Inculturation defends human, cosmic life - Church's outlook toward catholicity and indigenous peoples

Colonization produced the Third World. The colonial expansion of the West in Latin America, Africa and Asia was from the outset a global process that was ethnocentric, authoritarian, patriarchal and destructive of nature.

The global paradigm of the conquest identifies the domination of the Spaniard over the Indian with the domination of man over woman, of adult over child and of humans over nature.

Ethnocentrism follows the same logic as androcentrism, authoritarianism and the anthropocentrism that oppresses nature. The schema is presented as just and based on the natural law.

The paradigm's most important element is the identification of all the dominations with the supremacy of the sold over the body and of reason over appetite. The Spaniard, the man, the adult and the human represent the spiritual (soul) and the rational (reason); the Indian, the woman, the child and the animal are only body and appetite. Spirit and reason are consequently not present in the Indian, the woman, the child or nature.

This Western and colonial paradigm provides a perfect justification for destroying the indigenous, the woman, the child, nature and the very body itself The modern process of globalization, now based on the free market economy, follows the same colonial, ethnocentric, androcentric, authoritarian logic, a logic that is spiritualistic and destructive of nature and of the body.

The crucial issue of inculturation was present from the first days of colonization. Many missionaries as well as some indigenous thinkers offered inculturation as an opponent of colonization, identifying it as the defense of life, especially the endangered life of the indigenous peoples and of nature. Inculturation not only defended human and cosmic life but in addition affirmed the presence of the Spirit precisely where colonization denied it: in the Indian the African slave, the woman, the body and nature.

Inculturation was opposed to the destructive and excluding globalization, but it was not opposed to the universality of humanity or to the catholicity of Christianity. Every colonialization and globalization that is excluding is by definition less than universal. The Western colonial conquest and contemporary market globalization are contrary to universality and catholicity. Only the defense of life, of the Spirit and of the cultures of excluded peoples have the dimension of universality and catholicity. The oppressed people demand universality and they need the catholicity that Christianity offers them.

The church must choose

The church has to choose between inculturation and globalization. The church's catholicity can only be established in defense of life, of the spirit and of the cultures of the peoples who are oppressed and excluded by Western and modem globalization. Today, the church's catholicity faces the challenge of confronting a tradition that is still alive, a tradition of globalization that is ecclesial, Eurocentric, patriarchal, authoritarian and hostile to the body.

A Christianity that reached the Third World by the path of European colonial expansion can only regain its authenticity by the path of inculturation. If colonial and modern globalization traveled from the North to the South, inculturation will travel from the South to the North. Globalization oppresses the South; inculturation judges the North.

Inculturation of the gospel or incultured evangelization is the great tribunal of history in which the West is called to judgment. In this judgment, the church must be the defender of the life and the cultures of the oppressed in opposition to globalization.

Inculturation insists that the church break with the paradigms that are proper to colonial domination and Western modern globalization. Inculturation is possible if the church rejects Eurocentrism, authoritarianism, patriarchism and the spiritualisms that are destructive of nature and of the body. This entails also the declericalization and decentralization of the church's own structures.

By responding to these challenges of inculturation, the church will be a truly universal and Catholic church, a church meaningful for the peoples of the Third World. Our Third World peoples desperately need a church that is catholic, inculturated and universal. That is why we who live in the Third World have such a deep love for the church.

Brothers in ministry

Inculturation does not cause fragmentation or sectarianism. Fragmentation results rather from the exclusion that globalization produces. An inculturated church, to the extent that it defends the life of all, is a universal church. Only a church that accepts and appropriates all the cultures of the Third World is really universal. This universal, inculturated church has greater need than any other of the primacy of Peter, which in the Catholic church tradition is exercised by the bishop of Rome.

We believe that papal primacy can be exercised in many different ways. The pope himself, in the encyclical Ut Unum Sint, places himself on the side of a "communion of communities" model when he relates the primacy of the pope to the universal collegiality of the bishops: `When the Catholic church affirms that the role of the bishop of Rome corresponds to the will of Christ, it does not separate this function from the mission confided to all bishops, they also being `vicars and ambassadors of Christ.' The bishop of Rome belongs to his `college,' and they are his brothers in the ministry."