ...,op.cit. (p.360): Augustine, writing a cen-tury after Constantine, first solidified the doctrine of the indispensability of the Church and drew certain theocratic conclusions with regard to state suppres-sion of Idolatry

26

ered superior people, by blood, by breeding, by bearing. Class declared the wealthy superior, and it also said the poor were poor because they were intrinsically, irreparably inferior. It was the voice of the oppressor, the heart of the Great Lie.

The European lower classes achieved some measure of liber-ation from these same lies in the anti-aristocratic upheavals that spilled across their continent in the 19th century in the wake of the French and American Revolutions. But a comparable event never took place in many of the countries of Latin America. “Rev-olution” for them at that time only meant the local landed upper classes wrested power from the aristocrats of the Mother Coun-try, Spain. The local feudal relationships remained unmodified from what they had always been since the days of the conquista. And the Church was an entrenched part of that hidebound config-uration.

Where there was some insight into the magnitude of the inte-rior damage done by the colonial class relationship, the few “pro-gressives” among the clergy in the early sixties were trapped by their identity with the colonial Church. A dissenting sermon here or there, or a rebellious group of young religious committed to liv-ing in poverty like the people, were lost in a sea of conventional ecclesiastical elitism. It’s not that all missionaries were to be criti-cized (the poor of Porvenir knew that Boston Joe was on their side); it’s that, overall, First World missionary presence — in con-text — simply became part of the problem.

Perhaps something short of complete withdrawal would have reversed this effect. But most of these people, missionaries, NGO workers, Peace Corps volunteers, in spite of their good-will, education and analytical abilities, were blind to these issues. I be-gan to suspect that much of what goes by the name of “helping others” in the developing world is a mixed bag that shares a lot of space with the need of the First World “helpers” to “do some-thing,” or to identify themselves as helpers, or even, more crudely, to maintain their careers and consultantships. The pos-sibility that what they were doing might actually be part of the problem seemed beyond their ken — or their concern.

Was this judgment harsh and unfair? It’s interesting to note that it shared a viewpoint with what some others were saying at the time. Ivan Illich for one, spoke about the “seamy side of char-

27

ity,” meaning the negative effects of US missionary and develop-ment efforts in Latin America. He had already suggested these ideas in talks given in Peru in 1963, explaining why he thought the missionaries should all go home. That did not make the padres I met in Lima that summer very happy.

Illich would shortly become unwelcome in Puerto Rico as well, where his work in missionary preparation and language training began to include a criticism of the North-to-South missionary en-terprise. After Puerto Rico, he set up independent shop-in-exile in Cuernavaca, Mexico, where he continued to “document” his position. Ten years later he shut down that endeavor, subse-quently firing a barrage of criticisms aimed at the dehumanizing features of the pursuit of the universal desiderata of mass soci-ety: education, health care, material development.

Now everybody was unhappy with Illich. He seemed to criti-cize everything, and offered no solutions.

NO SOLUTIONS?I’ve spent a considerable amount of anguish in these reflec-

tions trying to revisit the stages and sequences of my own devel-oping awareness of the unusual anatomy of Third World “poverty.” I came to understand it as a very special poverty that goes beyond dearth, and reaches into the very soul of its victims. It is a world-wide plague born of colonialism that has come to de-fine our times and, I believe, will determine our collective destiny as a species.

It took me the better part of forty years to realize fully that this poverty is most properly an interior and relational reality, not a question of physical “lack.” It is that peculiar injustice that is cre-ated by false self-identities and contemptuous human definitions, entirely of social origin, thrust on untold numbers of people by other people, rendering them self-doubting, self-abasing, demor-alized and manipulable.

I call these definitions, lies. And they are big lies, I might add, not pesky little fibs, petty annoyances like wrong directions that take us out of our way forcing us to backtrack. These lies don’t easily turn around, because they once came from what people believed was the “mouth of God.” They could kill us. They are colossal deceptions, lethal, catastrophic distortions that bear down with crushing fatality on the vulnerable core of what it

28

means to be a human being: our self-esteem and our relationship to other human beings: the part of us that bread cannot feed.

That these particular lies are lies reveals an even deeper hor-ror: their very falsity stems from ersatz religious “facts” still consid-ered by many to be absolutely true and beyond dispute. This in-trinsic Christian flaw makes for a tragedy without, as yet, a catharsis. This is not an academic issue; the doctrine in question still functions. From the past, we already know its power to muti-late; but it remains to be seen what carnage it may wreak in the future.

Christianity in the colonial era, in asserting its claims to abso-lute truth and the absolute necessity of its Baptism, inevitably identified the primitive Amerindians and Africans — as well as Jews and Moslems — as beyond the pale of salvation, the prop-erty and minions of Satan, and forever stigmatized them as less-than-human: corrupt, impotent and morally contagious. It’s what Christians thought; but it was a lie. It was The Lie that ruled the Americas. That such identification of the absolutely alien was also color-coded, came to be seen as a gift from God, helping to pro-tect “innocent and healthy” white christians from contamination by satan’s servants. Even a child could tell who was “of the Devil.” They were colored.

If our most cherished sacred projections can betray us at this depth and with these consequences, what hope is there for us? As a young Catholic I at first admired the conquering Spaniards. I considered them as kin to me. They were my forebears in the faith, who held to the traditional Catholic Christianity that was mine as well. I believed what I was told, that whatever their fail -ings, they brought the saving grace of baptism to a world lost in primitive pagan darkness. It was this religion, and this very teaching, that I ultimately came to see permitted and even en-couraged the believing Spaniards, no less deceived than I was, to treat vast numbers of their non-Christian fellow human beings as if they were little better than animals. It was only then that I understood the residual racism in my own heart and the self con-tempt that poisoned the souls of the people I loved. I believe that racism as we know it, is an historical derivative of our remorse-less insistence that our religion, Christianity, is the only way to salvation. From this I believe we drew the conclusion that we and our way of life were meant to rule the world. The white man as-

29

sumed it as his “burden,” but the whole world staggers under its weight.

Jesus said, “By their fruits you will know them.” Colonial class and race relationships are a poisonous fruit that is destroying us. And it is by this fruit that traditional, institutional, Imperial Chris-tianity is known. It is this Church, this consort of the ancient Ro-man Empire with its arrogant, unrepentant, self-divinizing doc-trines, that I would like to think the Council, Vatican II, tried to put behind us for good — and failed. It’s the kind of Christianity that, following the directions of our great Guide, we can confidently know will not nourish us, for it will not help us to be human.

We are liberated from those lies by our ancient Freiré, that working class Jew who knew God was his Father, that wandering Rabbi who teaches us to judge the truth of what they say by us-ing the standards of measurement born within us, innate, intrin-sic, inalienable, etched indelibly, the image of God in our human flesh and bone. “By their fruits, you, we, human beings, who bear the image of God, will know them.” Perhaps under his un-complicated human guidance and sustained by his martyr’s courage, we may dare to exercise this atrophied faculty which is ours by birth, and silence the lies. Then, once silence reigns, we may hear the still small voice of our God-imaged humanity which tells all of us we, our bodies and our selves, are the children of Love and, without fear or shame or hesitation, we may live out our destiny to love, to love one another, to love every one an-other, in return — even the liars. Can this be called a “solution”?

Att the end of his life, when Illich spoke, he spoke only of friendship.

Tony EqualeWillis, VirginiaNovember 2002

30