Flipping the Euro-centric Script

When Europe’s colonizing arms wrapped around my Indigenous ancestors, they executed an act of racist encounter, not discovery. Indeed, my Iberian ancestors never settled a new world. They disposed my Indigenous ancestors of their centuries-old lands.

But here we must remember that actions often reveal more than people intend. And as Ignacio Ellacuría observes, European Christians revealed their and the Church’s health through their interactions with Indigenous communities.

To my way of thinking, what took place is the conquistador, the dominator, lays himself open to discovery. Thus, five centuries ago, with the “discovery” of the so-called “new world” what was really discovered was the true Spain herself, the reality of western culture and the Church as they were then. They opened themselves to discovery, they revealed themselves without realizing it, because what they did with regard to Latin America was a “cover-up” rather than a “discovery.” In reality it’s the Third World (sic) which discovers the First World (sic) in its most negative and truest aspects.

The Spanish—like the other European colonizing empires—disclosed their vicious willingness to dominate, exploit, and oppress others through their treatment of Indigenous communities. Moreover, their and several Popes’ crafting of ecclesiastical and civic laws like the doctrine of discovery, the requerimento, and Laws of Burgos show that many in the Church catholic weaponized theology to perpetuate these egregious evils.

But let us not stop our reflection during European colonial conquest. We need to hear Jon Sobrino’s linking of Iberian conquest to present day neo-colonialism. Sobrino writes:

The Spaniards and the Portuguese were discovered in their plunder and destruction of a continent and, in addition, they offered other nations, as the accepted norm, a pattern of behavior toward Latin America and toward the other continents of the Third World (sic): “discover,” “colonize,” “conquer”. . . in order to plunder. In this there is a coincidence in what the Spaniards and Portuguese did in their day in Latin America, with what was done in other continents by countries such as Holland, France, England, Germany, Belgium, the United States . . . [and the former countries relate to the global South] fundamentally to take advantage of the spoils while passing themselves off as benefactors, as if all the evils of the world were in the South and the countries of the North were their savories, whose only desire was to remedy those evils.

Like Ellacuría, Sobrino flips the Euro-centric script, arguing that the true barbarians are the European conquerors and their settler-state ancestors who continue to exploit those they have made the “wretched of the earth” (Frantz Fanon). This barbarism is what we discover, these Jesuits argue, if we consider Europe’s colonizing embrace of “the new world.”