SHITEPOKE.COM: Rome's Investment in the Americas Hits Pay Dirt

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This week pundits applauded the 118 Vatican Red Hats for selecting Jorge Mario Bergoglio as the 266th pontiff over its billion communicants. While the stilted white-smoke rigmarole is billed as the earthly machinations of the Holy Trinity, it is of course, the most vulgar of politics, calculated to insinuate the greatest pay-off in the global collection plate, commonly known as the Roman Catholic Church.

After a putative 2013 years, the prelates loosed their European bonds, held their collective upturned Holy Roman Empire noses, and anointed a Cardinal from the Americas. But it was a politically safe decision. You see Bergoglio is Italian by family and culture. So the putative leap of faith wasn't, in fact, much of a leap at all:

After a half-millennium investment in Western world human capital, it was was pay dirt time - time to cash in on the stunning demographics of Latin America fecundity. But I get way ahead of myself.

The stunning fecundity of Latin American Catholics has created a sea change in Roman Catholic demographics - and consequently potential cash flow.

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Rewind 499 years.

In 1514, at the callow age of 18, Hernando de Soto signed on as cabin boy to 74-year-old Pedro Arias Dávila, who at the behest of close friend and consort to Queen Isabella I of Spain, launched a flotilla of 19 ships and some 1,500 men to present day Columbia — the single largest colonial European expedition ever undertaken to the then-new world.

Hernando de Soto 1496-1542

From that point, de Soto’s career sustained vertical takeoff. As it turned out, Dávila would become overlord of virtually all Spanish Colonial holdings from Peru to Nicaragua, where he died in splendiferous retirement at the age of 91 (Methuselahan by 16^th century life expectancy), the direct beneficiary of untold riches, unrepentantly plundered from the treasuries of aboriginal societies, under the banner of the cross and the approbation of the Spanish throne.

Upon Dávila’s death in 1531, de Soto threw in as captain with Francisco Pizarro — again some twenty-five years his senior — in perhaps the most horrifically shameless chapter in European colonial annals: the conquest and looting of the Inca Empire, situated in present day Peru.

Upon returning to Spain in 1534, de Soto was accorded procuring credit for the Inca conquest. As honorarium, in addition to a so-called mounted soldier’s share of untold booty across South and Central America, the King of Spain, Charles V, awarded de Soto 724 marks of gold (about 83,000 troy ounces) — worth, give or take, $75 million on today’s market — not a bad net worth for a 38-year-old. But Charles V — titular Holy Roman Emperor and divine attaché to then-reigning Pope Paul III — had other things in mind for young de Soto.

It seems Charles, a Flemish-born prince-king — who never learned to speak fluent Spanish after inheriting the crown as a teenager, on his daddy’s side — had been badly burned by a succession of failed expeditions that had proved a sieve to the royal treasury. The worst of which was a rookie conquistador, Pánfilo de Narváez, who in 1527 managed to lose all but four of his entourage of 600, including troops, officers, spouses of officers, and slaves.

So it was, in 1539 Hernando de Soto launched his first, and mercifully only, expedition into the present day United States. Inexplicably, he decided to rely on the prior reconnaissance of Narváez.

After meandering up the Florida west coast and looping inland through present day Carolinas, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, and Arkansas, he wound up hopelessly lost somewhere along the Mississippi-Louisiana border, where he perished in 1542. His failed expedition fell apart and finally made it back to Mexico City. For that clodpoll decision on de Soto's part, providence indeed blessed North America.

For had de Soto succeeded in his mission, we might very well be speaking Spanish today, denizens of a hemispheric Latin America, composed of a shabby patchwork of bled-out, over populated, chronically impoverished, and systemically corrupt tin-pot dictatorships.

Speculative route of Hernando de Soto's final excellent adventure. Having billed himself as an immortal Sun God, his entourage was no doubt chagrined at his earthly passing - probably of malaria. To quell insurrection among the remaining troops, his lieutenants purportedly wrapped his body in a blanket and sank it in the Mississippi River in the dead of night. Those left, beat it to Mexico City, ending the venture.

