INTERVIEW By Rafael Pinto Borges, European Conservative.
The ‘evil conqueror–good native’ dialectic has conquered the collective unconscious of our society, and except for some who dare to think for themselves, it has become the obligatory mantra everywhere.
Fr. Javier Olivera Ravasi, SE is an Argentine Roman Catholic priest, lawyer, and holder of two doctorates (one in Philosophy from the Pontifical Lateran University in Rome, 2007, and another in History from the National University of Cuyo, 2013, with a focus on the Cristero Wars in Mexico). He is widely known for his apologetics work, historical defenses of the Catholic faith, and his popular YouTube channel Que No Te La Cuenten (QNTLC), which has nearly half a million subscribers and focuses on historical apologetics and what he calls the “Catholic cultural counterrevolution.”
The Catholic empires of Spain and Portugal legally recognized the humanity of the peoples they colonized from the very beginning of their presence in the Americas. To what extent can we affirm that the Iberian empires represented the first global attempt to integrate diverse populations under a single political and moral order?
There is no doubt that the first great globalization, rightly understood, was that of the Iberian peoples, and principally that of Spain. That Spain which, since the time of the Catholic monarchs, did not hesitate to undertake that “great feat,” as Don José María Pemán put it, of conquering new worlds and evangelizing them for the glory of God.
We must remember that when Columbus reached what we now call America in 1492, writing, the wheel, and numerical notation did not yet exist there. Meanwhile, 2,200 years earlier in Greece, Hesiod, and Homer were already composing their great poems.
This ‘globalism’—in its healthy sense—so often invoked today is, in reality, Catholicism. It implies universality without loss of individuality: an Inca is as Catholic as an Aragonese or a Syrian, and none thereby lose their national or cultural identity. They fall under a moral order that transcends borders, and a political order that bestowed upon the newly discovered peoples the blessings of Christendom, which—as Leo XIII said—is when “the philosophy of the Gospel governs the State” (Immortale Dei).
The famous Valladolid Debate has been described as the first major philosophical–juridical discussion on human rights. What does this episode reveal about the internal self-criticism of the Spanish Empire and its willingness to subject power to ethical principles?
The Valladolid Debate reveals something unique in the history of empires: the capacity to subject one’s own power to a public moral judgment.