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Toby Terrar, “Catholic Mission History and the 500th Anniversary of Christopher Columbus's Arrival: A Time for Mourning and for Celebrating.” This article originally appeared in Mission Studies: Journal of the International Association for Mission Studies (Chicago & Hamburg, Germany), vol. 9 (1), pp. 7-23 (1992). (DM10.04; P8-19b.doc, see also, P12-178-19b.doc; box 3.20.1, pt. 1; #53; same as #46.1).

            In 1992 the world will mark the 500th anniversary of Christopher Columbus's arrival in America. In June 1990 the National Council of Churches announced that the anniversary, so far as it was concerned, would be a time for mourning, not for celebrating. From the perspective of the NCC, the missionaries that Columbus brought and the theology of colonialism, racism, and landlordism which they taught was a betrayal of the church. The resolution of the National Council of Churches reads in part:

The church, with few exceptions, accompanied and legitimized the genocide, slavery, ecocide, and exploitation of the wealth of the land. The mission left a bitter fruit inherited by the descendants of the survivors of the invasion.[1]

            Mission history since the time of Columbus is a cause for mourning. But there is also a part of mission history that has fought against colonialism and racism. This tradision is useful in teaching present day resistance to these evils and is worth of celebration. The United Nations and Second Vatican Council's declarations on religious freedom, as well as the NCC's position on Columbus's arrival, all embody this anti-colonial tradition.

            This paper will first discuss the anti-racist and anti-colonial doctrine embodied in the UN and Vatican II doctrines on religious freedom. Then will follow three illustrations of this doctrine as embodied in Catholic mission history over the past 500 years. These examples involve the use of praemunire and anti-mortmain laws in fighting colonialism and racism.

            The U.N. General Assembly in 1981 enacted a declaration on religious freedom and religious duties.[2] The declaration makes it a duty under international law for religion to teach social justice and contribute to the elimination of racism, sexism, colonialism, and neo-colonialism. The preamble to the U.N. declaration reads in part:

Freedom of religion should contribute to the attainment of the goals of world peace, social justice, and friendship among peoples and to the elimination of ideologies or practices of colonialism and racial discrimination. . . The use of religion or belief for ends inconsistent with the charter of the U.N. and the purpose and principles of the present declaration is inadmissible. . . Member states have pledged themselves to promote fundamental freedoms without distinction as to sex. . . The disregard and infringement of the right to freedom of thought, conscience, religion or belief, have brought, directly or indirectly, wars and great suffering to mankind, especially where they serve as a means of foreign interference in the internal affairs of other states and amount to kindling hatred between peoples and nations.[3]

            The U.N. religious freedom doctrine is similar to the Vatican II legislation on religious freedom. The Vatican II teaching is scattered throughout the council's 4 constitutions, 9 decrees, and 3 declarations.[4] The Vatican II enactments require that freedom of religion contribute to social justice and to the elimination of racism, sexism, and neo-colonialism. Thus the "Dogmatic Constitution on the Church" states that religion has to help redistribute wealth.[5] The "people of God" and "each of the churches" must "work to see that created goods are more fittingly distributed, and that such goods lead to general progress in human and Christian liberty." The "institutions and conditions of the world" must be "conformed to the norms of justice." Among the scripture passages cited in support of the constitution is Luke 4:18 about Jesus coming "to bring good news to the poor."[6]

            The same document outlaws racism in the church and requires an affirmative action program in which "the customs of each people" be fostered.[7] The "Declaration on the Relationship of the Church to Non-Christian Religions" condemns racism against Jews.[8] Defense of gender justice is included in the "Declaration on Religious Freedom".[9] It speaks of the "inviolable rights" of the human person which must be protected.

