Hondurans celebrate 500th anniversary of first mass

Christopher Colombus was too sick to go ashore, so on August 14, 1502, the explorer sent his brother Bartolome and some sailors to pray on a beach near today’s port city of Trujillo, Honduras. They gave thanks for a safe journey, and, according to Catholic officials, celebrated mass.

It was the first mass on the mainland of the Americas if you discount Brazilian claims to an even earlier mass, and if you ignore the doubters who questioned whether what took place on that Honduran beach 500 years ago was really a mass.

You need a priest for a mass, and according to Mario Felipe Martinez, a professor of history at the Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Honduras, there is no primary source that claims the worshipers had a priest with them. Martinez, a Catholic who has studied historical records in Europe and the Americas relating to the event, said that later references to a certain Fray Alejandro, a Franciscan from Barcelona listed as an nobleman on one of the other boats in Colombus’ flotilla, are not convincing. Moreover, Martinez said most Franciscans of the time came to the Americas as evangelists and were not authorized to celebrate mass.

Wanting an anniversary to celebrate, Honduran church leaders commissioned archeologist Roberto Reyes to write a book entitled Cristobal Colon en Honduras, detailing the secondary sources, including journal entries by Colombus’ son Hernando and a later mention by Bartolome de las Casas, which report the mass actually took place.

When Reyes’ book didn’t settle the argument, Honduran church leaders did what their counterparts in Mexico did with Juan Diego, whose historicity also came into doubt. They declared the argument finished and chastised nay-sayers. And the show went on.

And what a show it was. On August 14 of this year, some 15,000 Hondurans gathered on a naval base east of Trujillo to celebrate the alleged mass. Some 200 light-skinned politicians and business leaders, including two presidents and one vice president, gathered under palm-thatched shelters built by the government for the occasion. The rest, most darker-skinned poor worshipers, stood in the tropical sun for hours.

Like celebrations of the “discovery” of the Americas ten years earlier, the anniversary of the mass provoked controversy.

The Organizacion de Desarrollo Etnico Comunitario, a Black activist group, published a manifesto demanding that the church “should ask forgiveness for the martyrdom it caused people of African descent during 500 years of evangelization,” yet soldiers confiscated all the copies before the group’s members could distribute the document to participants in the mass. Likewise, peasants demanding a renewed agrarian reform had their protest signs taken away. A group of teachers, locked in a bitter wage battle with the government, were smart enough to stage their protest alongside the road outside the naval base.

Church officials had debated what sort of celebration to hold. Some had argued for a quieter event which would include significant indigenous participation and serve as an opportunity to reflect on the nature of evangelization during the last 500 years. Yet those who favored a more triumphalistic event won out.

Among those favoring a big show was Cardinal Oscar Andres Rodriguez, the archbishop of Tegucigalpa and a leading papal contender.

The cardinal dismissed calls for the church to repent of its historical sins. “I think we’ve overcome the need for this discussion. The church asked for forgiveness in 1992,” Rodriguez said, adding that in Honduras the conflicts between earlier Spanish settlers and the indigenous were minimal, because much of the country was sparsely populated.

“To generalize about the guilt of the church is wrong. It’s not relevant today. We want to move this country out of its underdevelopment and we can’t do that if we remain looking only at the past,” Rodriguez said.

Cardinal Nicolas Lopez, archbishop of Santo Domingo and the pope’s representative in the mass, branded as unfair accusations that the church abused native populations. “The problems of the indigenous weren’t caused by the Catholic Church. Instead, the church tried to find responses to their problems,” Lopez declared.

“Today there are groups that manipulate the indigenous,” Lopez added. “It seems that they are not willing to forgive the fact that the Americas received the faith from Spain and Portugal.”

Ecclesiastical attempts to paint a happy face on history were betrayed by the church’s own national commission on indigenous ministry, which in June drafted a letter to the country’s bishops, complaining that the church was mistreating the more than 10 percent of the country’s six million people who consider themselves indigenous.

“Our indigenous communities are mostly Catholic, and our pilgrimages [and other forms of religious expression] are important ways for us to strengthen and express our allegiance to the Catholic faith, yet we have forms which are not always respected. Our religious expressions are often seen as meaningless, syncretic, or magical rites. Few are the priests who understand us,” the group wrote. “It’s urgent that you review the pastoral proposals pushed by the parishes and dioceses that are often at odds with our way of being and thinking, and which at times confuse us and discourage our participation in the church.”

Activists then pulled together almost 5,000 indigenous Catholics from around the country for a late July meeting that produced six pages of demands of the government and church, as well as the country’s nongovernmental organizations and ethnic groups. The document was presented to President Ricardo Maduro and church leaders following the August 14 mass, and the indigenous ministry commission has appointed a committee to follow up and report back to indigenous communities on whether any demands are met.


- From Trujillo, Paul Jeffrey