Franciscans Confront Columbus Issue

For the first time in the 800-year history of Franciscan missionaries, the Catholic religious order held last month its once-every-six-years worldwide conference in North America, in recognition that the upcoming 500th anniversary of the voyages of Columbus also marks the beginning of Christianity in the New World.

The 200 friars at the monthlong conference at the University of San Diego, representing the more than 19,000 brothers of the Order of Friars Minor, were keenly aware of the controversy surrounding their symbolic recognition of Columbus’ place in history.

Several Franciscans accompanied Columbus on his second voyage to the Caribbean, in September, 1493, becoming the first priests to spread the Catholic gospel in Latin America after almost 300 years of street preaching throughout Europe after the order was founded in 1209 by the ascetic St. Francis of Assisi. Father Junipero Serra, who established the chain of missions through California in the 18th Century, was a Franciscan.

Said noted Franciscan historian Francisco Morales of Mexico: “My brothers are having the same discussions (about the anniversary) as are going on in the secular world. We are part of the world, after all.”

Those discussions are growing in volume as historians, religious organizations and native American groups throughout North and South America debate the legacy of the Italian explorer turned colonizer for the Empire of Spain.

For many revisionist historians and others, Columbus has become the reigning symbol of what the National Council of Churches, a federation of Protestant groups, has called “the invasion and colonization with legalized occupation, genocide, economic exploitation and a deep level of institutional racism and moral decadence.”

All of which puts the Franciscans, as the religious torchbearers for the initial European encounter with residents of the New World, at the heart of disagreements over how the world should remember Columbus at the half-millenium mark.

In an interview, Morales, who is coordinating the work of colleagues to complete next year a massive, one-volume history of Franciscans in the Americas, noted that some Franciscans strongly supported Columbus in his entreaty to Queen Isabella of Spain to back his first voyage in 1492. Yet Franciscan priests were also the ones who forcibly escorted Columbus back to Spain in chains in 1500 for his despotic and capricious administration of the nascent Spanish colonial settlements in the West Indies.

“It’s an interesting (contrast) that still comes up today,” said Morales, a Mexico City native whose earned his doctorate in history from Catholic University in Washington and who spent more than a decade with the Berkeley-based Academy of American Franciscan History before returning to his native country.

“Some of my brothers today see only the positive aspects of the (Columbus) enterprise, and some of my brothers see only the negative . . . . In a way, I’d love to be able to go back to 500 years ago and see how my brothers then were viewing this situation. . . . There has been so much diversity over the years that” it cannot be possible to say that all that has taken place was foreordained by the single event of Columbus.

In the same way that Morales attempts to blend his evangelical background with his historical training, he argues for balancing the competing claims that various groups and nations make in interpreting the past.

“I don’t think that any single group can appropriate the past for itself,” Morales said. “There are simply a variety of interpretations that you can bring to examining the past. My effort is to try and consider all of these problems from a Franciscan point of view, from that of people, of understanding and peace.”

For Morales, the church was able “to begin the incorporation of the Americas into the mainstream of Western history, but with all the problems of the history of the Western world, both the lights and shadows--all the implications (contained in) the sweep of history, which, after all, is dynamic, not a static block to be seen as either all black or all white.”

Morales stressed the importance of understanding the context of European society at the time of Columbus, as well as learning from recently discovered writings in native Indian languages about the role of Franciscans.

“Europe was in the midst of moving from a medieval to a modern society, and there were still the institutions of feudalism, the concept of conquest, the ideal of Christianity as the only true religion and that every person has to be converted--those were facts at the time,” Morales said.

“Columbus, Pizarro, Cortes--they all had the intention of becoming feudal lords, absolute rulers” in the New World.

The same strands of political and social changes affected the church’s role as well, he said.

“At times, there was the ready acceptance by the friars of some of the Indians (religious views),” he said.

“But, at other times, the aspect of bringing the true religion to everyone caused the destruction of important elements of Indian culture . . . and later, with the Reformation, the friars in America have a greater fear of heresy (among Indians) because of pressure from (religious conflict) in Europe.”

But, although cruelty was what observers have called “a common currency” among Europeans and among Indian civilizations as well, Morales said the friars often strove to mediate secular excesses.

“The Indians themselves were very religious, and once they lost their own places, their own temples, they saw the Franciscans trying to help them and very likely felt more inclined to accept the religious teachings of the friars.”

Morales said that new research in colonial Christianity shows that the friars adapted in many ways to Indian culture, incorporating Indian ceremonies and the Indian language to many Catholic rituals.

“We have even today very few scholars in the Indian languages, yet we know that 60% to 80% of the friars’ writings were in the Indian language, and that all of the evangelization was in the Indian languages. . . . Only in the last century or so has Spanish really taken hold; the friars never really obeyed edicts to teach Spanish.”

Morales conceded the problem that many have in reconciling the church role five centuries ago in concert with colonization “when today, in the 20th Century, we have religious liberty, the respect for all cultures.

“But the church even then had a role relative to dealing with social problems, the injustices of some of the colonists, of the destruction of rights.” One of the best-known early writings of the colonial period in the New World came from the Dominican friar Bartolome de Las Casas, who wrote a scathing narrative about excesses by Spanish conquerors in 1552.

Said Morales, “I cannot see the church as a whole in (the historical role) of defending those who destroyed Indian rights, who were making slaves” of the native Americans. Priests such as Las Casas strengthened the moral high ground that clerical defenders took in protecting native residents from European mercantilists and others.

Christianity brought a “sense of Utopia” to the New World, he said, but at the same time that friars built towns, schools, universities and libraries, and introduced new methods of farming, the clash of the Western way of living with that of native Americans ensured that destructive elements would be part of the equation.

“You can’t look back at 500 years and say all that has happened simply (follows) from the landing of Columbus.”