The beginning of the thirteenth century was a time of social and political upheaval as the Mongols invaded from the East, and although the major Crusades in the Holy Land had ended, the holy wars against the Saracens (Muslims) continued. During the Crusades new trade routes forged opportunities for social mobility as merchants increased in wealth and prominence. The European feudal system continued to dominate the masses by manipulating them into military service in return for refuge and security. The church was blasé concerning its responsibility to protect its members from these nationalistic passions of violence and power, and it merely practiced similar means of suppression via the Holy Crusades. The papacy of the medieval period was politically corrupt, immoral, and abusive of power, as well as devoid of religious and spiritual authority. From this European milieu emerged two movements that set the stage for an explosion of Catholic mission efforts throughout the thirteenth century until today. In this chapter, we will explore the theological foundations in addition to the mission focus and efforts of both societies: the Dominicans and the Franciscans.
The Dominicans
Clouded in mystery, Dominic Guzman left behind only three small letters and some legal documents. One of the most prominent church leaders in the Middle Ages, he launched a student movement of preachers that produced one of the most dynamic missionary forces in history. In the Basilica of Saint Peter in Rome, a statue pays homage to Dominic alongside Francis, Bernard, Benedict, and Ignatius of Loyola.
Born around 1170 in Caleruega, Spain, Guzman trained for the priesthood at the University of Palencia and developed a deep concern for the poor. To raise money for the socially marginalized, he sold his books and commentaries and even twice attempted to sell himself into slavery to use the funds to liberate others (O’Connor 1913, 234). He believed that to be a follower of Jesus meant to lead a life engaged in service to others.
In 1204, as assistant to the bishop of Osma, Diego d’Azévédo, Guzman accompanied his leader on a diplomatic journey to Denmark. During the trip the young priest was disturbed by the way in which various heresies were used to manipulate the population of southern France. On one occasion, the travelers stayed with a nobleman in Toulouse, only to discover that their host was a member of the Albigensian sect. This group believed that there was an evil creator of the material world and a benevolent one of the spiritual realm; Christ came as both an evil savior in the physical and a good savior in the spirit. Dominic spent the night using the New Testament to refute the Albigensian heresy, which resulted in the conversion of the host family by morning (Butler 1868, 108–13).
Throughout the Spanish pair’s tour, the various heretical groups they observed so troubled them that on their return to Spain they visited Pope Innocent III in Rome to seek permission to evangelize the northern regions of Europe. The pope declined their request, instead redirecting their energies to southern France to support the Cistercians (a religious order focusing on the observance of the Rule of Saint Benedict) in their efforts to win the population back to the church (Tugwell 1982, 53–54). Upon their arrival in southern France in 1204, Diego and Dominic joined the Cistercians and convinced them to change their evangelistic strategy from physical intimidation to theological debate with key leaders. The interreligious dialogue proved successful, and several heretical leaders converted to Christianity (Walsh 1985, August 8).
After two years, Diego returned to Spain, while Dominic continued to preach in southern France, believing that the Albigensian heretics would convert if shown the biblical truth in ways they could understand. Relying primarily on the New Testament and following the example of the heretics themselves, he and his followers went humbly into the streets and shared their faith. After returning to Rome in 1215, Dominic petitioned a cautious Innocent III for permission to found a new order. After experiencing a dream that revealed a collapsing church supported on Dominic’s shoulders, the pope reluctantly gave approval, but only if the order submitted to an existing monastic rule. Back in southern France, Dominic and sixteen followers (eight Frenchmen, seven Spaniards, and one Englishman) chose the Rule of Saint Augustine and formed the Order of Preachers, also known as the Dominicans.
One year later Guzman returned to Rome to confirm the rule only to find Honorius III as the new pope. Their discussions on theology and the need to protect the doctrinal integrity of the church led to Dominic’s appointment as the first Master of the Sacred Palace, a position that the Dominicans held for many years. After returning to southern France in 1217, Dominic developed a progressive plan to send his preacher-theologians to the universities (Tugwell 1982, 18–19). Within fifty years after his death in 1221, there were more than four hundred Dominican houses throughout Europe. In the next section, we explore the outworking of the Dominican vision beyond Europe into Latin America together with a case study of Bartolomé de Las Casas of Spain.
Dominican Missions in Latin America
The Spanish incursion into the New World in the sixteenth century, as Spaniards searched for gold and brought Christ to the native peoples through military conquest and forced conversions, spread from the Caribbean Islands to Central and South America. The theology of mission at the time embraced the divine right to Christianize a naturally inferior people, with theologians such as Fernández de Oviedo claiming, “All attempts to convert the Indians required prior conquest by the Spaniards” (La Historia general de las Indias [General History of the Indies] 1535, quoted in Brading 1997, 124). For instance, Hernán Cortés invaded the Aztec lands of Mexico in 1520 with a small contingent of soldiers and subdued the Aztecs thanks to advanced weaponry, horses, cultural circumstances, and resistance to smallpox. He then requested twelve Franciscan mendicants from Charles V, who had succeeded Ferdinand II on the Spanish throne in 1516, to guide the spiritual life of the conquered peoples and to educate the children of the Indian nobility.
