Catholic Missionaries and Indigenous Indians

Almost two thousand years ago, the resurrected Christ appointed His disciples to become Apostles. His commission to them—the Great Commission—as recorded in the Gospel of Mark, reads:

“Go into all the world and preach the gospel to the whole creation.”

The Great Commission required messengers who were willing to travel, explore, discover—and suffer. Indeed, such was the commitment of the Catholic messengers of the Great Commission that their activities on its behalf had a tremendously powerful influence on the settlement and development of America.

The journeys of missionaries to America involved one people, represented by the Catholic messengers—Franciscans, Dominicans, Jesuits, Augustinians--who were sometimes more aggressive than the other, indigenous people because the former believed that they knew the truth, the reality that explains all the creation over time, a truth that, they assumed, the other, indigenous people, did not know—but the Great Commission required that these people be taught.

The activities of Catholic missionaries in America over the space of five hundred years are as varied as the human condition. In recent years commentators and critics have castigated missionaries for the negative consequences of their actions, which included corporeal punishment, educating indigenous children in schools separated from their parents, and trying to remove the indigenous culture and language for a Christian, European perspective. Some missionaries, such as the Franciscans in seventeenth-and eighteenth-century California, have been crucified under a torrent of words and accusations. But many missionaries--most I would say--had love in their hearts, even if the practices of people in the past did not always conform to what we expect in today's world.

Reality rarely conforms to ideals. Notwithstanding the rightness of Catholic aims toward the indigenous—to teach, to civilize, to save, to love—humans are humans, we belong to the City of Man, and sin, error, and crime against others will inevitably result. To answer the sins that some Catholics perpetrated against indigenous people, Pope Francis in 2022 went to Canada to apologize to the First Nations. Some were mollified, others were not. It is difficult to explain centuries of behavior in a single day, a single speech. And is it even possible for humans of the present to explain past actions?

Most historians in college classes and textbooks determine whether the person or people written about were morally culpable or not. What is the point, they argue, of being able to see what has happened in the past if we cannot pass judgment on historical persons so that we can learn to avoid wickedness, immorality, and overall mistakes? But what if the historian writing in the present has no greater wisdom, is no more rational, than the person living a century or more in the past? I constantly consider this when I write and teach. I can hardly be a qualified judge and jury to pass judgment on people like Christopher Columbus or George Washington. Rather, my view of writing and teaching history is to try to help readers and students recover from the past the exact feelings and mentality that the historical person was feeling and thinking. I try to resurrect the past, to empathize with past people, to look at them not from the perspective of my or my society’s values, rather to look at them from the perspective of their own time. I am not a judge and jury of the past. Rather, I want to give listeners and readers as much as possible an unbiased portrait of a past time so that the reader/listener can make their own silent judgment.

I taught for many years at a private liberal arts college founded for missionary purposes to bring Christian civilization to American Indians. I heard the chagrin that American Indians had and still have about the imposition of Christianity upon indigenous culture. Upon the chapel walls of this college were carved old words that gave me pause. They are from Charles Journeycake, a Delaware Indian, who wrote:

“We have been broken up and moved six times. We have been despoiled of our property. We thought when we moved across Missouri River and had paid for our home in Kansas we were safe, but in a few years the white man wanted our country. We had good farms, built comfortable houses and big barns. We had schools for our children and churches where we listened to the same gospel the white man listens to. The white man came into our country from Missouri and drove our cattle and horses away and if our people followed them they were killed. We try to forget these things but we could not forget that the white man brought us the blessed gospel, the Christian’s hope. This more than pays for all we have suffered.”

Another Indian, a Kiowa, had a similar experience, declaring that the Gospel was “like a stream of living water without sticks or stones or mud in it, ever-flowing, clear as crystal, free to all.” He added: “before the missionaries came they knew nothing about God; the Indians lived in the dark; their minds were covered just like a veil over the face, but now they can see clearly.”

This is of course the point behind the sacrifices of the missionaries in America. There were crimes committed, and some people were evil. Particularly the Spanish conquistadors were ferocious toward the indigenous people, and the Franciscans in particular worked tirelessly to mitigate the evil with good. The Indians experienced chagrin, anger, and depression trying to conform to the beliefs, institutions, and laws of white civilization while being tugged in the different direction from their tribal past. But overall, the lives changed, the souls saved, the goodness imparted by these Christian men and women is a vast sea of love compared to the drops of despair and anguish.