I still recall my high school
history teacher telling us, like many other history teachers would tell their classes
that those coming to the New World came for three reasons: Gold, Glory, and the Gospel. She didn’t say it at the time but I later
realized there is a reason “gospel” is usually listed last. Often if the gospel got in the way of
accumulating the first or winning the second, the gospel suffered.
CATHOLIC MISSIONS IN THE NEW WORLD
The Spanish Sphere
The Roman Catholic Church had been
a missionary church throughout most of its history. The impulse to take the message of Christ (as
they understood it) pushed priests and friars beyond many national
borders. In the beginning, the
missionaries sometimes entered new territory armed only with their faith; they would
go to the new world accompanied by a technologically superior military force.
The common approach taken by the
Spaniards to the native peoples they encountered in those early days included
reading a proclamation which said they were now subjects of the Pope and must
submit to his spiritual authority. They
were warned that if they did not submit, the Spaniards would cause them
whatever “mischief” they could and then they would be made slaves. The proclamation was, of course, in
Spanish. Those who submitted were kept
in compounds and were, in essence, made slaves.
Evangelism among the Mexicans was
of questionable value. No real
instruction preceded the baptisms. Some
of the priests would report thousands of baptisms per day.
The Indians
were eager enough to accept the Christian faith; but they were just as ready to
abandon it. Between 1524 and 1531 the Franciscans baptized more than a million
Mexicans. The practice of mass baptisms had the same effect as mass conversions
in northern Europe in the early Middle Ages: ignorance, magic, superstition in
Christian symbols.[1]
The church had crossed the Atlantic
and reproduced on new soil the cultural Christianity that dominated most of
Europe. This not to say there were no genuine conversions among the Indian
peoples but the approach made it unlikely.
Gold hungry Spaniards looted
temples and sent the wealth back to the king.
Where the Spaniards started plantations, they made the natives—who were
in theory their spiritual brothers and sisters—into slaves. The life-expectancy of such slaves was about
three years.
The Dominican friar Bartolomé de las Casas
(1484-1566), who served in Guatemala and later as a bishop in southwestern
Mexico, urged fairer treatment for the native populations. He wrote a defense of the “Indios” in which
he claimed their various civilizations were as advanced as the Greek, Roman,
and Egyptian civilizations, more advanced than some of the northern European
cultures. He condemned the demands for
tribute made by the Spaniards and the use of the natives as slaves. To press his cause, he returned to Spain
where he spent the remainder of his life fighting for more humane treatment for
the people he had come to admire. He is
remembered in Latin American countries as a pioneer of human rights.
Regrettably, however, he
recommended that Indian slavery be replaced with African slavery. It’s difficult to imagine the convoluted
thinking that might have prompted this argument but African slavery was already
being practiced so he may have felt his scheme would have, at least, stopped
the abuse from extending to one more group.
Despite such a beginning, Roman
Catholicism became entrenched in the Latin American culture. Like a giant birthday cake, the pope simply
divided South America between Spain and Portugal.
Further north, the number of cities
and towns across the American southwest named after saints reminds us of that
Catholic heritage. Then, too, evidence of the friars’ efforts can still be seen
in the remains of the old missions they built to bring Christianity to the
Indians. One was the Valero mission
built in 1724, in the state of Northern Mexico. It functioned as a mission
until 1793 when it was secularized and the land nearby was returned to the
locals from the village of Bexar. After
being abandoned for a decade, soldiers from the Bexar garrison began using the
buildings, renaming it for the cottonwoods that grew nearby. They called it the Alamo.
The presence of the missions does indicate that the friar and priests made an effort to do more than generate nominal belief.
2
Catholicism dominated the area
until Texas and later California became part of the United States. However, there were some illegal Baptist and
Methodist churches in Texas prior to the 1836 Revolution. The American people who moved into the
southwest brought their denominations with them and, of course, one new
religion made its center of activity in the area.
Mexico’s
Reformation: Roman Catholicism
remained unchallenged in Mexico until the mid-nineteenth century. General Santa
Anna had even made conversion to Catholicism a requirement for settlers in
Tejas.
Mid-century brought what has been described as
Mexico’s Protestant Reformation. In
1857, President Benito Juarez (who had helped overthrow Santa Anna in 1855) signed
the Laws of Reform that granted religious liberty throughout Mexico. The Catholic hierarchy opposed this new
freedom, but many priests were supportive and eventually formed their own
church, Iglesia de Mexicana de
Jesus. As an entity, the church lasted only about a
decade but during that time many of its leaders embraced clearly Protestant
ideas. They would become leaders in the
Presbyterian, Methodist, and Anglican churches in Mexico.
After the 1870, missionaries began
arriving in Mexico, mostly from the US.
Their work would create a strong evangelical minority in the
nation. These evangelicals were
especially supportive of the Revolution from1910-1917.
In the twentieth century,
Pentecostals and then the so-called Neo-Pentecostals became a powerful force
reaching the middle and upper classes. Pentecostalism had been brought to the country
by returning migrant workers who had embraced this form of Protestantism while
working in the US. Mexican evangelicals represent about 10 percent of the
population and they are beginning to become involved in the political life of
the nation.
In 2000, Lindy Scott wrote that “Religious
persecution continues in Chiapas, Oaxaca, Hidalgo, and other states, but this
persecution has resulted in even greater growth.”[2] For the past forty years, Protestantism has
grown rapidly in the southern portion of the nation. It’s estimated that of the populations of
Chiapas, Tabasco, and Yucatan 25% is evangelical Protestant or Pentecostal.
The French Sphere
French Catholic missionaries, often
unsupported by military force, travelled great distances. In 1600, missionaries reached what is now
Sault Ste Marie, Michigan. In 1604,
Jesuits arrived in Nova Scotia. A few years later, in 1615, French missionaries
opened a school in the Trois-Rivieres area in Quebec.
The practice of mass baptism did
not play a role in missionary efforts to reach the Indians of Canada and what
would become the American northeast.
3
Despite concerted efforts to reach
the native peoples, the missionaries were often hampered by the French
conflicts with the Indians, especially the Iroquois.
When the British gained control of
Canada in 1763 the fate of the Roman Catholic Christians became a matter of
concern. The Quebec Act, in 1774, gave
Catholics freedom of worship.
[1] Shelley, B. L. (1995). Church history in
plain language (Updated 2nd ed.) (285). Dallas, TX: Word Pub.
[2] “Mexico,” Evangelical
Dictionary of World Missions, 2000, p.
620. Much of the foregoing
material on the church in modern Mexico is from this article.
