Weekly Reflection 071303AD

Sunday July 13, 2009AD

14^th Sunday in Greentime

He Didn’t Go for the Gold.

A Dominican friar who died on July 18, 1566, Bartolome de las Casas, deserves to be remembered not only as a prophet, but as a political philosopher, years ahead of his time. In the mold of Amos, he was in the Spirit of Jesus the Prophet.

De Las Casas was 8 years old when Christopher Columbus returned from his first voyage to the New World. He was ordained a priest and sent as a missionary to Hispaniola (the Dominican Republic and Haiti).

At the age of thirty, he underwent a dramatic conversion, when he snapped out of the “big lie”, the conventional wisdom, the “gold, glory, Gospel” mystique, associated with la Conquista. He witnessed firsthand the genocidal treatment of so many of the indigenous people. In the Spirit of Jesus, he was revolted by the inhuman treatment of Indians by nominal Catholics, who justified much of what they did by baptizing the native Americans (or else!!)

De las Casas stressed that indigenous peoples were not subhuman, apparently, an argument used by some of the conquistadores.

De las Casas stressed that the natives were just as human and as entitled to basic human rights (such as they would have been understood in the sixteenth century.) He stressed that if the indigenous people did not want to become Catholics, that was their choice. The Catholic religion was not to be forced upon them.

The treatment of the native Americans, in some cases, was so barbaric and inhuman that de las Casas wondered aloud in sermons whether or not the Spanish would get into heaven with their mistreatment of God’s children. Needless to say, this prophet was not well-received.

He was made the Bishop of Chiapas, in southern Mexico, to get him out of the way. He shocked his Spanish flock by refusing absolution to Spaniards who did not free their slaves.

Many of his ideas were proclaimed 200 years later in Europe during the Enlightenment. Many of his ideas were proclaimed 450 years later at the Second Vatican Council (1962-1965) as well as in the encyclicals of several Popes beginning with Pope Leo XIII’s Rerum Novarum in 1891 and continuing with the socio-economic-political encyclicals of Pope John Paul.

A popular term with Blessed John XXIII was “solidarity” All are God’s children, we are all family.

Since Vatican II, Catholics speak of “a preferential option for the poor”, that is, that God loves all of us, but God has a special solicitude for the less fortunate and expects that we help them. De las Casas saw this, not as an option, but as a mandate for every Catholic, with God’s Help.

In the Spirit of this weekend’s readings, in the Spirit of Amos, of de las Casas, in THE SPIRIT OF JESUS, let us heed the words of the prophets and teach them to our children so that their world will be a better one than ours. 071303 AD jfq