In their greed for gold, the Spaniards disregarded the rights of the indigenous peoples. “In the name of Christ, the natives were dispossessed of their lands by means of Requerimiento . . . and the natives were dispossessed of their freedom by means of the encomiendas” (Gonzalez 1992, 32). Requerimiento refers to the church’s belief that only indigenous people who acknowledged Christ should remain free since non-Christians had no rights. This crusade mentality justified forced conquest and focused exclusively on salvation and conversion without concern for the physical and social circumstances of the convert (Floristan 1992, 132). Since the Spanish believed that the natives were subhuman, the settlers stole the lands of the Amerindians and enslaved them to work in the fields and mines on encomiendas (estates granted to Spanish colonists) in exchange for instruction in Spanish customs, the value of diligence, and Christian doctrine. In a twisted irony, the natives became the reward granted by the Spanish Crown to the conquering settlers in this semifeudal institution imposed on the indigenous people that required them to give part of their crop as tribute to the Europeans and perform arduous labor. Spain had followed this practice in previous centuries when it had used the conquered Moors as laborers in Spanish encomiendas (Chasteen 2001, 52–53).
In 1493 Pope Alexander VI had entrusted sovereign lordship of the New World (any conquered land three thousand leagues west of the Cape Verde Islands) to the Spanish monarchy to spread the gospel to its inhabitants; accompanying this right was a hidden Spanish royal agenda of gaining economic supremacy. The combination of Spain’s declining economy and the promise of New World wealth with a massive indigenous workforce, together with Catholic missionaries seeking refuge from European persecution, led to ever-increasing conquests of the land and its natives. Luis N. Rivera charges, “Hidden behind the evangelizing cross, faintly veiled, was the conquering sword. . . . The hostile medieval dichotomy between Christians and infidels assumed the shape of a crusade in the very heart of the discovery and acquisition of America” (1990, 9).
Eighteen years after the Italian Christopher Columbus (representing King Ferdinand II and Queen Isabella of Spain) arrived at the island of Hispaniola in the West Indies in 1492, the Dominicans sent missionaries under the leadership of Pedro de Córdoba from Saint Stephen’s in Salamanca, Spain. On arrival, the Dominicans found “children torn to shreds by hungry dogs, women tortured, men burned alive, tropical roads lined with corpses of Indian porters dead of exhaustion, and Indian villages pillaged and burned” (Daniel-Rops 1959, 73). They immediately spoke against such atrocities. Called to a life of serving the poor, the Dominicans believed that Jesus’s example showed that human equality and the love of all people were biblical principles that they needed to follow; they thought that, given a peaceful opportunity, the indigenous peoples would choose the truth of Christ in preference to their animistic beliefs (Gutiérrez 1993). The following excerpt is taken from a sermon that Dominican Antonio de Montesinos preached (from Matt. 3:3, “A voice calling in the wilderness”) on December 21, 1511, denouncing the mortal sin of the encomienda system to a congregation that included the governor of Santo Domingo, Diego Columbus, the son of Christopher Columbus:
In order to make your sins against the Indians known to you I have come up on this pulpit, I who am a voice of Christ crying in the wilderness of this island, and therefore it behooves you to listen. . . . This voice tells you that you are in mortal sin: that you not only are in it, but live in it and die in it, and this because of the cruelty and tyranny that you bring to bear on these innocent people. Pray tell, by what right do you wage your odious wars on people who dwell in quiet and peace on their own lands? By what right have you destroyed countless numbers of them with unparalleled murders and destruction? . . . You kill them with your desire to extract and acquire gold every day. And what care do you take that they should be instructed in religion? . . . Are these not men? Have they not rational souls? Are you not bound to love them as you love yourselves? (Gonzalez 1992, 33)
Angered by the sermon, which every Dominican on Hispaniola signed, Governor Diego Columbus communicated his concerns to the king of Spain. One year later, the king supported the Dominican cause by passing the Laws of Burgos to protect the rights of the indigenous people: the natives were free; they were to be taught the Christian faith; and their forced work could not be “detrimental to their physical or spiritual wellbeing” (DiSalvo 1993, 90). These laws were difficult to implement in the New World due to settlers’ greed for land and gold, the difficulty of communication with Europe, and the Dominicans’ lack of governmental authority. We will now examine the outworking of Las Casas’s missionary efforts to protect the rights of the native people in Central and South America, especially the effect of his publications and legislative appeals to Europe (see Gallagher 2005b, 109).
Bartolomé de Las Casas
Bartolomé de Las Casas of Seville, Spain, originally came to Hispaniola in 1502 (when he was eighteen years old) with the family heritage that his father and uncle had sailed with Columbus on his second voyage to the Americas. As a “gentleman cleric,” he served the religious needs of the Spanish military for four years and then returned to Salamanca for priestly ordination (1510), whereupon he received a papal commission to bring the gospel to the natives in New Spain. Las Casas was also in the congregation and influenced by Montesinos’s sermon on human rights for the indigenous peoples. Furthermore, having witnessed the Caonao massacre of five hundred Cuban Amerindians in 1513, this twelve-year encomendero (a labor system rewarding conquerors with the labor of a particular group of people) set his Indian slaves free the next year (Las Casas 1992b, 51–53).
Las Casas then began traveling between the New World and the Spanish monarchy, lambasting the Spanish conquistadores’ injustices: “Everything done to the Indians in these Indies was unjust and tyrannical” (Las Casas 1992b, 74). In 1515 Las Casas (with Antonio de Montesinos) sailed from New Spain to Seville to expose the unjust treatment of native people to the Spanish monarchy in the hope of saving Cuba from a fate similar to Hispaniola’s.
