Indian giving in Rome

Vincent J. Curtis

30 Mar 22

RE: ‘Those items, those artifacts…those are ours’: Vatican delegate.  By Kelly Geraldine Malone, The Canadian Press.  Published in the Hamilton Spectator 30 Mar 22.

If the aboriginal delegations went to Rome expecting the Pope to denounce the Church’s mission in the New World, they were disappointed.  What is the Church’s mission?

Well, the first mission is to bring the good news of Christ to the world.  Second, it has been to preserve and disseminate knowledge; and third, to be a civilizing influence on the world.  The aboriginal delegates went to Rome holding that it was wicked to have challenged their paganism, that they should have been left uneducated, and they should have been left in their Neolithic culture.  What is a European to make of such a position?

Between 400 A.D. and 1750 A.D., Europe saw the collapse of the Roman Empire under the pressure of barbarian invasions.  There followed the Migration Period, when the Angles, Saxons, and Jutes settled in Britain, the Franks and Burgundians settled in France.  Charles “The Hammer” Martel stopped the Islamic invasion of Europe from the south at the Battle of Tours in 732 A.D.  There followed Charlemagne, and the Viking scourge.  There were the Mongol invasions from the east, and the Islamic invasion from Turkey, finally stopped under the walls of Vienna when the Polish King John Sobieski destroyed the Turkish army in 1683 A.D.  There was the protestant reformation and the thirty years war, and finally, the Enlightenment.

Against this millennium of turbulence, the aboriginals of North America hold that the Europeans had no right to take over North America and disturb their Neolithic culture.  Where would they even get the moral reasoning to hold such a position?  Ironically, it can only come from European philosophy, and in particular Postmodernism, a central tenet of which is a complete absence of gratitude.  But some things never change.

When given a tour of the Vatican’s Ethnological museum, in which artifacts from their culture were on display, the reaction of the aboriginals was to engage in “Indian giving.” They claimed those artifacts as theirs.  Those artifacts likely wouldn’t exist today had the Vatican not acquired them, but never mind.  If you want reconciliation, Pope, you have to give those things to us; oh, and $30 million also.”

Reconciliation is a mugs game.  No amount of money and no amount of apologizing will satisfy.  It’s time for people of western civilization to realize it.

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