La Inculturación de la Iglesia en el Pueblo Indígena de Riobamba

The relationship of the Catholic Church with the indigenous peoples of America has been very close from the moment Christopher Columbus set foot on the continent. It should not be thought that the fact of planting the cross and declaring that he was arriving with the mission of spreading the Christian faith was a mere fiction that concealed the real motive: to seek gold and riches. Medieval men (and Columbus was still one of them) were deeply rooted in the conviction of being the bearers of a superior Message, although this purpose was almost always linked to greed and cruelty. Conquerors and missionaries arrived in the same ships, but, especially in the first decades, they maintained strong contrasts, exactly because of the bad treatment that the first ones gave to the natives. Little by little the tensions were softened, because the Church ended up adapting to the colonial administration and many of its leaders turned out to be descendants of the former conquerors. It cannot be denied that, in many cases, the Church was complicit in colonial exploitation, at least by omission. In its haciendas, the Indians were often treated no better than in other haciendas.