Speech in the Theatre "Columbus"
of Buenos Aires, on October 12, 1934,
in the evening to commemorate the "Day of the Race" by Cardinal Goma
Thomas
archbishop of Toledo and primate of Spain.
What part did Spain in the discovery of America? Did the good or bad the work of conquest and colonization? Did she Spain for his work throughout the match he was entitled to? Or, on the contrary, was a greedy exploiter of what happened, more than its worth, put in your hands?
And this really, this Fiesta de la Raza, I want to do with loyalty Knight English and zeal of Bishop, that all should seek the glory of the Cross on his chest and the glorification of Jesus Christ, who is the Apostle. My thesis, to the maximum I diaphanous, is this:
America is the work of Spain. This work in Spain it is essentially Catholicism. Then there is a relationship of equality between Hispanic and Catholic, and every attempt is madness hispanización repudiate it.
The ideal proclaimed him the great Queen Isabella on his deathbed, when the royal scribe dictated his testament: "Attracting people of India and convert them to the Santa Fe Catholic." Our great Lope will double later this ideal in the mouth the conqueror Mexico:
the King, vast lands,
to God, countless souls.
lofty destinies of Spain in history, gentlemen! God wanted to test it with iron and fire of the Saracen invasion, eight centuries was the bastion whose resistance saved Christianity in Europe, and God rewarded the huge effort to give our people a sturdy soul, strengthened in the fight, cast in the die of a single ideal, with the character that gives the spirit professed Christian supernaturalism as a law of life and national history. The same year that ended in the conquest of the solar Granada native, gave Spain the transoceanic leap and splicing the most heroic of reconquests with the most momentous achievement in history.
America is the work of Spain by right of invention. Colon, excluding Spain, is a genius without wings. Only Spain could incubate and give birth to the thought of the great navigator, who fought with us in Grenada affected by them of Medinaceli, who encouraged at La Rabida Fr Marchena, who effectively dispensed protect my illustrious predecessor the great Cardinal Mendoza, who found a heart like that of Elizabeth and brave men to jump from Palos to San Salvador. Spain had not gone without sleep a poet or remembrance of an old tradition of Seneca word "few centuries, and the ocean will open its barriers: a vast region will be discovered, a new world appears across the seas, and Tule not be the boundary of the universe. "
The discovery follows the conquest. When someone says fundamental "do not know what it is based. When Spain, the day of Pilar, 1492, addressed on the beaches of San Salvador, do not know what is on either side of their ships ten thousand miles of coastline and a continent with forty million square kilometers. Ignore that populate million people, split into one hundred breeds, with a jungle of different languages \u200b\u200bamong themselves that the diverse languages \u200b\u200bof Europe. Do not know that cannibalism, sodomy, human sacrifices are large scourges of Aztecs and Redskins, Caribbean and Guarani, Quechua, and Diaguitas Araucanian. No matter: Spain is generous, not stingy, has the ideal height of Christian thought their companies do not measure their benefits, and will throw his whole soul to conquer the New World.
Spain have been accused of greed in the work of conquest: Auri Rabida bursitis "he said in an exaggerated statement to Peter Martyr avertit Hispanic culture. Spain, no, many English, yes, came to the Americas after the lure of gold, as many foreigners came here mixed with the English expeditions, like many others, pirates, for whom it was much more comfortable rob galleons returning to Spain with the loot. But gold came later, before it took the English for the ordeal of poverty and tropical climate that decimated. English
That was cruel! Many were, no doubt, but see that the hardness of a soldier far from home and with huge numbers of Indians had to make up the numbers and lacked weapons. And see that the first blood spilled over that wilderness is that of the thirty-nine English of Santa Maria, early settlers of America, slaughtered by the Indians of the English.
