Madrid, Spain, Oct 11, 2024 / 08:00 am (CNA).
The Catholic Association of Propagandists (Advocates) (ACdP) in Spain has launched a campaign on the discovery and evangelization of America titled “1492: Neither Genocidal Nor Slave Owners — They Were Heroes and Saints.”
With more than 200 posters distributed on marquees and billboards in more than 60 Spanish cities, the campaign was created with the aim of “dismantling the stereotypes of the black legend against Hispanic heritage.”
The campaign extols the accomplishments of those who “at the risk of losing their lives, embarked on the adventure of reaching the New World with one main objective: to spread Christianity,” a statement from the organization explained.
The ACdP emphasized that with this initiative it “pays tribute to those who brought the promotion of human dignity — which has its origin in the Catholic faith — to Indigenous peoples, subjected to the oppression of bloodthirsty empires.”
The association seeks to “combat the so-called ‘black legend’ spread for centuries against the remarkable Spanish accomplishment.”
The posters and billboards show a QR code that links to a video that, in a humorous tone, simulates a television contest in which a promoter of the “black legend” and a citizen of a Latin American country participate.
The simulated TV contest dismantles one by one the main stereotypes about the arrival of the Spanish in the Americas and the spread of the Christian faith by the Catholic monarchs Queen Isabel of Castile and her husband, King Ferdinand of Aragón.
Among other points, the episode points out that Spain never had “colonies” but “viceroyalties” and that on the cultural level, 100 of the 140 United Nations World Heritage sites in Latin America are of Spanish origin. It also points out that by 1538 more than 30 universities had already been founded and that by 1574 the Bible had been translated into more than 12 native languages.
The fact that the Spaniards intermarried with the Indigenous, resulting a mixed-race society, was pointed out as contrary to the widespread expulsion and extermination of Indigenous peoples by other European powers in North America. The episode also pointed to the enormous economic cost that Spain incurred to maintain its presence in America, much more than what was obtained from the natural resources of the new continent.
Last year, on the occasion of Hispanic Heritage Day, the ACdP also publicized a video that summarizes the history of Spain in two minutes, from the appearance of the Virgin Mary to the apostle St. James in Zaragoza to modern times.
These and other campaigns are part of a strategy developed by the ACdP in recent years to highlight the positive impact of Catholic values in society.
This story was first published by ACI Prensa, CNA’s Spanish-language news partner. It has been translated and adapted by CNA.
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While we’re at it, about the bible being translated into indigenous languages, there’s the case of the 4th-century St. Jerome into Latin, and a few translations prior to Luther into German, several earlier editions even into his German…
By the 2nd Century translations of scripture already had been made in the vernacular—from the Greek to Latin for those Western Christians who did not understand the original Greek. The most common was the Old Latin, or Itala. Of the complete translations, a Gothic version is dated in the 4th Century still near the same time that St. Jerome in the East translated the Vulgate from Greek to Latin. A sampling of either partial or complete and mostly early translations (copies!) are in Gaelic, Anglo-Saxon, Italian (1500), Cyrilic (9th Century and which first required Sts. Cyril and Methodius to invent a Slavic written script), German (980) Armenian (4th and 13th Century), Icelandic (1297), French (807 under Charlemagne, others in the 15th and early 16th Centuries), Russian (New Testament, 10th Century), Flemish (1210), Polish and Bohemian (six editions beginning in 1478), Italian (1471), Spanish (1478 and 1515), and Slavonick (early 16th Century).
Between the invention of printing and Luther’s extolled German version, early complete German editions after 1462 were numerous, with 5 editions at Mentz, 15 at Augsburg, and others at Wittenberg, Nuremburg and Strasburg. The vast majority of other translations or copies no longer exist due either to religious wars, invasions and the pillaging of the Reformation. In the modern languages, and before the first Protestant version was issued from the press, some 626 complete or partial editions of the Bible were published by the Church, and of these 198 were in the language of the laity. (Buckingham, “The Bible in the Middle Ages,” 1853)