            The "Decree on the Missionary Activity of the Church" speaks of "mission" as a central characteristic of the church, not of its being merely one among many characteristics.[10] It defines mission in terms of social justice and quotes the communitarian ideal in Acts 2: 42-47 and 4: 32-35, from each according to their special gifts and abilities to each according to their needs.[11] The use of mission by neo-colonialists, including the U.S. state department, to inhibit the unity of the developing nations in working for a new economic order, is not condoned by the spirit of the decree. In this regard, the decree cites the international working class ideal: an injury to one is an injury to all.[12]

            Both the U.N. Declaration and the Vatican II legislation reject the neo-colonialist doctrine of religious freedom as freedom to use the church as a tool to keep the working people in obedience to the established order. The Vatican II "Declaration on Religious Freedom" defines religious freedom as "a responsible freedom, motivated by a sense of duty."[13] The right of religious freedom "has its foundation not in the subjective disposition of the individual, but in their very nature. . . The right of freedom is according to the just requirements of public order."[14] It is not religious freedom but a violation of it when the church is used to promote social injustice. Similarly, the "Dogmatic Constitution on the Church" speaks of a "just freedom."[15]

            It is in part because Vatican II taught that religious freedom and mission had to be contributors to world peace, social justice, and the elimination of ideologies and practices of colonialism, sexism, and racial discrimination that Catholic defenders of religious freedom in the developing countries such as Ignacio Ellacuria, S.J. and Gustavo Gutierrez hold up the Vatican II documents for praise.[16] Gutierrez remarks:

A missionary church is a church that looks outside itself in service to the world, and in the final analysis, to the lord of history, as the "Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World" repeatedly says.[17]

            The Vatican II and U.N.'s declaration on religious freedom represent and arise out of a centuries-long tradition of social justice and national liberation struggles. To give an idea of the part which Catholic missions played in this tradition, three examples will be discussed. These date from the 17th to the 20th century. The focus of the examples will be the use of anti-mortmain and praemunire laws.

            Praemunire legislation prevents Roman interference in the local churches and preserves the fraternal, not paternal, relation that is part of the religious freedom ideal that has always existed to a greater or lesser degree. In the English-speaking world, formal praemunire laws date back at least to 1353.[18] The same purpose had been served prior to praemunire by common law writs of prohibition, of quare impedit, of quare non admisit, of quare non-permittit, and by the long-established right, reaffirmed by an ordinance in 1343, of forbidding the introduction into England of papal bulls prejudicial to the church.[19]

            Praemunire, among other things, safeguarded the local chapter of the clergy as the elector of the bishop. The Roman establishment was not allowed to appoint foreign bishops subservient to colonial landlords or transfer out of the rhelm clergy who took the side of the people.[20] Thus the 1353 law prevented the Avignon papacy during the Hundred Years War (1337-1453) from making the church a tool through which France could rule England.[21]

            Anti-mortmain legislation prevents the monopolization of church property by bishops. Mortmain, literally "dead hand," means holding property corporately, rather than personally. In England a statute against ecclesiastical mortmain was first enacted in the thirteenth century to control the monopolizing of land by the Norman colonial monasteries.[22] The aim was to keep the church's land, revenue, service, and theology, under relatively popular control, rather than that of foreign landlord bishops.

            MISSION EXAMPLES. The first of the three examples of the use in Catholic mission policy of praemunire and anti-mortmain legislation comes from Maryland. During the 17th century North America was missionary territory. The Catholic-dominated second Maryland General Assembly in 1638 enacted one of the first North American praemunire and anti-mortmain laws against foreign landlord interference in the church. The Maryland praemunire law, as historian Alfred Dennis puts it, "guaranteed the immigrants from papal interference."[23] Thomas Copley, S.J., a Maryland priest and landlord at the time, and one of the individuals against whom the law was directed, complained:

Hereby even by Catholics a law is provided to hang any Catholic bishop that should come here, and also every priest, if the exercise of his jurisdiction be interpreted jurisdiction or authority [from Rome].[24]

