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Posted on 05/15/2007 6:15:58 AM PDT by NYer
BRASILIA, May 14 (Reuters) - Outraged Indian leaders in Brazil said on Monday they were offended by Pope Benedict's "arrogant and disrespectful" comments that the Roman Catholic Church had purified them and a revival of their religions would be a backward step.
In a speech to Latin American and Caribbean bishops at the end of a visit to Brazil, the Pope said the Church had not imposed itself on the indigenous peoples of the Americas.
They had welcomed the arrival of European priests at the time of the conquest as they were "silently longing" for Christianity, he said.
Millions of tribal Indians are believed to have died as a result of European colonization backed by the Church since Columbus landed in the Americas in 1492, through slaughter, disease or enslavement.
Many Indians today struggle for survival, stripped of their traditional ways of life and excluded from society.
"It's arrogant and disrespectful to consider our cultural heritage secondary to theirs," said Jecinaldo Satere Mawe, chief coordinator of the Amazon Indian group Coiab.
Several Indian groups sent a letter to the Pope last week asking for his support in defending their ancestral lands and culture. They said the Indians had suffered a "process of genocide" since the first European colonizers had arrived.
Priests blessed conquistadors as they waged war on the indigenous peoples, although some later defended them and many today are the most vociferous allies of Indians.
"The state used the Church to do the dirty work in colonizing the Indians but they already asked forgiveness for that ... so is the Pope taking back the Church's word?" said Dionito Jose de Souza a leader of the Makuxi tribe in northern Roraima state.
Pope John Paul spoke in 1992 of mistakes in the evangelization of native peoples of the Americas.
Pope Benedict not only upset many Indians but also Catholic priests who have joined their struggle, said Sandro Tuxa, who heads the movement of northeastern tribes.
"We repudiate the Pope's comments," Tuxa said. "To say the cultural decimation of our people represents a purification is offensive, and frankly, frightening.
"I think (the Pope) has been poorly advised."
Even the Catholic Church's own Indian advocacy group in Brazil, known as Cimi, distanced itself from the Pope.
"The Pope doesn't understand the reality of the Indians here, his statement was wrong and indefensible," Cimi advisor Father Paulo Suess told Reuters. "I too was upset."
The wisdom of the indigenous peoples fortunately led them to form a synthesis between their cultures and the Christian faith which the missionaries were offering them. Hence the rich and profound popular religiosity, in which we see the soul of the Latin American peoples:
- love for the suffering Christ, the God of compassion, pardon and reconciliation; the God who loved us to the point of handing himself over for us;
- love for the Lord present in the Eucharist, the incarnate God, dead and risen in order to be the bread of life;
- the God who is close to the poor and to those who suffer;
- the profound devotion to the most holy Virgin of Guadalupe, the Aparecida, the Virgin invoked under various national and local titles. When the Virgin of Guadalupe appeared to the native Indian Saint Juan Diego, she spoke these important words to him: “Am I not your mother? Are you not under my shadow and my gaze? Am I not the source of your joy? Are you not sheltered underneath my mantle, under the embrace of my arms?” (Nican Mopohua, nos. 118-119).
FULL TEXT
"It's arrogant and disrespectful to consider our cultural heritage secondary to theirs," said Jecinaldo Satere Mawe, chief coordinator of the Amazon Indian group Coiab.You still lived in grass huts, without the wheel, draft animals, organized agricultural, or writing. Some of you practiced ritual cannibalism. You were showing zero progress.
No, it's not.
-Eric
The neopagans are becoming bold not only in Brazil, but in Bolivia - where official government policy proposed before the Congress is to forbid the teaching of Catholicism in both public and private schools, and to replace it with compulsory instruction in pagan savagery.
Well said!
ping
Didn’t know that, and will ask my boss about it.
The neopagans are becoming bold not only in Brazil, but in Boston............
They were offered Christianity, by whatever means, and they rejected it. Shake the dust off your sandals and move on. God will deal with them later..........
I wonder are they going to burn things down now? Their own artifacts show what kind of peoples they were. They weren’t particularly nice. Puhleeze.
Viva Il Papa!
The initial charge, however, is wrong ~ genocide simply was not conducted against the Indians. For a variety of reasons vast plagues swept through native populations in the Western hemisphere and tens, even hundreds, of millions of people died.
Traditionaly Western diseases have been blamed for these deaths, but more recent findings by authoritative and competent scientific investigators have revealed that the plagues were probably hanta virus of various kinds.
There are gazillions of reference works on the matter ~ yet they remain unread.
This is infuriatingly bad history. I know next to nothing about the history of colonial Brazil, but in North America at least, this same canard is offered and it is grossly distorted.
The biggest slaughterers and enslavers of Indians in the 1600s-1700s were other Indians themselves--who often allied themselves with European colonial powers (e.g. Hurons and Algonquins, Narragansetts & Mohegans), OR attacked and destroyed other tribes completely on their own volition without European help except for arms (e.g. Iroquois).
The Iroquois, in particular, dispossessed the following tribes of the original homelands: Hurons, Petun, Shawnee, Potawatomi, Mascouten, Sauk, Fox, Kickapoo. We can also add the Neutrals, Erie, Honniasont, Mosopelea, who not only were destroyed by the Iroquois but were never heard from again.
Colonial history is complex--shifting allegiances, intra-tribal warfare, colonial powers playing against each other. It is a massive disservice to portray it as simplistically as people tend to do nowadays.
But I think that's the point, isn't it? Indians good, Europeans bad. Nice pat formula that fits in nicely with race hatred against Europeans.
Reuters, you are abysmal.
Don't forget that the Injuns stole the land from the Australian Aborigines thousands of years before Europeans ever set foot in the Americas.
That aside, what are these people expecting? He's the Pope... and although I have serious disagreements with the way the Catholic Church operates in the USA, I think what the Pope said is right on the money.
I am offended that they are offended!
I demand they retract their offensive comments immediately!!!
Actually the Indians of the Amazon jungle area had an incredible amount of useful information about a multitude of natural medicines. Scientists are now striving to learn again what has been forgotten about those Indian medicines.
The death rate among the California mission Indians during the mission era (1769-1834) was about 90%.
And, there is increasing evidence that introduced diseases had already significantly lowered populations by the time Spanish colonization began.
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