Pray with the Pope in July 2016

The ‘First People’

General Intention: That indigenous peoples, whose identity and very existence are threatened, will be shown due respect.

 

Indigenous people sometimes are described as “pre-invasion” or “pre-colonial”. The word “first” is sometimes used to describe them, as in “First Americans” or “First Australians”.

In Southern Africa it seems to me that the Khoisan people would logically be referred to as First Southern Africans.

What happens to the original or first peoples when waves of different peoples arrive and take over is the implied focus of the pope’s prayer intention for July.

The newcomers often arrived with diseases to which the indigenous had no resistance, powerful military technologies which local armies could not match, and economic systems which wreaked havoc with the natural environment the traditional indigenous economies based upon it. Cattle-ranching clashed with hunter-gathering.

In the Americas the arrival of European settlers was catastrophic as indigenous people were frequently enslaved, infected and even deliberately exterminated. The steel weapons and armour of the Spanish enabled them to defeat and subdue vastly superior numbers of native South Americans.

This pattern was repeated in many places throughout the world. Smallpox is estimated to have killed 98% of the population in the Polynesian Marquesas Islands. The Russian conquest of its “Far East” is a story of brutal military and cultural subjugation. That some indigenous peoples survived at all is remarkable.

How to show respect to such peoples, who have been demoralised and decimated without being patronising?

A first step is an acknowledgement of history. In Australia there was the terra nullius debate during which the convenient colonial idea that the continent was empty before colonisation, was finally overturned in law. Modern governments resist such admissions because they fear that indigenous peoples will take them to task and to court for the depredations of the past. However, it is important for the human dignity of a people that its experience of history should be acknowledged.

How compensation for the past can be made without creating further dependency is one of the big problems.

The North American system of reservations, which often have exemptions from the law of the federal government, appears to be an imperfect setup, and many of the communities in the reservations suffer from severe social and economic problems.

The Church’s presence among suffering indigenous peoples can serve to build up a sense of self-respect through a theology which stresses our common humanity made in the image and likeness of God.

Mission with vigour

Missionary Intention: That  the  Church  in  Latin  America  and  the  Caribbean,  by  means  of  her  mission  to  the  continent,  may announce the Gospel with renewed vigour and enthusiasm.  

One of the reasons we must pray for Pope Francis is that we have such huge expectations of him. I suppose we all hope that the “Francis effect” will renew and revivify the Church. Imagine what the expectations of him are in Latin America and especially in his native Argentina.

Obviously his inspiring example can only really change the Church if it changes us. This will take time. This fact is underlined by a survey done in 2014 in Latin America on how the Catholic Church is doing. The Latinobarometro survey showed that the Catholic Church continues to decline in numbers relative to Pentecostal churches. It also showed that in some countries, particularly Uruguay and Argentina, there is a growth in secularism.

The good news of the survey was that a much higher proportion of Catholics (78%) (and Protestants too) have trust in their churches today than they did back in 2011 when the level of trust was 69%. That statistic seems to me to be more significant than the statistic on membership.

If it is accurate, that would indicate an increase in morale among Catholics and Christians in general in Latin America. We don’t know for sure whether this increase in confidence in the Catholic Church in Latin America has anything to do with Francis’ leadership, but I would hazard a guess that it does and that it is also to do with a loss of trust in political leaders. Other surveys which have been done more recently flag Francis as the most popular leader in the world.

The trust in the Church under Francis holds out the hope for a more fruitful Church in the future, whether that fruit be numerical or something less countable, like joy or missionary zeal or indeed, mercy.