More church history...James The Spanish Colonization. Chapter 2 1. The Earliest on the New American field were the Spanish discoverers and conquerors. When Columbus discovered the little West India island of San Salvador, and raised upon the shore the cross, he dedicated it and the lands beyond to his sovereigns, Ferdinand and Isabella. The “Gloria in Excelsis” was sung by the discoverer and his weary crew with as much fervor as it had ever been chanted in the cathedrals of Spain. The faith was the Roman Catholic. On his second voyage, in 1494, Columbus took with him a vicar apostolic and twelve priests, and on the island of Hayti erected the first chapel in the Western World. The success of Columbus in discovering a new world in the west awakened a wild enthusiasm throughout Europe. Visions of gold inflamed the minds alike of rulers, knights, and adventurers. To discover and gather treasures, and organize vast missionary undertakings, became the mania of the times. No European country which possessed a strip of seaboard escaped the delirium. To send out a vessel or a fleet to the new world was the fashion of the palace and the capitalist. 2. Mexico was the first broad field of conquest by the Spaniards. Cortes led the expedition, and in 1520 landed at a point which still bears the name of Vera Cruz (the True Cross). He conciliated a tribe which was in rebellion against the Aztec king Montezuma, and succeeded in dethroning the king, and bringing the country into subjection to Spain. The colonists, who arrived in quick succession, had among their members earnest priests, to whom it was a passion to carry the cross into the interior, and to convert, by any means, the aborigines to the Gospel of Christ. From the capital, Mexico, missionaries representing the principal Roman orders penetrated all parts of the new province, reached the shores of the Pacific, and formed a line of missions up the Pacific nearly to the present state of Washington. 3. Other fields, more or less dependent on Mexico, were rapidly added to the Spanish domain in America. In 1542 Coronado led an expedition northward into the New Mexico and Arizona of our day, and the mission of the priest continued after that of the military adventurer was ended. The traces of this expedition are still to be seen in the old church of Santa Fe and Tucson, and in the Roman Catholic faith of the mixed Indian and Spanish population. The conquest of Florida was begun by Pamphilo de Narvaez in 1526, and completed about 1601. A Huguenot colony was established there, but the Spaniards would not allow it to live. They murdered the Huguenots, and established their own missions on the spot. Texas was organized into a mission by Father de Olmos in 1546. De Soto explored the Mississippi Valley. Vasco Nunez de Balboa and Alonzo de Ojedu explored the Isthmus of Darien, and added the contiguous regions to the same broadening domain of Spain and the Roman communion. 4. The Evils of Spanish Colonization were manifested in each of these sections. The conqueror was devoted to the Church, and missionaries became willing tools to compel obedience to the new Spanish authority. Wherever the natives refused allegiance to the religion of the conquerors, they were persecuted and even put to death. Las Casas, the one humane servant of his Church, reports that in Yucatan alone five millions of Mexican aborigines were slaughtered. The curse of Spanish cruelty in Mexico has never been counterbalanced by beneficence in other departments. The Aztec and other native races have always cherished a violent hostility to the very name of the Spaniard. As if a divine Nemesis had watched over those suffering people for three centuries, the freedom from Spanish rule and the birth of the Mexican Republic have been brought about by descendants of the natives whom the Spaniards persecuted. Juarez, the Washington of Mexico, was an Indian, and the first president, Diaz, is in part Indian, while Altamirano and other leading literary characters are of unmixed Indian blood. 5. All the Spanish Colonies in North America shared with Mexico the same narrow spirit. The Spaniard was in the New World to get what he could; to enforce his faith; to carry back gold to enrich the coffers of Spain and the Pope; to add to his own dignity by grinding down the conquered races. Florida, the Mississippi Valley, the Pacific Coast, the West India Islands, and Central America became a vast feudatory territory, whose reassures were used for filling foreign coffers, and whose people were regarded as little better than slaves. 6. Scanty Education was imparted to these millions newly added to the Roman faith. Some of the priests translated devotional and doctrinal treatise into the native tongues, in order the better to reach the people. The printing-press was early erected in both Mexico and Vera Cruz, but only as an instrument of ecclesiastical authority. Molina published in Mexico an Aztec and Spanish Dictionary in 1545—the first important philological work printed in America. Small works by Zumaraga were also published in the Aztec tongue in the city of Mexico. Many devotional works in the Spanish language were printed in Spain and Flanders, and introduced into Mexico for the better holding of the increasing Spanish population in willing subjection to the Roman Catholic Church.
Posted on: Thu, 24 Oct 2013 23:54:19 +0000
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