            The Maryland praemunire law prohibited church courts and canon law. This meant bishops and their deputies were not, as in some countries, the probators of wills, administrators of estates, punishers of acts such as blasphemy, and the licensors of marriages. In missionary countries such as Mexico where the landlord class controlled, canon law and church courts were used to prevent the tenantry and laboring people's religious and other freedoms. In this regard, the historian of colonial Mexico, Colin Palmer, gives an example of blasphemy prosecutions. Palmer notes that blasphemy was in part a manifestation of rebellion by Mexican slaves and tenantry against the established colonial order. Palmer describes the use of the church courts in collaboration with the landlord class against the laboring people during the 1630s at the same time Maryland prohibited such courts:

The accused person [in a church court] who balked at confessing could be tortured into making an admission of guild. The most common offense was blasphemy. In its efforts to foster religious orthodoxy, the Inquisition relentlessly pursued blasphemers.

A few examples will indicate this pattern. One blasphemed when his head was cut in three places while he was being beaten by his master. Another renounced God ("I renounce God, Our Lord") when she was about to be branded. A third renounced God when her master tied her while she was nude and began to beat her and squeeze her flesh with pincers ("I renounce God and his saints, I only need a knife to kill myself"). A fourth slave blasphemed after he had been tortured before a picture of Mary by his master for an entire night. Blasphemy appeared to be the instinctive reaction by a slave to an unbearable situation.[25]

            The Maryland missionary clergy were the products of Spanish seminaries, experienced in the ways of the Spanish ecclesiastical judicial system, and had classmates involved in the Mexican courts. They had the will but not the power to establish similar courts in Maryland. More frequently, the Maryland courts were used against the landlord clergy.[26]

            The Maryland anti-mortmain law prevented the clergy, as clergy, from owning church property. As a result, the tenantry, not the Maryland landlords, including landlord clergy, owned church property and used it to promote religious freedom. For example, Catholics and Protestants jointly built and operated the chapel at St. Mary's. When the Catholic landlord Thomas Gerard attempted in 1642 to exclude Protestants from using the chapel and removed their books from it, the Maryland Assembly found Gerard "Guilty of a misdemeanor." He was fined 500 pounds of tobacco, which was about half a years income.[27] It was common for the landlords to use religious sectarianism to create hatred and division among the people. This distracted the people from resisting their real enemy, the landlord. On the otherhand, popular control of church property, as in the Maryland mission, was associated with ecumenism, not religious hatred.

            The second example of praemunire and anti-mortmain legislation in Catholic mission policy deals with 18th century South and Central America. Just as popular legislation in missionary Maryland helped promote ecumenism and social justice there, so anti-mortmain and praemunire measures in the late 18th century put the missionary church on the people's side in African, Spanish, French, and Portuguese America. This legislation included the common law that resulted from revolutions like that in Haiti in Aug. 1791 and which became part of the Haitian Constitution of 1805. Haitian law made church offices subject to popular election. Native clergy were able to gain church offices.[28] The clergy that had identified with the slaveowners were deposed. Appeals to Rome were outlawed, as was foreign canon law.[29] Relations with Rome were eventually suspended in order to stop slaveowners from using that establishment against the people. It was only in 1860 that relations were restored, after Rome agreed to recognize the same right for the proposal and appointment of bishops that the former French king had possessed.[30]

            The Haitian praemunire and anti-mortmain type laws helped some 50 African, French, Spanish, and Corisican clergy put the pulpit in the service of anti-racism. These clergy included the Spanish Capuchin, Corneille Brelle (d. 1817), an ex-slave named Felix, a mulatto priest, Salgado, and a white Cuban, Juan Gonzalez.[31]

            As in the Haitian revolution, so in each of the late 18th century South and Central American national liberation struggles, anti-mortmain and praemunire laws were an aspect of putting the mission church on the popular side. Insurrections and revolutions often became the church's pulpit from which anti-colonial and anti-racist praemunire laws were enforced. These insurrections included those led by Catholic Afro-Americans in Buenos Aires, Argentina in 1795, in the Bahian Tailors' Rebellion[32] and in the Eugenho Santana uprising, both in Brazil in 1798.[33] Catholic freedom fighters in the Cuban mission were involved in the 1795 Nicolas Morales conspiracy,[34] the Puerto Principe rebellion of the same year, the rebellion in central Cuba in 1798, and the Maracaibo conspiracy of 1799.