The island of Cuba is almost as long as the distance from Valladolid to Rome; it is now almost entirely deserted. The islands of San Juan [Puerto Rico] and Jamaica . . . are both desolate. The Lucaya Isles lie near Hispaniola and Cuba to the north and number more than sixty. . . . The poorest of these . . . contained more than 500,000 souls, but today there remains not even a single creature. . . . We are assured that our Spaniards, with their cruelty and execrable works, have depopulated and made desolate the great continent. . . . The reasons why the Christians have killed and destroyed such infinite numbers of souls is solely because they have made gold their ultimate aim. . . . In this way have they cared for their lives—and for their souls: and therefore, all the millions above mentioned have died without faith and without sacraments. (Las Casas 1992b, 145)
Las Casas’s defense of the Amerindians persuaded King Charles V, the Holy Roman emperor, to adopt a welfare reform to replace the oppressive encomienda structure. “Indians would be settled in villages of their own, grouped around a central Spanish town, and would work under a few carefully chosen Spanish supervisors mutually sharing profits of each other’s labor” (Las Casas 1992b, 132). The king granted land in Guatemala to establish a colony to implement the idea. After seven years, Las Casas abandoned the venture because Cuban encomenderos had invaded the settlement and enslaved most of the inhabitants. After repeated protests to the Santo Domingo authorities failed, he considered the project “a divine judgment, punishing and afflicting” (Las Casas 1992a, 88).
Attracted by the Dominicans’ purpose of intellectual study, writing, and preaching to correct the nominal in belief and practice, Las Casas joined the order in Santo Domingo in 1522. From his ten years of studying theology and writing he formed his mission to work among the indigenous peoples to share Christ and protect their human rights. His order silenced him for two years, however, because of his controversial action of refusing absolution to those who declined to renounce ownership of their slaves and encomienda (Las Casas 1992a, 30). Nevertheless, he did not change his mind. He declared in Respuesta al Obispo de Charcas (1553) that encomenderos who did not do penance and restitution for their actions “will go to hell, along with the confessors who have absolved them and the bishops who appointed them” (Gutiérrez 1993, 227). Those who spread the gospel with the sword, likewise, are “precursors of Antichrist and imitators of Mahomet, being thus Christian only in name” (Brading 1997, 131). According to Las Casas, Christlike faith, love, and justice were inseparable and led to the salvation of both the Amerindian and the so-called Christian.
Las Casas’s Writings
Las Casas strengthened his focus on justice and compassion missions by publishing. He wrote a three-volume history of the early colonization, History of the Indies, and the Apologetic History (1527–1561). In 1530 Las Casas penned a missionary tract in Latin, The Only Method of Attracting All People to the True Faith, which became a guideline for his missionary method. In summary, he advocated “the spread of the Gospel by peaceful means alone, the need for understanding of doctrine and clear catechesis prior to conversion, the need to respect and utilize native cultures as part of the missionary enterprise” (Gutiérrez 1993, 263).
Through Las Casas’s many court appearances and publications, such as his 1542 work, De Unico Vocationis Modo (The Only Way), he persistently presents the case for the indigenes of the Americas. In this publication he reasons that the natives have rational minds and that all peoples need to follow the divine laws in the Bible rather than those set by monarchs. The only way to evangelize is through peaceful persuasion and dialogue. He argues that God appointed one way of conversion “common to men throughout the world . . . by persuading the understanding through reasons and by gently attracting . . . the will” (Las Casas 1992b, 138). Las Casas elaborates on this method: “This conclusion will be proved in many ways by arguments drawn from reason; by examples of the ancient Fathers; by the rule and manner of preaching which Christ instituted for all times; by the practices of the Apostles; by quotations from holy teachers; by the most ancient tradition of the Church; and by her numerous ecclesiastical decrees” (Las Casas 1992b, 138). He continues, “There is no other reason why Saracens, Turks, and other unbelievers refuse to embrace our faith than the fact that we deny them with our conduct what we offer them with our words” (Gutiérrez 1993, 155–56).
The aim which Christ and the Pope seek and ought to seek in the Indies—and which the Christian Kings of Castile should likewise strive for—is that the natives of those regions shall hear the faith preached in order that they may be saved. . . . And the means to effect this end are not to rob, to scandalize, to capture or destroy them, or to lay waste to their lands, for this would cause the infidels to abominate our faith.
Bartolomé de Las Casas (Hanke 1951, 561, 617)
It was the responsibility of the missionaries to protect the oppressed and lead them to Christ. Las Casas writes, “They [the natives] are most submissive, patient, peaceful, and virtuous. Nor are they quarrelsome, rancorous, querulous, or vengeful. . . . Surely these people would be the most blessed in the world if only they worshipped the true God” (Neill 1964, 146). Finally, in 1542 Charles V of Spain established the Laws of the Indies, advancing the previous attempt at rectifying colonial oppression. The indigenous peoples were free subjects of the king of Spain: they should learn the Catholic faith; they were not slaves; they should receive the rights to life, health, and self-preservation; and they owned themselves and their possessions (Tinker 1993, viii).
Hindrances of Application
Despite the Spanish royal decrees of 1512 and 1542, the colonizers continued to deny the indigenous peoples their basic human rights. The laws were difficult to enforce in the New World primarily because of the greed of the Spanish settlers and government, who relied on the natives to work the land and the mines. Too invested in their growing wealth and convinced of their racial superiority and natural right to rule, the settlers resisted the new laws. The independent colonists advocated rebellion before they would submit to laws against their interests, and the government was unwilling to lose any colonies to revolution (Caroazza 2003, 87).