Nonetheless, the Iberians managed to conquer and subjugate virtually all of Central and South America.

But the conquistadores did not act alone in their crimes against humanity, for they enabled an equally virulent co-conspirator – The Roman Catholic Church.

Not content with the occasion to proselytize and indenture an estimated 30 million¹aboriginal recruits in the name of Christ, the merger of the Vatican and the Spanish throne provided ever more license to depredate natives and their own countrymen alike.

The enabling liturgy was the Requerimiento, a burlesque piece of Roman Catholic dogmata asserting that God almighty, through his intercessory the Pope and Vicar of Christ, held authority over the all the earth, and that the Inter Caetera — a Papal Bull of 1493 by Pope Alexander VI —ceded title over the Americas to the Spanish throne.

Now to be perfectly balanced, the Requerimiento was supposed to be delivered aloud to the subject natives, affording them the coveted opportunity of accepting Jesus Christ as their Lord and Savior. More often it was recited from the bow of a moored ship, empty beachhead, or at best to a gaping uncomprehending assemblage of aboriginals, shall we say, rather unschooled in courtly Castilian Spanish.

To the conquistadores the Requerimiento provided a tidy ecclesiastical – and political – loophole, framing American aboriginals in the godless state of having rejected the Holy Trinity. That the Native Americans were culturally clueless as to their transgression of failing to supplicate Christ did not deter the pious and imperious Spaniards in the slightest. Accordingly, any death, destruction, or pillaging was, de jure, their own fault — the mortal consequence of fiat paganism.

As Richard Dawkins flatly observes in The God Delusion, a half millennium later: “What impresses me about Catholic mythology is partly its tasteless kitsch but mostly the airy nonchalance with which [they] make up the details as they go along. It is [all] just shamelessly invented.”

Pope Philip II (1527-1598) would ultimately unleash the legendary atrocities of genocidal maniac Tomás de Torquemada – Grand Inquisitor of the Spanish Inquisition – on the new world colonies.

Having presided over some 44,000 heretic trials on the European Continent, with more than 5,000 executions under his belt, in 1569 the first two field offices of El Tribunal del Santo Oficio de la Inquisición were established in New Spain (Mexico) and Peru.²By 1610, royal bureaus of the Inquisition were installed in every Spanish colonial diocese, from Hispaniola to the Philippines.

Re-inactment of Spanish Inquisition tribunal

Universal and unrepentant Roman Catholic fealty was the joint papal and royal injunction. The prime transgressors in Spain, Jews and Muslims – hardly a factor in the new world – were summarily held accountable as enemies of Rome and the Spanish crown.

For that, dragnet kangaroo courts for alleged infidels were conducted by minions of the inquisition, independent of, and unaccountable to, secular authority. Suspects were arrested and relentlessly interrogated without semblance of due process. The antidote for failure to voluntarily confess and repent was torture.

Routinely detainees would be placed naked on a potro, a bedlike frame with straps from side-to-side. Arms and legs were strapped with leather bands and tightened by turns of a wheel, inflicting excruciating pain. Typically, a detainee would confess his or her infidelity upon the first few turns.

Alternatively, the medieval antecedent to water boarding might be administered by cramming a rag in the detainee’s mouth and saturating it with copious amounts of water. Reflexive swallowing would cause the prisoner's abdomen to become excruciatingly distended.

500 years' later, the George W. Bush Administration popularized waterboarding as a method of torture - no doubt reminiscent of the Spanish Inquisition.

Failing that, a makeshift trial and public execution was the final solution for those who manifestly refused to submit to the inquisitors – and there were manifold thousands. For that, native Americans under Spanish conquest were terrorized, en masse, to adopt Roman Catholicism under the most outrageous contrivances of duress.

That Latin America stands preponderantly Roman Catholic today – the rank and file slavishly subservient to the stultifying and impoverishing dogma – serves as testimony to the innate depravity of the merger of church and state.

Such is the atrocious legacy of the Iberians in the new world, indelibly writ in the embarrassing social and economic diametrics between the North and South Americas to this very day.