            In Dominica, Catholic Afro-Americans were among those who led anti-racist insurrections in 1791 and 1795.[35] The revolt of 1795 in Grenada was led by the Catholic Julien Fédon[36] and the 1795 revolt in Guadeloupe was led by another Catholic, Victor Hugues. Black Catholics fomented the Pointe Coupée plot of 1795 in Spanish Louisiana,[37] the Martinique slave revolt of 1789, and the larger one on that island led by Jean Kina in 1802.[38] The 1795 Aguadilla conspiracy in Puerto Rico,[39] the St. Vincent insurrection of 1795, the Boca Nigua rebellion on Santo Domingo in 1796, and the revolt on Tortola in 1790 were all the work of free and slave Black Catholics. Finally, the 1795 Coro rebellion in Venezuela was led by the Catholics José Chirinois and José Caridad Gonzalez.[40]

            The anti-colonial struggle of the missionary church in the late 18th century was helped by the European church. This was because the European church was itself making gains in religious freedom. The dozen European democratic revolutions in the late 18th-century each included a church democracy aspect. Praemunire and anti-mortmain legislation, as in the French Constitution of the Clergy of 1790, the Cisalpine Constitution of 1797, and the Polish Constitution of 1791 were typical. The French bishops became subject to popular election, they lost their monopoly on church property, and were required to keep residency in the place of their ministry and perform their ecclesiastical duties. The jurisdiction of foreign canon law was abolished.[41]

            One parish priest remarked that "the [French} National Assembly has consummated reforms that 10 centuries of church councils had been unable to effect."[42] Another priest stated a similar approval:

The God the French will no longer be the God of superstitious priests and of haughty pontiffs. He will be the God of the Gospels, the protector of the weak, the consolation of the feeble, the avernger of despots and of the leaches on the people.[43]

            The slave abolition movement in Europe was one of the fruits of the European democratic revolution and a support to the missionary church in America. Catholics, including the clergy, helped in gaining the French Republic's abolition of slavery on Feb. 14, 1794. Among the clergy who were active in international abolitionist organizations were Guillaume Raynal (1713-1796), Antoine de Cournand (1747-1814), and Henri Grégoire.[44]

            Raynal's A Philosophical and Political History of the Settlements and Trade of the Europeans in the East and West Indies (1783) went through 55 editions in six languages by 1800.[45] It recited the evils brought upon the world by European colonialism and its religion of obedience. Among the passages from this work which the Haitian general, Toussaint, admired was the following:

If there is no power under heaven that can convert me into a brute, there is none that can dispose of my liberty. God is my Father not my master. I am his child, not his slave. How then, could I accord to political power that which I refuse to Divine omnipotence?

These are immovable and eternal truths--the foundation of all morality, the basis of all government. Will they be contested? Yes! And it will be a barbarous and sordid avarice which will commit the audacious homicide. Cast your eye on that shipowner in Europe, who, bent over his desk, regulates, with pen in hand, the number of crimes which he may commit on the coast of Guinea; who, at his leisure, examines what number of muskets will be needed to obtain a negro, what number of chains to hold him bound on board his vessel, what number of whips to make him work: who coolly calculates how much will cost him each drop of the blood with which his slave will water his plantation; who discusses whether the negress will give more or less to his estate by the labors of her feeble hands than by the dangers of child-birth.