Your majesty will find out there are no Christians in these lands; instead, there are demons. They are neither servants of God or of the King. Because in truth, the great obstacle to my being able to bring the Indians from war-making to a peaceful way of life, and to bring the knowledge of God to those Indians who are peaceful is the harsh and cruel treatment of these Indians by the Spanish Christians. For which scabrous and bitter reason no word can be more hateful to those Indians than the word Christian, which they render in their language as Yares, meaning Demons. And without a doubt they are right, because the actions of these Governors are neither Christian nor humane but the actions of the Devil.
Bartolomé de Las Casas (1974, 100)
At one point, Las Casas even suggested, as an alternative, that African slaves replace the natives of the Americas in the encomienda labor system to maintain the newly founded Spanish economic interests. Although Thomas E. Skidmore and Peter H. Smith accuse the Dominican of being responsible for initiating the African slave trade in the Indies (2001, 291), Las Casas quickly and permanently repented of this idea. Further, not all Catholic religious leaders agreed with Las Casas’s belief that the establishment of social justice was a necessary requirement for the propagation of the gospel. Toribio de Motolinia, a Franciscan missionary to Mexico, protested to Charles V against the Dominican’s portrayal of the conquistadores since the military force of the Spanish settlers had prevented “pointless martyrdom” (Brading 1997, 135–36).
Even though the Dominican campaigns did not bring immediate results, many Europeans became aware of the terrorism, thousands of indigenous people received salvation, and Las Casas formed the reduccion. The practice of reduccion throughout Latin America provided indigenous peoples a peaceful opportunity to accept Christianity with freedom from Spanish slavery, yet in the process it “enabled, simplified, and enhanced the ultimate conquest of their tribes” by placing them in European cultural and social systems (Tinker 1993, viii).
In 1543 Las Casas accepted the bishopric of Chiapas, Mexico, and brought with him forty-five Dominican friars. Because of the new laws, hostile Spaniards in Santo Domingo and Chiapas continually rejected the Dominicans on arrival. In addition, Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda (the emperor’s chronicler and Renaissance humanist), in Valladolid, Spain (1550), debated the legality of the reforms in the Spanish occupation of the Americas. Sepúlveda argued that the Indians were “slaves by nature” (Gutiérrez 1993, 217). He reiterated the belief of many Europeans: “With perfect right do the Spanish exercise their dominion over these barbarians of the New World . . . who in prudence, natural disposition, and every manner of virtue and human sentiment are as inferior to Spaniards as children to adults, women to men, cruel and inhuman persons to the extremely meek . . . in a word, as monkeys to men” (Las Casas 1992b, xiv). On the other hand, Las Casas contended, “It clearly appears that there are no races in the world, however rude, uncultivated, barbarous, gross, or almost brutal they may be, who cannot be persuaded and brought to a good order and way of life, and made domestic, mild, and tractable, provided . . . the method is properly and naturally used; that is, love and gentleness and kindness” (Las Casas 1992b, 174).
The next year, the “Protector of the Indians” resigned from his bishopric and focused on writing for the courts in defense of the indigenous peoples. In a year he produced eight treatises denouncing the “Black Legend” of Spanish cruelty in the Indies, which resulted in a growing respect for his ideas in the Spanish court and throughout Europe. In 1552 Las Casas wrote one of his most renowned publications, A Brief Account of the Destructions of the Indies, in which he unfolds a “grisly description of Spanish cruelty, rhetorically exaggerating a slaughter that was horrible enough in reality” (Chasteen 2001, 61). The pamphlet saw forty-two editions in seven languages. Three days before his death in 1566, he wrote the following in his will:
In His goodness and mercy, God considered it right to choose me as his minister, though unworthy, to plead for all those peoples of the Indies, possessors of those kingdoms and lands, against wrongs and injuries never before heard of or seen, received from our Spaniards . . . and to restore them to the primitive liberty of which they were unjustly deprived. . . . And I have labored in the court of the kings of Castile going and coming many times from the Indies to Castile and from Castile to the Indies, for about fifty years since the year 1514, for God alone and from compassion at seeing perish such multitudes of rational men, domestic, humble, most mild and simple beings, well fitted to receive our holy Catholic faith. (Las Casas 1992a, 16)
Las Casas and the Dominicans traveled through much of Latin America preaching the gospel in the vernacular and establishing indigenous churches and schools. According to Gustavo Gutiérrez, “Salvation of unbelievers and believers, proclamation of the gospel to both, and defense of the Indians’ life and liberty: here are Las Casas’ great concerns” (1993, 194). In 1522, for example, the Dominicans opened in Lima, Peru, the first of a series of twenty-five universities as well as fifty-six secondary schools and numerous hospitals (Maust 1992, 35). As a result, the mission methods of the Dominicans influenced other mission groups as well. In California the Spanish Franciscan friar Junipero Serra used the Dominican model with the Native Americans of that territory, as did the Puritan John Elliot with the Algonquians, Henry Benjamin Whipple with the Sioux, and the Moravian David Zeisberger with the Delaware Indians.
