The myth of the intellectual missionaries who "defended" and researched the invaded civilization is disproved by serious researchers of the Catholic Church, such as the text entitled "Flower and Song of the Birth of Mexico".
"There were some —the lesser— that, as Sahagún, devoted incredible care, worthy of the best modern anthropologist, to delve, in depth, into the Anahuac world;" but this was not due to any appreciation for it, but by the explicit and confessed desire to better destroy it. [The doctor —he asserts at the start of his monumental work— cannot accurately apply medicines to the sick unless he first knows what causes the illness... to preach against these things and even to find out if they exist, it is necessary to know how they were used]. He thus acted (Sahagún), as a captain in command, carefully studying the schematics of enemy facilities: not to admire or copy them, but to better destroy them." (Jose Luis Guerrero. 1990)[1]
Indigenous people and their culture represented "the real presence of the devil and evil" for Europeans of the 16th century and the justification for their atrocities. It also has to be considered that "informants" of the missionaries, men of knowledge, now defeated, would not hand over their wisdom to those who, they knew, wanted to obliterate it. Finally, in this regard we shall say that, in cases where the missionaries valued the “diabolical civilization” from another perspective, would be scrutinized by the Holy Inquisition and the Royal bureaucracy, which censored and destroyed any text that would cast doubt over the dogmas which sustained the church and the "just and legal" process of colonization from Spain.
"The most deplorable case in this chain of censorship and repression is that of Bernardino de Sahagún. In the fifty years that Sahagún dedicated to the compilation of the grandiose body of knowledge concerning the indigenous culture, he successively suffered the contradiction of Friars and the ecclesiastical authorities of Nueva España (New Spain), the haggling of economic support to conduct his work, the dispersal of his
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- ↑ Guerrero, José Luís, Flor y Canto del nacimiento de México”. Librería Parroquial de Clavería. México.
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