The English effort emerged, as if by magic, the cities from Mexico to Tierra del Fuego, with the typical English plaza and temple, topped by Cruz, who dominated the towns. Fundáronse universities who became famous in Mexico and Peru, in Santa Fe de Bogota, Lima and Cordoba de Tucuman, which attracted the youth of the Rio de la Plata. With science arts flourished, the architecture reproduces the southern form of our buildings, but you get the impression of the genius of the new race, and the Gothic, Mudejar, Baroque Plateresque and Castilla, Leon and Extremadura, achieve an air transplanted indigenous to the flourishing cities of the New World. Painting and sculpture flourish in Mexico and Quito, making school work English painters to American churches and wealthy individuals bequeath their collections of paintings to American cities. Encourage the expansion of culture the wise administration of viceroys and bishops, the courts, rock castle of Christian justice, the Councils and parcels, gradually forming a town that is a transcript of the colonized people.
Because this is the characteristic of the work of Spain in America: be all and give everything, making huge sacrifices that may in future centuries truncated their own history, so that Aboriginal people are given all and going all out to Spain , resulting from this mutual sacrifice a new Spain, with the very soul of the old Spain, but with a different label and nuance in each of the major territorial boundaries.
With the merger came the merger language, the better, transfusion of religion. For the English, to the adventurer, had Jesus Christ in the depths of his soul and marrow of his life, and was by nature an apostle of faith. It has been said that the English conquistador, showing the Indian with a crucifix and left in his right hand brandishing a sword, he said: "Believe or die." Lies! This can report abuse, not a system. Warm word of the missionaries, their zeal and their traces on divine inexhaustible love for the poor Indians were, by grace, which pulled the soul of their superstitions india horrible and put at the feet of the Crucified God.
And all this followed the ideal transfusion: the personal ideal of free men, that is not meant to be sacrificed to any man or even to any god, but uses his freedom to make himself a god, by imitation of the Man-God. And the social ideal, which is to harmonize everything about God, the Super Omnia Deus, to produce in the world order and the welfare and help man the conquest of God.
This is the sum of civilization, and this is what Spain did in the Indies. Rome did more than his vast empire to conquer, because Rome was enslaved peoples, and Spain gave them true freedom. Rome divided the world into Romans and barbarians, Spain gave rise to a world of men whom our sons and brothers Reyes called. Rome raised a Pantheon to honor the idols of the Empire, Spain was the pantheon of the American horrible a temple to the one true God. If Rome was the people of the huge building, designed by the English in Romans made roads and bridges, in the words of an English speaking Andean routes, compete with modern Gotthard, and if Rome could concentrate on the codes light of natural law, Spain issued this body of six thousand laws of India, a monument of Christian justice, which competes greatness of the genius with the huge heart of the legislature.
This is the America that made Spain, an extension of your own being, achieved with the greatest effort ever known to history: New Spain, New Granada, Nueva Extremadura, Nueva Andalucia, Nueva Toledo, like a mirror, this side of the Atlantic of the old Spain, his real mother. And to that point was the love of this mother who, as one French historian, his whole desire was to change their laws to design their new vassals happier than the English themselves.
II
The work of Spain, Catholicism
work now that I should show them the work of Spain was, above all, the work of Catholicism. It is not necessary. Here is the fact, huge. Started the century of the conquest, Latin was virtually Christian. Cross dominion, with the banner of Castile, the vast regions extending from Mexico to Patagonia, cease human sacrifices and superstitions horrific, magnificent temples sheltering under its vaults to those people, by barbarians, and sprouted new and enlarged countries the virtues of the Gospel. Jesus had tripled his kingdom on earth.
Because Spain was a missionary before conquering State. If you used the sword was to no violence, no matter triumphant Cross. The tonic the conquest was Queen Isabella, when at the time of his death, the royal scribe dictated these words: "Our main intention was to try to attract people Dellas (from India) and the convert to our holy Catholic Faith." The Carlos V was when, in dismissing the prelates of Panama and Cartagena, he said: "Behold, I have thrown those souls on their backs; parad liest Dell perceive not God, and I link to download to me." The Monarchs were all in sentences that subscribe to the most ardent missionary of our faith. The law gave the Indies, whose thinking oscillates between these two major concerns: the teaching of Christianity and the defense of the natives.
Spain commanded the elite of American missionaries. Franciscans, Dominicans, Augustinians, Jesuits, sent men here size and European fame.
