BUENOS AIRES — Pope Benedict XVI's declaration in Brazil that colonial-era evangelization in the New World did not represent "the imposition of a foreign culture" has ignited criticism from indigenous representatives and the governments of Venezuela and Bolivia.
Indigenous groups from Chile to Mexico have condemned the remarks as a revision of a history marked by massacres, enslavement and destruction of native cultures.
For many in Latin America, the incident was reminiscent of provocative comments the pope made last year about Islam, unleashing a wave of anger across the Muslim world.
The response this time has been concentrated in the region, but analysts say the reaction again illustrates the pope's apparent tin ear for the often provocative content of his discourse.
Despite a keen analytical mind, "Benedict can also be remarkably tone-deaf to how his pronouncements may sound to people who don't share his intellectual and cultural premises," John L. Allen Jr., a Vatican analyst for the National Catholic Reporter, wrote after the pope's trip to Brazil this month.
Benedict's comments came in a speech from the Brazilian shrine town of Aparecida on the final day of his first visit to the Americas as pope. He referred to the arrival of European explorers in the 15th century as an "encounter" between "faith and the indigenous people" of the New World.
"The proclamation of Jesus and of his Gospel did not at any point involve an alienation of the pre-Columbus cultures, nor was it the imposition of a foreign culture," Benedict declared. The people of the Americas, the pope said, had been "silently longing" for Christ "without realizing it," and willingly received a Holy Spirit "who came to make their cultures fruitful, purifying them."
The pope's analysis didn't mention the widely acknowledged violent side of the conquest, a theme that is at the heart of a resurgent indigenous movement in Latin America.
Most credible modern accounts of the conquest now include some reference to the often barbarous treatment that Spanish and Portuguese overseers inflicted on native populations through colonial times.
"Surely the pope doesn't realize that the representatives of the Catholic Church of that era, with honorable exceptions, were complicit, accessories and beneficiaries of one of the more horrible genocides that humanity has seen," said an Ecuadorean-based association of Quechua Indians, one of South America's largest indigenous groups.
