Joseph Cardinal Höffner CHRISTIAN SOCIAL ... - Ordo Socialis

was furthered by the two world wars in an unforeseen way, the colored peoples struggled for
their freedom.
2. Characteristics of Colonialization
2. If one seeks to characterize colonialism, six features seem conspicuous:
a) The Western nations confronted other races with the consciousness of an all-round superiority,
even if these nations could look back upon a millenary culture. In particular, all colored
peoples were considered culturally backward and were treated as ‘underprivileged’ people.
There was talk of the ‘white man’s burden’, upon whom the task of educating the ‘primitive’
nations had devolved.
b) Modern colonialism has opened up the whole earth and brought nations and cultural areas
which had led their own lives until then into manifold and lasting contact with the remaining
world - a process, moreover, that has led in an alarming way to uprooting and foreign infiltration.
c) In the era of colonialism, the technical revolution proceeding from the West traveled
around the whole earth simultaneously with European domination. It has had an incisive effect
upon the mode of existence and the awareness of life of all nations such as has not occurred
since the transition to settlements in the Neolithic age or since the rise of advanced
civilizations. At the same time, a type of man marked by technology began to emerge, a type
assuming strikingly similar features everywhere on earth, even in the former colonial countries.
A new period of world history has begun, and, without colonialism, technology would
doubtless not have penetrated into all parts of the world in such a brief period of time.
d) In the wake and, to a large extent, under the protection of the colonial powers, the Christian
missionaries began their work of conversion. The often close relationships between the ambassadors
of the faith and the colonial authorities gave rise to the impression among the indigenous
population that the Christian mission is an epiphenomenon of European colonialism.
It thus could not be avoided that, with the collapse of colonialism, the Christian missions
should also have fallen into a crisis.
e) It must be recognized that the Christian conscience in the European homeland raised a protest
against the conditions in the colonies and championed the human rights of the natives.
Two great protest movements can be distinguished: the Spanish colonial ethics of the sixteenth
century, which led to the construction of a colonial legislation that was excellent for the
conditions of that time, and the movement for the abolition of slavery, which began towards
the end of the eighteenth century. Both movements sprang from the Christian consciousness
in the European countries and were not provoked by the indignation of the colonial nations,
which, at that time, had hardly fought their way through to self-understanding.
f) The effects of European colonialism on the former colonial nations must be designated as
enormous and ineradicable. Even now that the colonial domination has ended, a return to earlier
conditions is no longer possible anywhere. A strong and sensitive national consciousness
has arisen, which, on the one hand, defends itself against every kind of tutelage, but, on the
other hand, would like to catch up in the shortest time possible with the technological progress
of the modern industrial states
3. Four consequences
3. If one places European colonial domination in the light of Christian principles, one will
have to admit with shame that, in its essential expressions, colonialism cannot stand up before
the Christian conscience. Violent elimination of political independence, economic exploita-
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