You shudder? ah! if there existed a religion which tolerated, which authorized, if only by its silence, horrors like these; if, occupied with idle or contentious questions, it did not ceaselessly thunder against the authors or the instruments of this tyranny; if it made it a crime for the slave to break his chains; if it suffered in its bosom the unjust judge who condemned the fugitive to death; if this religion existed, would it not be necessary that its altars should be broken down.[46]

            Another of the abolitionist clergy was Henri Grégoire (1750-1831), who was a member of the French National Assembly. The Vietnamese anti-colonial leader, Ho-Chi-Minh, at the bicentennial of Gregoire's birth in 1950, called him "the apostle of liberty of all people."[47] Gregoire proposed legislation in France that would require the clergy to use the pulpit to teach against racism and slavery. He wrote:

Religion teaches people to look upon one another as equals. I propose the following decree to the National Assembly: the clergy are to use all the influence which their ministry gives them in order to efface racial prejudice. Let us obliterate all the degrading distinctions which nature rejects and religion prohibits. . . Equality should be the sole measure of rights. To live is nothing but to live free is everything.[48]

            English, Spanish, and French landlords carried on a 10 year war to restore the old order in Haiti in the late 18th century. More than 50,000 European mercenaries lost their lives and 25 million pounds sterling was spent in these unsuccessful attempts.[49] The Haitian people in their military struggle had the support of the anti-colonial European church. Henri Grégoire is illustrative of those who campaigned against the landlords:

These people wish to rule over servile men, over cadavers and rubbish. They are rulers who prefer burned villages to villages in rebellion, who would sacrifice thousands of soldiers rather than abandon an assault. These bloodthirsty beasts lead armies into butchery with impunity.[50]

            The third and final historical example of praemunire and anti-mortmain legislation in Catholic mission policy deals with the laws enacted in China since the 1949 revolution. These laws culminated a long struggle for religious freedom in missionary China. For centuries the Roman establishment was employed by the colonial powers to implement racist policies like not allowing a native church leadership and by inhibiting the Chinese to have their own religious culture.[51] After the Opium War between Britain and China in 1840, European capitalism promoted drug sales and drug addiction in China. Foreign missionaries were exempted from Chinese law by the "unequal treaties." Their presence served the public relations needs of colonialism, not social justice.[52] Some European Catholic missionaries, like Vincent Lebbe, a Belgium Vincentian in the 1920s, fought on the side of the Chinese against colonialism.[53]

            By using anti-mortmain and praemunire type legislation, the Chinese church deposed or silenced those clergy and bishops who identified with landlords and monopolists. China's 146 bishops and 1,000 parishes now identify with and put the church in the service of the people. China's 7 Catholic seminaries teach and respect the Chinese communist laws of 1949 and the literature, philosophy, and customs of China.

            Theresa Chu, R.S.J., is a Chinese-Canadian nun and director of the Canada-China Program of the Canadian Council of Churches. She has studied the thinking of China's 3 million Catholics concerning those like the deposed bishop Gong Pinmei of Shanghi. For him the church was supposed to serve as a political party for colonialism. He wanted to excommunicate the Catholics who took the side of the working class and national liberation. Sister Chu writes of Catholic rejection of Gong Pinmei:

Why should that couple be refused communion when all they did was to allow their daughter to wear the red scarf awarded her in school? Why should I be refused communion when all I did was to read the People's Daily? More important issues included volunteering to fight the enemy or to nurse the wounded in Korea from 1950 to 1953, and signing a protest against germ warfare, and after 1957, the consecration of bishops.[54]

            The advance made in the Chinese mission is typical of those made in all the mission countries since World War II. Freedom from colonial religion, which has involved to a greater or lesser degree praemunire and anti-mortmain, has been a part of every national liberation struggle in the 20th century. Native clergy, native leadership, and native church policies responsive to popular, not to European and U.S. state departments have often become the norm.