The final section of this chapter investigates the Franciscans, a thirteenth-century mission group contemporary with the Dominicans. The founder of the Franciscan order, Francis of Assisi, led his followers in early preaching trips throughout Italy, where he taught his “little brothers” to spread the gospel by living in the world instead of withdrawing from it. As martyrdom goaded Francis to convert others to Christ, his message of joyous peace went beyond the religious and political strife of his home country (Thomas of Celano 1999, 229). From the inception of their order in 1210, the Franciscan mendicants abounded in mission energy. They were the first religious group of the time, for example, to have a written missions goal to reach the Muslims. They believed that Christian outreach to Muslims should occur through peaceful dialogue rather than the violence of the Crusades (Ingvarsson 2004, 311).
The Franciscans
Giovanni di Pietro di Bernardone (later renamed Francesco by his father, or Francis in English) was born at Assisi in Umbria, Italy, around 1181 to a cloth merchant family of seven children. From sixteen to twenty years of age, Francis, attracted by the ideas of “romantic chivalry,” joined his city’s army to fight in the regional class wars over land and property between the new bourgeoisie and the old nobility. After he was imprisoned in the neighboring town of Perugia for a year, the authorities released Bernardone due to a severe illness. Afterward, through a series of dreams and visions, he underwent a radical conversion to Christ and exchanged his frivolous behavior for an ascetic lifestyle.
Historical Background
The Crusades had established new trade routes, and opportunities arose for merchants and artisans to gain wealth and power. Feudal nobility controlled the common people through wealth and power, using them as soldiers in return for security and protection. The church did little to safeguard the people from these nationalistic passions of violence, merely using similar methods of subjugation during the international series of Crusades against Islam to spread the gospel’s message of peace. Corruption had infiltrated the papacy in the form of immorality and abuse of power, with the church acting more in a civil than a religious capacity. Roger P. Schroeder sheds light on the historical context:
The church and mission of the Latin West were at a low point in the year 1000. Many if not most of the clergy were caught up in moral and political corruption, in addition to having little to no biblical/theological training. In an attempt to escape from the corruption of the Church, most of the reform movements which arose at this time emphasized isolation from the world, resulting in almost no impetus for mission. (2000, 412)
A New Mendicant Order
In contrast to this prevailing perspective was Francis of Assisi. Foremost in his life was the desire to imitate Christ’s poverty in the world and “rebuild his church.” He felt God’s call to preach to “kings and rulers and great crowds,” and in turn the Lord would “multiply and increase his family throughout the entire world” (Galli 2002, 72). Bishop John of Sabina, who gained Pope Innocent III’s favor for Francis to create a new mendicant order in 1210, declared, “I believe that the Lord wills, through him [Francis], to reform the faith of the holy church throughout the world” (Galli 2002, 77). Francis had not intended to found an order, but his winsome habits and his message proclaiming a rejection of possessions found a response among those who were ashamed of the earthly church. “Francis’ originality consisted in his lack of originality. He drew his spirituality directly and entirely from the Gospels without addition or subtraction” (Lynch 1982, 91).
The Lord has shown me that God will make us [Franciscan brothers] grow into a great multitude, and will spread us to the ends of the earth. I saw a great multitude of people coming to us, wishing to live with us in the habit of a holy way of life and in the rule of blessed religion. Listen! The sound of them is still in my ears. Their coming and going according to the command of holy obedience. I seem to see highways filled with this multitude gathering in this region [Umbria] from nearly every nation. Frenchmen are coming, Spaniards are hurrying, Germans and Englishmen are running, and a huge crowd speaking other languages is rapidly approaching.
Francis of Assisi (Thomas of Celano 1999, 206)
Francis’s Earlier Rule (1221), which governed the order, states, “The rule and life of these brothers is this: namely to live in obedience, in chastity, and without anything of their own, and to follow the teaching and footprints of our Lord Jesus” (Francis of Assisi 1982a, 117). Along with his friars, Francis ventured to the fields, homes, marketplaces, and vineyards in gentle humility and sincere piety, dispensing his message of joy and holy living for Christ using words “well-chosen and chaste for the instruction and edification of the people” (Francis of Assisi 1982b, 143). They traveled in pairs; taking no money or extra clothing; working with their hands; singing hymns and poems of praise to God; using Italian, the common language, in “preaching the kingdom of God and penance”; and alternating between itinerant speaking and prayer in remote places (Galli 2002, 57). Francis desired above all else to obey God and “took the Gospels as a manual for Christian life” (Harkins 1994, 40).
The flesh desires and is most eager to have words but [cares] little to carry them out. It does not seek a religion and holiness in the interior spirit, but it wishes and desires to have a religion and holiness outwardly apparent to people.
Francis of Assisi (Dries 1998, 6)
Francis copied the communication technique of the troubadours popular with the uneducated—an attention-getting action followed by a short poetic explanation often incorporating a song or chant (Dries 1998, 6). He believed that “all the brothers should preach by their deeds” (Francis of Assisi 1982a, 122); and if speaking were necessary, it should be “in a discourse that is brief because it was in a few words that the Lord preached while on earth” (Francis of Assisi 1982b, 143). Francis and his disciples imitated the humility and poverty of Christ by living among the powerless, sick, and lepers, proclaiming peace in a war-torn Italy. Bestowing dignity rather than shame, Francis respected the poor and desired to be more like them (Thomas of Celano 1983, 432). “Anyone who curses the poor insults Christ whose noble banner the poor carry, since Christ made himself poor for us in this world” (Thomas of Celano 1999, 248). For the Franciscans, “the preaching of the word availed little without the sermon of one’s life” (Schroeder 2000, 413). They were to live as a presence and witness of Jesus.
