Summary
Highlights
The speaker emphasizes the importance of understanding our history to truly appreciate and defend our faith, family, and country. He argues that many Catholics today, even in Catholic schools, have received an anti-Christian and anti-Catholic education. This anti-Catholic formation often attacks not dogmas directly, but rather the 'preambles of faith,' such as history, to undermine belief. History, as an auxiliary science to theology, narrating transcendent past events, has been distorted to attack the Church.
The 'Black Legend' against the Church and Spain began centuries ago, rooted in Protestant movements, as a cultural battle against the powerful Spanish Empire. A primary example is the narrative surrounding the conquest of America. The prevailing belief is that pre-conquest America was a terrestrial paradise, inhabited by 'good savages' (a concept popularized by Rousseau). However, the speaker challenges this by examining the indigenous cultures, particularly the Aztecs.
Upon arrival in Veracruz, Mexico in 1519, 400 Spanish soldiers encountered the Aztec Empire, a civilization of over a million inhabitants. The surrounding indigenous peoples, tired of Aztec tyranny and practice of human sacrifice, allied with Cortés. The Aztecs, driven by their belief in appeasing the sun god with human blood, practiced widespread human sacrifice and cannibalism. Mexican authors, even non-Catholics, estimate 50,000 human sacrifices annually. This suggests that the Spanish conquistadors were seen as liberators by many oppressed groups.
The speaker clarifies that not all Spaniards were 'good' and sought spiritual aims; some were certainly motivated by riches. However, he highlights Queen Isabella the Catholic's will (1506), which decreed that no inhabitant of the new lands could be exploited or mistreated. It also mandated their evangelization, threatening that if evangelization didn't occur, the Spanish should return. This contradicts the 'myth' that Spaniards believed indigenous people had no souls, a belief more prevalent among Protestant evangelizers in North America, leading to the near extinction of indigenous populations there, unlike the mestizaje (mixing of races) in Hispanic America.
Hernán Cortés, faced with his soldiers' fear of advancing into the Aztec capital, famously 'burned the ships' as a gesture of no retreat, symbolizing their total commitment. The speaker recounts the brutal reality of Aztec religious practices, where priests would quickly extract the still-beating hearts of victims during sacrifices on pyramids (which were altars, not tombs like Egyptian ones).
After a decade of limited success in evangelization in Mexico, the appearance of the Virgin of Guadalupe to Saint Juan Diego in 1531 led to a massive conversion among indigenous people. The primary request of the indigenous to the Virgin was to stop the 'death of Indians,' referring to the devastating plagues brought by Europeans for which indigenous people had no antibodies. This, not Spanish genocide, was the main cause of the drastic population decline, a fact admitted by serious historians.
The speaker addresses the question of what right the conquistadors had to be there. He argues that it was based on Christ's mandate to evangelize. He contrasts Christian faith, which is a gift, with other belief systems like Buddhism, which he calls 'garbage' after missionary experience in Tibet. Furthermore, only 5% of the American continent was populated, and many tribes were nomadic with no concept of private property. According to Roman law ('res clamat dominum'), unowned land belongs to those who possess it. The Pope also gave the Catholic Monarchs the right and duty to evangelize, under threat of losing the lands if they failed.
Contrary to popular belief, the 'Recopilación de las Leyes de Indias' (Compilation of the Laws of the Indies) established advanced social protections, such as the 8-hour workday, maternity leave for pregnant women, and prohibitions against child labor, long before they were adopted in Europe or elsewhere. The speaker criticizes the repetition of historical falsehoods, echoing Lenin's quote about a lie told a thousand times becoming truth.
Spain sent its best to America, including highly educated missionaries and artists, indicating its commitment to the new territories. The Black Legend was significantly propagated by Fray Bartolomé de las Casas, a Dominican friar who, as a former slave owner, sought to atone for past wrongs. He exaggerated accounts of Spanish abuses in his book "Brevísima relación de la destrucción de las Indias" (1552) to compel the Spanish Crown to act more severely against abuses. This book was then widely translated and used by Protestant powers (like the Dutch and English) as propaganda against Catholic Spain, portraying it as uniquely cruel.
The speaker shows images from these propaganda works, depicting graphic Spanish atrocities, highlighting how they were intentionally illustrated to shock. He notes that serious historians refute de las Casas’ exaggerations, as even contemporaries like Fray Toribio de Benavente (Motolinía) challenged his claims. De las Casas, as a bishop in Chiapas for only a year, never learned the indigenous languages and wrote many of his accounts from Spain. The speaker also debunks the myth that Columbus primarily sought spices or riches; his diaries reveal his main objective was to fund a new crusade to liberate Jerusalem, which was under Muslim control after the Fall of Constantinople in 1453. The crosses on his ships were Crusader crosses, signifying this religious objective.
The cultural and religious transplantation by Spain and the Church in America was immense, saving pre-Columbian civilizations from their own destructive practices and bringing the alphabet, numbering systems, and the wheel. Without them, indigenous communities would have remained isolated and self-destructive. Spain even halted its conquest (1550-1552) to debate the justice of its actions in the Valladolid Controversy. Fray Bartolomé de las Casas’ solution to protect indigenous people from Spanish labor was to suggest bringing enslaved Africans, who he claimed did not need evangelization. In Mexico, within 15 years, over 6 million indigenous people were baptized.
Spain brought faith and culture, which go hand-in-hand. Early evangelizers learned indigenous languages to communicate the faith effectively. Spain also founded numerous universities and schools in America, with the first university established in Santo Domingo in 1538. These educational institutions taught indigenous people to read, write in their own languages, Spanish, and Latin, and even to preach. The speaker concludes by saying that this continent, more than 'Hispanic America,' should be called 'Christian America,' and that today, it is our turn to evangelize the world. He thanks the audience and invites them to support his apostolate.