            Liberation theology is part of the missionary tradition. Liberation theology often looks with favor on praemunire and anti-mortmain, and teaches that freedom of religion means freedom for mission to do social justice, not freedom for mission to serve neo-colonialism. Missionary colonialism for centuries denied the tie between religious freedom, politics, and class, while at the same time teaching obedience to the established colonial order. Typical of missionary colonialism was its support for the overthrow of the Allende government in Chile. The U.S. ambassador to Chile, William Korey testified that "With the full knowledge of Chile and the United States, millions in CIA and AID funds were allocated to Roman Catholic groups opposed to `laicism, protestantism, and communism.'"[55]

            Liberation theology begins its defense of principled religious freedom with Jesus, who rejected the landlords of his day and their doctrine on the classless nature of religion and freedom. The liberation theologian Juan Luis Segundo, S.J.. for example, writes:

Jesus had a clear preference for all those who have been objects of scorn, injustice, and marginalization, whether they are good or bad. . . The "good news" is for the poor; it is not directly or immediately for everyone. In its historical setting, in fact, it is "bad news" for those who already have had their reward in the present regime or kingdom.[56]

            In contrast to the colonial theology of oppression, liberation theology teaches that because Jesus took the side of the people, the forces that upheld the established political and religious order, the Herodians and Pharisees, conspired to assassinate him. Jesus was aware of the political dimensions of his liberation project, and adopted a political mode by which to manifest God.

            The emphasis of liberation theology is that the historical Jesus and his mission of social justice was rejected not only by the established order in the first century but by landlords, monopolists, and their missionaries ever since. Segundo, who is a Urugayian Jesuit, is critical of those colonial missionaries who substitute for the historical Jesus a spiritualized figure who had no love for or commitment to the liberation of the oppressed. The Jesus of colonialism in fact hated life and viewed the world as an obstacle or test to be endured. The ministry and message of Jesus with its inherent conflictiveness was minimized and translated into an atemporal moral teaching.[57]

            "Service" and its equation with life-as-test made the avoidance of sin and the attainment of heaven of supreme importance. The concept of sin became individual.[58] This was not the case for the historical Jesus, for whom sin was social. Sin involved every fault that posed an obstacle to the reign of God on earth. What avoidance of sin meant for the landlord dominated missions over the past 500 years has been a lack of corporate commitment to contribute creatively to establishing God's reign on earth. As Segundo puts it, "Jesus took an interest in concrete human affairs. . . This sin of omission by the colonial church is crucial, especially as society depends on complex mechanisms that operate (and even kill) by themselves."[59]

            CONCLUSION. This essay has been about the mission tradition of anti-colonialism, as embodied in the UN, Vatican II, and NCC doctrine on religious freedom. Anti-mortmain and praemunire were tools which helped bring ecumenism and the defeat of landlord monopolists in the 17th century Maryland mission as compared with the Mexico mission. These tools in the 18th century South and Central American mission made the pulpit a source for anti-racism and slavery abolitionism. Praemunire and anti-mortmain in the 20th century Chinese mission has prevented capitalists from using the church to defend racism and colonialism. Praemunire and anti-mortmain policies are currently part of the theology of liberation that puts mission on the side of national liberation and working class parties.

            The Catholic priest Tissa Balasuriya at Aquinas University College in Sri Lanka describes the positive relation between the communist movement, for which praemunire and anti-mortmain are basic, and religious freedom in his Asian mission:

Communism is a medium through which the values of the West, such as those of Greek civilization, Roman order, the European renaissance, the industrial and technological revolutions, the secularist humanism and Judaeo-Christian messianism, present themselves to Asia without the repulsive odor of Western colonialism and economic imperialism or the humiliating foreigness of the Christian missionary methods. Historical Marxism is essentially a serious-minded, humanist, collectivist reaction against the individualistic, sentimental, asocial, pietistic Christianity of 19th century Europe.[60]

            The media, politics, and economy in the U.S. are dominated by the capitalist system and its neo-colonialist program. The message of Fr. Balasuriya, the positive history of missionary history, and the tie between religious freedom and anti-colonialism is too often censored in the US. The 500th anniversary of Columbus's arrival is a time to mourn. But mission history is not only negative. It also includes often successful resistance to colonialism and racism. The 500th anniversary is an opportunity to publicize and celebrate this history.

 

 

 

FOOTNOTES