Autobiography - The Galindo Group

Ram Galindo THE MAKING OF AN AMERICAN Page 22
plottings from Francis I of France and the Turks in the Balkans, with corsairs in the
Mediterranean, with his own Conquistadors and European pirates in America, with the
wracking pressure from Vatican mischief and with mounting debt to the Fugger banking
family of Germany. No wonder he thought 56 years was a good age for retirement to a
monastery.
And yet, before he abdicated in the midst of a suffocating financial crisis, he managed to
lift Europe to heights never before expected. His dreams were vast and his sense of
liberal acceptance of disagreement unprecedented in a world coming out of the
darkness. Although he was near the inception of absolutism and was a hereditary
monarch, therefore at the time the highest embodiment of the oppressing class, he
actually enlarged the crack that generations later brought in the winds of the
enlightenment. Thinking about my Hungarian friends from Villanova, I feel like my
ancestors’ feelings for freedom escaped through this crack, while theirs did not.
Among many others, three talented advisors of significance to my points provided
Carlos V the intellectual thrust to hold back the temptations of nascent absolutism that
gripped the world with the birth of nations. Fortunately for the warriors of freedom, most
of them born much after him, Carlos V listened to these advisors. Fray Bartolome de las
Casas became the champion for rights of the vanquished “Indians” of the new colonies.
Conquistadors sailed from Europe under the banner of the three “Gs” – Gold, God and
Gospel. Much too frequently, the last two G’s were forgotten shortly after departure and
only the first energized the rest of the journey. Except for a few monks whose cries for
compassion seldom crossed the Atlantic, the Conquistadors cruelly dominated the
indigenous population, giving them no freedom at all.
But in Spain, close to the Emperor’s ear, Fray Bartolome de las Casas argued, properly
draped in official dogma, that these natives were just as human as any Spanish Hidalgo
and therefore were worthy of the protection of the law, as the law may be. He was one
forerunner of the enlightenment thinkers who two and a half centuries later posited that
all men are created equal.
Juan Luis Vives, a former tutor of Charles’ niece “Bloody” Mary (daughter of King Henry
VIII of England and of Katherine of Aragon and a future English queen herself),
preached more opportunity for women and for those not of noble birth. He would not
have had a chance of being remembered by history had the crown not protected him
and actually embodied some of his thinking in its decrees and promulgations.
At the blossoming University of Salamanca, Fray Francisco de Vitoria, with the help of
his colleagues, produced the thinking behind one the first bodies of law dealing with
colonial policy, war and peace. All three advisors helped Carlos Quinto maintain as
favorable a climate as possible to soften the retrogression of the inquisition and attract
the progress of the renaissance, with the implicit, but unspoken, future promise of the
right to pursue individual dreams.
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