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What If Catholic Monks Led the First Expeditions to the Americas?

Briefly, there would be no genocides by Spaniards, an empire based on faith instead of greed and theft, and far less disease since invaders spread it deliberately or made it far worse by deliberate starvation. Other European invaders face Spanish priest armed Natives, much like Jesuit reductions IOTL.
 
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Can we maybe stop using this forum as an advertisement space? This isn't the 'promote our own YouTube channel' forum.
Quite. As has been said on a previous occasion, this forum is primarily intended for written discussion. Anyone with a TL idea is free to share it in writing. A video is more difficult to respond to in a detailed way, so most people are simply going to react to the gist of it.
 
These are PODs. I've seen others post videos as well. Is the issue the medium being posted? If not, it's not promotion any more than every other thread I've seen with someone writing on a topic that they have written a book or story on, or hope will become one.

But I could easily post the text of it instead. Most responses I've gotten are to the summary, not the video. The link is there for greater detail.

So, again:

Briefly, there would be no genocides by Spaniards, an empire based on faith instead of greed and theft, and far less disease since invaders spread it deliberately or made it far worse by deliberate starvation. Other European invaders face Spanish priest armed Natives, much like Jesuit reductions IOTL.
 
Briefly, there would be no genocides by Spaniards, an empire based on faith instead of greed and theft, and far less disease since invaders spread it deliberately or made it far worse by deliberate starvation. Other European invaders face Spanish priest armed Natives, much like Jesuit reductions IOTL.

You have a faith in the church that is touching.

I'm not saying that priests weren't kind to natives but well there's also plenty of uprisings where the priests were the first targets because they were the most brutal of the landowners. It largely depends on the nature of the priests in question.
 
You have a faith in the church that is touching.

I'm not saying that priests weren't kind to natives but well there's also plenty of uprisings where the priests were the first targets because they were the most brutal of the landowners. It largely depends on the nature of the priests in question.

That may be another reason for me to quote the text rather than post a link to it. To make it clearer which orders or groups I was referring to. Namely Jesuits in Paraguay, Dominicans in Chiapas, etc, rather than the monks in places like New Mexico.

But even at their worst, there were no monk equivalents to Columbus or Cortes. Brutal punishments, beatings, suppression of religions. But no mass killings of civilians, no mass rapes, no throwing children to dogs to be torn apart, no deliberate spread of disease or mass starvation.
 
But even at their worst, there were no monk equivalents to Columbus or Cortes. Brutal punishments, beatings, suppression of religions. But no mass killings of civilians, no mass rapes, no throwing children to dogs to be torn apart, no deliberate spread of disease or mass starvation.
There didn't need to be, because the violent suppression of dissent was taken care of by secular authorities. In your scenario they would have to take matter into their own hands, though it's just as likely that, as usual in such cases, they would outsource and share the spoils.

Christianity spreading peacefully has been the exception rather than the rule. The default method has been to use the power of the state as a mechanism of forced conversion.
 
Besides which, how would catholic monks make any demographic or cultural impact by themselves? The Jesuits didn't just land in South America and march inland. They needed an existing infrastructure first, which means secular settlers.
 
Why exactly would Catholic monks lead the first expeditions? Prior to Columbus's journey there's no good reason for Catholic monks to cross the Atlantic, and afterwards the secular authorities have every reason to explore, invade, and colonize these lands. Furthermore, I question the idea that the Catholic Church was all about peaceful conversion. The Church had a long history of supporting military ventures to conquer non-Christians, and actively encouraged the sort of behavior that the Conquistadors engaged in. For example, in 1452 the Pope granted issued a bull (Dum Diversas) which granted Portugal "full and free permission to invade, search out, capture, and subjugate the Saracens and pagans and any other unbelievers and enemies of Christ wherever they may be, as well as their kingdoms, duchies, counties, principalities, and other property [...] and to reduce their persons into perpetual servitude." This right was confirmed in multiple other bulls made prior to the discovery of the Americas. And that's not even getting into the Crusades and other religious wars the Church authorized. When the Pope gave Spain the right to the New World in 1493 he was following a long tradition. There are individual religious orders that supported peaceful conversion, but they don't have the power to stop the Spanish invasions.
 
Furthermore, by the late fifteenth century some form of theological upheaval is brewing- how is a Church that was taxed to the very limit to handle a crisis on its own continent supposed to settle and convert two new ones?
 
I think a more interesting PoD is something like Catholic monasticism _in the absence of colonization_ (we can use whatever PoD we want for this). What happens if Native power structures and states survive colonization largely intact but there's a Catholic presence? How does it turn out? Does it make inroads? Get surpressed? get co-opted, or used for their technical expertise but kept on a short leash? Do the answers depend on where we are?
(also it's worth pointing out that monastic orders could be incredibly brutal, especially surpressing religious dissent-the Yucatan comes to mind).
 
I think a more interesting PoD is something like Catholic monasticism _in the absence of colonization_ (we can use whatever PoD we want for this). What happens if Native power structures and states survive colonization largely intact but there's a Catholic presence? How does it turn out? Does it make inroads? Get surpressed? get co-opted, or used for their technical expertise but kept on a short leash? Do the answers depend on where we are?
(also it's worth pointing out that monastic orders could be incredibly brutal, especially surpressing religious dissent-the Yucatan comes to mind).

I think I could quite easily see some sort of Inca equivalent of 'Dutch Studies' emerging with catholic missionaries as the point of contact.

I could also see them managing a successful mass-Conversion in one of the Maya City-states due to some sort of crisis or what have you and things getting very complicated after that in terms of local relations.
 
(actually I kinda picture a apocalyptic native movement going somewhere, like Chan Santa Cruz but more successful)
 
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