A Warning from History

From The Catholic Herald:

Archaeologists have recently uncovered evidence of the mass sacrifice of children at a site called Las Llamas. We read:

“…[B]esides the bones [of 140 children], researchers also found footprints that have survived rain and erosion. The small footprints indicate the children were marched to their deaths from Chan Chan, an ancient city a mile away from Las Llamas… [T]he children’s skeletons contained lesions on their breastbones, which were probably made by a ceremonial knife. Dislocated ribcages suggest that whoever was performing the sacrifices may have been trying to extract the children’s hearts.”

All this represents an inconvenient truth for those who would like to have us believe that the Spanish conquest of the New World was not a good thing. Pre-Colombian civilizations, which achieved a great deal, as any visit to a museum in Mexico will show, nevertheless had great drawbacks, as any honest observer must admit. The same is true, of course, of the Spanish Empire in the New World, but, and it remains a huge but, the Spanish abolished human sacrifice and banished the sort of errors that made people think that human sacrifice was either good or necessary.

The discovery of this site of mass child sacrifice in Peru could provide ammunition for those who want to see European values as innately superior to those of pre-Colombian America. Conversely, it could be used by moral relativists to claim that child sacrifice is not per se an innately evil thing, and that we must not judge other societies which are very different from our own by the standards we would judge ourselves. However, my own view of things is clear, though some might find it simplistic: no intrinsic evil – and child murder is a clear example of such – is ever to be tolerated, for whatever reason, and the fact that the society that once practiced child sacrifice at Las Llamas no longer exists is a cause for satisfaction. Thank God for the conquistadors. (Read more.)

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