In the fervor of his [Francis’s] love he felt inspired to imitate the glorious victory of the martyrs in whom the fire of love could not be extinguished or their courage broken. Inflamed with that perfect love “which drives out fear” he longed to offer himself as a living victim to God. . . . He would repay Christ for his love in dying for us and inspire others to love God.
Bonaventure (1983, 701)
With only twelve brothers at its beginning, the order expanded to five thousand men within the first decade. The followers of Francis spread the gospel beyond Italy (Ugolino di Monte Santa Maria 1998, xxxvi): from Tunis (in 1217 with Giles, one of the first disciples) to England (1224), and from Syria (Elias in 1217) to Germany (in 1219 with John of La Penna leading sixty friars) and France (the troubadour Pacifico in the same year). Continuing in mission, the Franciscans established houses stretching from Russia to the Mongol court of China (1254) and on to India. In India, for example, they translated the New Testament and Psalter into the common language and converted six thousand to Christ (Ellens 1975, 490). By 1260 there were approximately 17,500 Franciscan brothers; forty years later there were about 30,000 friars in the order in more than 1,100 houses. We now turn to Franciscan mission expansion in Africa with a particular spotlight on Ramon Llull.
Franciscan Missions to Africa
Ramon Llull closely followed the footsteps of Francis and similarly dedicated his life to bringing Muslims to Christ by way of his apologetic writings, the establishment of missionary training colleges, and his willingness to embrace martyrdom. In an age influenced by the Crusades to consider that the only way for infidel conversion was by the sword, Llull’s strategy of Muslim outreach was a unique alternative to the predominant brutal interactions, and this strategy allowed for the opportunity of increased affiliations and reconciliation.
Thirteenth-century Europe commonly portrayed non-Europeans (non-Catholics) as a series of concentric circles. Europeans occupied the center, the non-Christian barbarians were in the next circle, and the outer circumference was reserved for “disorder, fears, and fantasies” where in the medieval imagination “monstrous races” existed who were hairy, naked, cannibalistic, and sexually perverted (Strickland 2003, 157–65). Followers of Islam were not in the center of the European worldview.
By the end of the seventh century, the Islamic Empire was on the rise, and although Muslims condemned forced conversions, they believed that the “faithful” should govern the world. In 638 Jerusalem surrendered to the Muslims, and at first the conquerors allowed Christians to visit the holy places. By 714 an Arab-Berber army had control of Spain, establishing the western border of the Islamic world for three hundred years. During those centuries, Islam experienced significant internal conflict as well as prosperity until the end of the 900s, when economic growth shifted from North Africa to Europe. In 1031 the domination of the Umayyad Caliph of Córdoba ended and was followed by a period of anarchy until James I of Aragon gave the Catalan people power over the western Mediterranean region, some two hundred years later. Islamic rulers employed the Catalans as mercenaries during this time—even as the royal guard of the caliph of Tunis.
If speaking is necessary then it should be “in a discourse that is brief because it was in a few words that the Lord preached while on earth.”
Francis of Assisi (1982b, 143)
A change of leadership from the Arabs to the Turks in the Middle East saw an increase in Christian persecution. In reaction, the Byzantine rulers appealed to Pope Urban II, who in 1095 aroused an avenging missionary spirit in Europe and launched a series of Crusades over the next 250 years. The pope declared, “A race from the kingdom of the Persians, an accursed race, a race wholly alienated from God have taken what belongs to us. . . . Let the holy sepulcher of our Lord and Saviour, which is possessed by unclean nations, especially arouse you, and the holy places which are now treated, with ignominy and irreverently polluted with the filth of the unclean” (Munro 1901, 6).
The beginning of the thirteenth century was a time of social and political upheaval as the Mongols invaded from the East, and although the major Crusades in the Holy Land had ended, the holy wars against the Saracens (Muslims) continued. For instance, James I of Aragon regained Majorca, conquered by the Saracens in the eighth century, in 1229. A city strategically located in the western Mediterranean and an important commerce center with Catalan as a language of trade and diplomacy, it had a dominant Muslim culture with a population that was one-third Muslim and included Jews in prominent financial and political positions (Bonner 1985, 3–10).
RAMON LLULL
Born to an aristocratic family in Palma, Majorca, in 1233, Ramon Llull became chief administrator to James II of Majorca. At thirty-three years of age he became a follower of Jesus after a series of five visions of the crucified Christ and receiving inspiration from the life of Francis of Assisi; he eventually became a member of the Franciscan third order. In a conversion poem he wrote, “But Jesus Christ, of His great clemency, five times upon the Cross appear’d to me, that I might think upon Him lovingly, and cause His name proclaim’d abroad to be through all the world” (Peers 1969, 21). When he dedicated his life to serving Christ, he pledged to bring the gospel to the Muslims because of their continuing influence in Spain, the church’s lack of success in overcoming Islam by the sword, and the insidious effect of Islamic teaching on Christian theology. His other two ministry objectives were to write a book addressing the errors of other faiths and convincingly present the gospel, and to establish monasteries where monks could learn the languages of nonbelieving peoples and receive appropriate instruction to preach the gospel.