These conquerors were distinguished both for his military genius for his soul as apostles. Pizarro, who founded the city of Cuzco "in accrescent of our holy Catholic faith"; Balboa discovering the Pacific, which no eye had seen a white man, from the Andean highlands, jacking his knees and bless Jesus and His Mother and wait for God to conquer the lands and seas, Menendez de Aviles, the conqueror of Florida, which promises to use all that is and he is "to put the Gospel in those lands, "and a hundred others, did nothing but follow the spirit of Columbus first landed in San Salvador," Yo, "says the Admiral," because we had very friendly, because people knew it was best to become our Santa Fe to love not by force, I gave them some red caps and glass beads that were placed around their necks. "
The same classification of cities and counties, with which they form an extensive calendar of saints, the enormous sums cost the exchequer English missions and the P. Bayle makes riding in three centuries, six hundred million pesetas, the American deep devotion to the Mother of God, especially under the title Guadalupe, transplanted from the Diocese of Toledo to the Americas by the conquistadors Extremadura, and - what else? - the tenacity with which English America, from Mexico, the martyr, to Cape Horn, the old faith claims against tyranny and sects over the rationalist secularism hurricane, what else is more than undefeated argument that the substantial form of the work of Spain in America was the Catholic faith? Arrancadla of Spain and America, and not saying that we were not the key to our history, here and there, but we need to discover the secret of the New World, which started the unknown seas Spain, before conquering missionary in the state's political thought.
And miss the secret of the race, Hispanic, which either is empty word, or is the synthesis of spiritual values, with Catholicism, are the heritage of Hispanic peoples.
America is of our making, this book is essentially Catholicism. Then there is a relationship of equality between race or Hispanic and Catholic.
Race, Hispanic is something spiritual that transcends on biological and psychological differences and the concepts of nation and homeland. If the notion of Catholicism could be reduced in scope and safely applied to a historic institution that was not Catholic, we would say that the Hispanic mind certain catholicity within the boundaries of a larger grouping of nations and races. It is something spiritual, human and divine order at a time, it includes the religious factor, Catholicism in our case, which connects with Catholicism "Catholic", so to speak, and other factors merely human, tradition , culture, collective temperament, history, skilled and qualified by the religious element as the main factor, whence it is a specific civilization, with an origin and a historical form trends that the fall in world history. Understood thus
Hispanic, would say that is the projection of the face of Spain out of themselves and the villages of Hispanidad. It's the English temperament, no physiological temperament, but the moral and historical, which has been transfused to other races and other nations and other land and affixed the seal of the English soul, life and the English action. It is the genius of Spain that has hatched the genius of other lands and races, without altering, has elevated and refined and made it like himself. How we understand race and Hispanic.
"No Child know what God has in store on this earth and we should not ask it early. Only one thing is certain: that whatever happens to those who love the Lord is for own good. And besides, the roads that lead to cross Salvador limits of earthly life. "The entourage of the Son of God made man: All of us have ever felt a happiness on Christmas Eve, even though heaven and earth not yet have joined. The star of Bethlehem is still today a star in the dark night. Just two days after the Church removed the white garments and clothes the color of blood, the purple the fourth day of sadness. San esteban, the first martyr, the first to follow the Lord in the martyrdom and the Holy Innocents of Bethlehem and of Juda, the infants brutally beheaded by Herod's soldiers are the procession of the Child of the Manger. What does that mean? Where is the joy of the heavenly host? Where the quiet bliss of Christmas? Where peace on this earth? "Peace on earth to men of good will." But not everyone has good voluntad.Es why the Son of the Eternal Father had come down from the greatness of his glory to the smallness of the earth, since the mystery of iniquity had covered the shadows of noche.Las tinibleas covered the earth and He came upon us like the light that shines in the darkness, but darkness not receive it. Those who received him, he brought the light and peace, peace with the Father in Heaven, peace with those who are also sons of light and the heavenly Father and the deep and intimate peace of heart. But no way to peace with the sons of darkness. The Prince of peace does not bring them peace but a sword. For them it is the stumbling block against which collide and estrellan.Esta is a difficult and very serious indeed we should not conceal the poetic charm of the Child of Bethlehem. The mystery of the Incarnation and the mystery of evil are very closely linked. 
