Christian saints and colonial conquest

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

NY Times, February 12, 2000

When Armies of Conquest Marched In, So Did Saints

By CHRIS HEDGES

The Old World may have conquered and colonized the Americas largely for
commercial gain, or the extraction of gold and silver, or imperial
expansion, or sheer adventure. But the grand endeavor was sanctified by the
Catholic and Protestant churches as the greatest religious campaign since
the Crusades.

The empires of France, Spain and Portugal, along with the dour and
messianic Protestant sects that settled New England, acted swiftly to
create their own native hagiography and to record miracles to establish
that they, too, were working under divine providence and were building a
new Jerusalem. The ordeals of martyred missionaries, warriors and visionary
nuns matched the strange and sometimes gruesome tales of virgins being torn
apart by wild beasts that inspired the early Christians.

The intertwining of vengeance, mass slaughter and slavery with religious
zeal that characterized European settlement of the Americas has often been
overlooked or minimized in histories of the period. Now, however, scholars
are rediscovering a vast body of hagiographic literature and the impact it
had in the colonizing process. One such scholar is Allen Greer, a professor
of history at the University of Toronto who is organizing the first
academic conference on colonial saints, to be held in May in Toronto.

When the Americas were settled, there was a 1,500-year-old Christian
tradition of writing about saints' lives to inspire and direct the
faithful. Spain, which had just completed an 800-year struggle to drive the
Muslims from its territory, had refined the image of the warrior saint. The
conquistadors who sailed for the New World were all reared on stories of
Santiago Matamoros, literally St. James the Moor Killer, who was the patron
saint of the Spanish war against Islam. All would have been familiar with
medieval images showing him on horseback trampling an infidel, which was
reworked to show him trampling an Indian (he became known as Mataindios or
Indian Killer). Indeed, the Spanish fighters constantly invoked his name
and often equated the battle against the Aztecs and the Incas with the
campaign against the Muslims. Jean de Brébeuf, a French Jesuit missionary,
was tortured and burned alive, and a Christian mission destroyed, by an
Iroquois force in 1649 during the last part of the Iroquois-Huron wars.

Such deaths, commemorated in lugubrious popular histories, helped muster
support among the colonists for the decimation of Indians who resisted.

While Protestants and Catholics alike used biographies of the righteous to
perpetuate colonization, they diverged widely about the qualities that
should be venerated. Cotton Mather's "Magnalia Christi Americana," often
sounding more like Plutarch than "The Little Flowers of St. Francis," duly
records the lives of pious ministers and patrician, Moses-like figures --
John Winthrop, for example -- struggling against the forces of sin. His are
male symbols of order, probity, self-restraint and exemplary leadership.

Catholic saints, on the other hand, included martyrs, missionaries, nuns,
aesthetic visionaries, mystics and Indians, blacks and mulattos, often from
humble backgrounds, who had visions or led pious lives. "There was more
room in Catholic tradition for sacred biographies of women, as well as men,
for veneration of the humble and the powerful, the colonized races as well
as Europeans," said Mr. Greer. "But this does not mean that when holding up
an image of a saint, such as Martín de Porres, a mulatto doorman for a
monastery in colonial Peru, that other races were treated any more equally.
It was rather a validation of their humble status. It illustrated a
different conception of what constituted achievement."

"There is a way in which the colonized races, the Indians, blacks and mixed
races, are part of the vision in the Catholic colonies," he continued,
contrasting them with the view of Protestant New Englanders. "They are
considered socially inferior, but not, as in New England, excluded from
view."

But such veneration was always in the service of a campaign to obliterate
traditions and replace them with those imported from Europe. The stories of
saints, martyrs and exemplars of probity and wisdom, churned out by local
printing houses, served to justify the newly imported culture as well as
acts of barbarism against the native inhabitants.

Many indigenous people, especially given the persecution and forced
conversions, found it prudent to fuse the imported Catholic saints with
their own deities. Slowly, the transplants began to mutate. Native saints,
even those imported from Europe, began to take on characteristics peculiar
to the New World, and they were joined by a pantheon of new saints who
legitimized the colonial process and embraced its peculiar elements

"There were saints brought from the Old World who were conflated with
indigenous deities," said Charlene Villaseñor Black, assistant professor of
art history at the University of New Mexico, who has just finished a book
on St. Joseph, the patron saint of Mexico. "St. Joseph was conflated with
the Aztec rain deity Tlaloc, and he ends up taking over some of the tasks
of Tlaloc. He becomes associated with earthquakes, rain and fertility.

The saint did not have these associations in the Old World. The Virgin was,
as well, conflated with Tonantzin, the major mother goddess figure of the
Aztecs."

Jodi Bilinkoff, an associate professor of history of the University of
North Carolina at Greensboro, said, "The colonists attempted to transplant
whole institutions, genres of literature and religious practices to the New
World, but eventually everything, including questions of race and
hierarchy, were mixed together."

The revolution in Haiti in 1791, the only successful slave revolt in the
Americas, led to perhaps the most radical mixture of religions: between
Catholicism and African Dahomean beliefs. Here, too, native saints fused
with Old World saints, but often the doubling picked up on particular
experiences that were minimized in the Old World. The veneration of St.
Patrick in Haiti, who is tied with the spirit Danbala, heavily
emphasizesSt. Patrick's bondage in Ireland, a bondage many Haitians
understood. The spirit Ezili-Fréda, identified with the Virgin, was also
fused with the goddess of love.

"The profane and the sacred, lust and purity, were not opposed, as in
European culture," said Joan Dayan, a professor at the University of
Arizona who writes on Haiti. "There is a two-way movement between purity
and impurity. Ezili-Fréda in contemporary Haiti counts among her devotees
prostitutes, virgins and widows."

But the Old World was slow to acknowledge the revelations of the New. The
first beatified saint of the New World is St. Rosa of Lima, but this does
not take place until the late 17th century, more than 150 years after the
conquest. In Mexico, the Holy Child Martyrs of Tlaxcala, children martyred
by their parents or fellow villagers for having converted to Christianity,
swiftly gained a following, although the church did not promote the cult.
And the Mexican national St. Philip of Jesús, martyred in Japan in the 16th
century and the patron saint of Mexico City, was not canonized until the
19th century.

"Early on there was a reluctance to recognize New World saints," said Ms.
Black, "but they continued to appear, the cults bound up with emerging
national pride. The emergence of native saints, the fusion of Old and New
World beliefs, were all part of the establishment of national
characteristics that led to independence."

This gave all the religious impulses in the New World a common thread, one
that increasingly defied the interests of their Old World progenitors. Mr.
Greer said: "The way race, gender and religion in the Americas intertwined
can be better understood when we compare how the different empires took
root, rather than constantly holding them up to Europe. Stories of
exemplary religious figures and saints provide wonderful material for
analyzing this interaction, for the common experiences of all the colonies."


Louis Proyect
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