He then spent the next nine years in Majorca learning contemporary science, Latin, and Arabic with a Muslim slave as his teacher, as well as studying Christian, Muslim, and Jewish theologies and philosophies. In all this preparation, he felt inadequate in knowledge, education, and mastery of the Arabic language (Llull 1985a, 15–17). The Catalan influence in southern Europe together with Llull’s aristocratic connections enhanced his emergence as a respected scholar and prolific writer in interdisciplinary fields and enabled him to gain access to ecclesiastical leaders and monarchs.
Conversion of Unbelievers
During the Middle Ages, the prevailing attitude toward Islam was one of “gross ignorance and great hatred,” and in spreading or defending Christianity, violence and torture were considered justifiable (Zwemer 1902, 50). In general, Llull believed that the first attempts to convert the unbeliever should be with love and compassion and called himself the advocate of unbelievers [procurator infidelium] (Lorenz 1985, 20). In his Book of Contemplations, he avowed that the conquest of the Holy Land should “be attempted in no other way than as Thou [Christ] and Thy apostles undertook to accomplish it, by love, by prayer, by tears, by the offering up of our own lives” (Mackensen 1920, 29). Moreover, attempts at such conversion should be through apologetics and dialogue by using principles common to Islam, Judaism, and Christianity.
Dominican apologists such as Ramon Martí (missionary to North Africa) and Ramon de Penyafort (the Dominican minister general) held debates with Jewish and Arabic scholars at Paris in 1263, using reason to try to prove that the opposition’s suppositions were false. In contrast, Llull promoted true debate by insisting that each of the faiths, including Christianity, needed to prove by reason its own faith as well as engage with each of the other belief systems (Hames 2000, 2–3, 8–9).
Llull’s Communication Methodology
Llull tried to communicate in a way that was most appropriate to his audience. His novel Libre de Blanquerna, written in Catalan, incorporated narrative with theology and philosophy; he wrote The Book of Contemplation first in Arabic and then later translated it into Catalan. Not only did Llull use the vernacular in written communication (Arabic, Catalan, and Latin; his writings were also translated into French and Italian), he also sought to use a commonality of thought in style and content. For instance, he styled The Book of the Lover and the Beloved after the style of Muslim Sufi writings; well versed in the Qur’an and Islamic doctrine, he wrote on Islamic beliefs in his Book of the Gentile (Bonner 1985, 20).
In the Middle Ages, the intelligentsia of the different religions influenced one another and had much in common in their ways of thinking. Since the strength of Islam and Judaism in the age of Scholasticism was their philosophy, Llull engaged the Saracen and Jewish philosophers where they were intellectually, using Augustinian reason and logic to understand faith. He held that if a scholar could be overwhelmingly convinced of the truth of the gospel through philosophy and rational debate, then that person would convert. This approach was at odds with Llull’s own complex conversion process, which unfolded not through philosophical debate but because of a series of supernatural interventions and traumatic encounters with people. He held firmly to the belief, however, that divine reason had placed in God’s creation an order that he could discover through the disciplines of language, mathematics, and poetry, in addition to music, geometry, and astronomy. Since the educated, wealthy aristocrats were the shapers of society, Llull was convinced that if these elites were converted, a mass conversion of Jews and Muslims would follow.
In practice, Llull, under government sponsorship, debated with the minority Majorcan Jewish intellectuals in their synagogues with some success, although in Muslim-majority Bugia, Algiers, he spent most of his time imprisoned with limited opportunity for debate and only then with the intervention and protection of the Catalan royal mercenaries. Samuel M. Zwemer concedes that Llull “perceived the possibilities (though not the limitations) of comparative theology and the science of logic as weapons for the missionary” (1902, 127).
Llull appeared unaware of the controlling influences within the Islamic world. Because of past heresies and fear of Hellenistic influences, Muslim theologians, such as Al-Ghazzali (d. 1111), exhorted the Ummahs (communities of believers) to restrict study and teaching to the revealed knowledge of the Qur’an, which was to be accepted without question (Saunders 1965, 197). Doubting or questioning Allah’s composition was sin and resulted in a believer losing any hope of salvation. The fear this inspired severely limited the importance of reason in the conversion process. Further, political instability created by Islamic heretical sects in the Middle Ages produced a controlling cooperation between religion and politics. The Shiite and Ismailian heresies with their Greek philosophical persuasions had almost engulfed Sunni theological tradition, which responded by establishing the madrassa educational system to subjugate unorthodoxy (Talbani 1996, 68–69). Unlike his Muslim counterparts, Llull had freedom of thought and expression, which he used without reciprocal responsiveness.
Well acquainted with Arabic theology and philosophy, Llull wrote about the Trinity and the incarnation in the Book of the Gentile and Felix, the Book of Wonders. Because Islamic theology considers these ideas idolatrous—since God is one and does not have a son (a relationship between Mary and God being an abomination)—they were not addressed as such in Llull’s writings. Not having lived within the Islamic worldview, which preconditioned resentment against these doctrines and restricted critical reflection, Llull remained ignorant of the ineffectiveness of his rational missional methods.
Llull wrote some 256 books; nevertheless, it was in his major work of apologetics that he developed a complex instrument of logic to demonstrate the truth of Christ. He wrote this work to explain the superiority of the Christian faith to Jews and Muslims based on the attributes of God common to all three major religions. He spent years redeveloping a witnessing technique that he called “the Art” (Ars General, Ars Brevis, and Ars Demonstrativa). The Art was a series of mnemonic charts, which he used to classify all aspects of knowledge, science, and theology, believing that such a system of truth would ultimately support Christian doctrines.
