The History of Catholic America
Reform From Within

Eventually mistreatment of Native peoples reached such proportions that Catholic theologians began to question the motive and manner of Spanish settlement. A reform movement led by Bartolome de las Casas, after he returned to Spain in 1539 from his post as bishop of Chiapas in southern Mexico, targeted the brutal treatment of Indians on the encomiendas (Spanish settlements in which Native people were forced to provide food, materials, and manual work). Las Casas condemned the system claiming it was "against all reason and human prudence, against the welfare of our Lord and King, contrary to all civil and common law, against all rules of moral philosophy and theology, and against God's will and his Church." Strong criticism, from someone who had witnessed the barbarity of the encomiendas and who was himself part of the establishment. In 1542, new laws were passed in Spain which forbade royal officials and religious orders from holding encomiendas. The new requirements stirred rebellion in the colonies among the landowners, and eventually King Charles revoked the more restrictive laws. But some statutes remained, notably those condemning cruelty, slavery, and personal service from Indians.

But the debate continued. Juan Gines de Sepulveda, a leading humanist scholar, presented arguments to the Spanish court, based on Aristotle's theory that some human beings were intended by God to be slaves. He posited that such men and women were "natural" slaves, and he concluded that Native peoples in the New World fell into this category. A Christian and Spanish chauvinist, he argued that the superiority of Spanish culture, religion, and way of life justified the conquests of Indian peoples, even by barbaric means.

Las Casas countered with the proposition that military efforts on the part of the Spanish could be justified only in self-defense, that the Native people of the Western Hemisphere were not natural slaves, and that the goal was to convert them by peaceful means and make them Spanish subjects. Las Casas' arguments began to make a dent in official policy. In 1549, a law was passed that Spanish colonists must pay for all the food they received from Indians (previously settlers could demand or even confiscate food and supplies with impunity). And the following year, to everyone's surprise, King Charles suspended all conquests, expeditions, and explorations, stating that none would be considered legal, until the morality of colonization was decided by the Church. The most powerful monarch in Europe had agreed to halt expansion of his own empire for moral reasons!

The moratorium lasted for ten years. In theory, brutal press gangs stopped dragging Indians off in shackles to perform forced labor. No new land was wrested from Indian communities. Hungry settlers no longer looted Native storehouses for food and supplies. In practice, of course, the ideal was not always achieved. Nevertheless, the ban on further exploitation and the laws protecting Indian peoples from certain forms of exploitation in the Spanish settlements was a high-water mark in Catholic social thought.

Spreading The Faith
Missionary activity continued among the Indians in North America. In the 1560s Pedro Menendez de Aviles, captain general of the Indies fleet, established a Spanish fort in Florida to counteract French influence there. The fort was to incorporate a religious mission, and the settlement became the present city of St. Augustine, today the oldest city in North America. Here a "Thanksgiving" feast was celebrated by Spanish settlers and Native peoples, more than 70 years before the more famous Thanksgiving in New England.

In the 1570s, Spanish Jesuits founded missions as part of military outposts along the Florida coasts, and frequently staffed them with lay instructors to teach the Indians. In the later part of that century, Franciscans also entered the area, and by 1600 they had more than 30 missions in the southeastern part of North America. The dedicated missionaries sought to teach Native peoples European arts and crafts as well as the fundamentals of the new faith. In 1598, a Catholic church was built at San Juan, later Saint Gabriel, New Mexico. In the first decade of the 1600s, the first school building was constructed in St. Augustine, Florida, where efforts were taken to translate dictionaries and devotional books into Native languages, for those Indians who were eager to assimilate the new European culture, along with the basics of Christianity.

In the Great Lakes region, French colonists tended to make friends with local Indians, whom they needed as trappers and guides in the lucrative fur trade. Jesuit missionaries capitalized on these economic alliances to spread the faith. They met with mixed results. After some success at converting the Mohawks, St. Isaac Jogues and his brave companions were murdered by them. Christianity was extremely disruptive of traditional spiritual beliefs and life-styles, and not all Indians favored the changes. On one occasion, two Mohawk women, who had converted to Catholicism, were sentenced to death for not renouncing the faith.

After preaching to many Algonquin tribes and establishing a number of Indian missions, Father Jacques Marquette joined Louis Jolliet to explore the Mississippi River valley, where he brought the faith to many Indians in the heart of the vast American continent.

North America was a volatile continent, with French, Spanish, and many disparate Native communities clashing during these centuries of European exploration and settlement. Later the English joined the fray. Warfare between hostile Christian groups also broke out on occasion, as in the case of the French Huguenots, whose memories of persecution by Catholic authorities in Europe fired their raids against Spanish and Catholic Indians in the Georgia-Florida area of North America.