Derived from Jewish theological reflection on how an infinite and perfect God could have a relationship with his finite creation, he synthesized a Christian Neoplatonist understanding of creation. Aware of the questions of both the Jewish and Muslim academic communities, Llull designed the Art to answer them using their own cognitive frameworks.
Missionary Training Schools
For Llull, missionary training was essential in reaching the unbeliever, especially in language, theology, geography, and ethnography. Similar to the Dominicans, his desire was to establish monasteries to train monks and laypeople to learn Arabic, Hebrew, and other languages of unbelievers to share “the holy truth of the Catholic faith, which is that of Christ.” In Felix, the Book of Wonders, he expresses his hope that God would send apostles who knew science and languages to convert unbelievers and set an example for the church (Llull 1985b, 781).
Wherefore, it appears to me, O Lord, that the conquest of that sacred land will not be achieved . . . saved by love and prayer and the shedding of tears as well as blood.
Ramon Llull (Peers 1969, 30–31)
Although Llull spent some fifty years endeavoring to gain financial support from papacies and monarchies, he only partially succeeded in diverting the church’s attention from the Crusades to his peaceful mission techniques. Through the assistance of James II of Majorca and the support of the Portuguese pope John XXI, he founded his first school, Trinity College at Miramar, Majorca, in 1276. There Llull established a curriculum in the liberal arts, theology, Oriental languages, Islamic doctrines, and his own Art for thirteen Franciscans and taught there for a time. It is unclear what happened to the students trained in this institution (Lorenz 1985, 20).
Llull continued to seek endorsement for other missionary training facilities in various cities without success, since popes such as Nicholas IV were more interested in fighting the Saracens than in saving them. This continued until at Pope Clement V’s Council of Vienne in 1311 his proposal aroused support for academic chairs in the study of Arabic, Chaldean, and Hebrew in cities where the papal courts resided and at the universities of Bologna, Oxford, Paris, and Salamanca. The council’s decision died with Llull in 1316. The insufficient support of the church for Llull’s missionary training colleges was one of his major disappointments and the catalyst for his missionary trips to North Africa.
Missions to Africa
Thirty years after his conversion, Llull embarked from Genoa for Tunis, North Africa, on his first mission journey to bring the gospel to Muslims. Desiring to serve Christ unto death yet fearful that the Saracens would imprison or martyr him on landing, Llull claimed, “I want to preach in the land of the Infidels the incarnation of the Son and the three Persons of the Trinity. The Mahometans do not believe in this, but in their blindness think we worship three Gods” (Barber 1903, 46). Despite his good intentions, Llull was so fearful of Muslim persecution that he disembarked from the ship. Then, racked by shame and remorse over his disobedience to God’s call, he became physically ill. In 1292, restored in health and courage, he once again set sail for Tunis (Llull 1985a, 30). Upon arriving he decided to “experiment whether he himself could not persuade some of them [Saracens] by conference with their wise men and by manifesting to them, according to the divinely given Method, the incarnation of the Son of God and the three Persons of the Trinity in the divine unity of essence” (Zwemer 1902, 82). A contemporary biographer describes this occasion: “When he [Llull] had answered these [arguments in defense of Islam] readily and given satisfaction therein, they were astonished and confounded” (Peers 1969, 242).
The volatile situation in Tunis caused Llull to flee within a year and focus his energies on obtaining church partnership for a unification of the three monotheistic faiths—Judaism, Christianity, and Islam—which he hoped would defeat the Mongol invaders then threatening Europe and the Middle East. Returning to the Muslim port of Bugia, Algiers, in 1306 he brought his arguments to the city’s chief judge, only to suffer imprisonment for six months and then expulsion for proposing to write a book proving the Christian faith. He returned to this city two years later on a reconnaissance mission for a crusade planned by Pope Clement V. He returned to Europe in 1308 and reported that the pope should achieve conquest through prayer, not through military force. Llull again traveled to North Africa and lived peacefully in Tunis, where he debated with the city’s intelligentsia, five of whom converted. In this city in 1315 while he was preaching in the market square an angry mob fatally stoned him.
Conclusion
In this chapter we have highlighted early Franciscan missions to the thirteenth-century world via Francis of Assisi and Ramon Llull by underscoring the inspiration of martyrdom and efforts to contextualize the message of Christ. This strategy of Muslim mission was “certainly an alternative to the prevailing model of interaction, which was a battle of words and disputation that brought rancor, ill will, separation, and death, rather than strengthened relationships and healing” (Dries 1998, 6). It also deemphasized the prevailing missionary method of military conquest and forced mass conversions. The Franciscans fostered the belief that it was necessary in mission to respect what was best and central in other religions and use those beliefs as a connecting point to “announce the word of God . . . in order that [unbelievers] may believe in God, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit” (Francis of Assisi 1982a, 121).
Two main religious convictions guided Franciscan missionaries such as Francis of Assisi and Ramon Llull: to present the gospel of Christ in an intellectual manner, which would confound the errors of the nonbeliever; and to attain martyrdom for their beloved Lord. In an age in which the power-obsessed Crusades taught that the only way to convert infidels was by the sword, the Order of Friars Minor demonstrated the love of God by its members’ sacrificial lives and compassionate communication—a distinctive mission approach to thirteenth-century Islam that still speaks to the church today.