In Andes Speech to 200,000, Pope Urges Ecuador Indians to Preserve Ancient Values

Pope John Paul II got an emotional lift Thursday from a vast throng of Indians, many of them descendants of the Incas, and praised some of their ancient values and asked them to preserve them.

Calling the ancient Inca beliefs in a sense of justice and an afterlife “the seeds of Christ,” the pontiff said: “The profound values of your people are not just folkloric realities. They are effective realities which you have maintained--not without grave difficulties--across the centuries.”

More than 200,000 Indians--including some former headhunters--from the Andes mountains and lowland jungles trekked, flew and bused to this small agricultural marketing town in Ecuador’s Andes to see and hear John Paul.

Gifts of Sombrero, Llama

Their unrestrained enthusiasm and uninhibited cheers and chants of welcome--along with gifts of a sombrero, a llama, an Inca ruler’s silver staff of authority and a headhunter’s spear--brought a beaming smile to the pontiff’s slightly sunburned face, an exuberance usually only briefly glimpsed at public ceremonies.

Speaking of assimilating their ancient beliefs and customs into the Roman Catholic Church, John Paul told the Indians in Spanish that “it is perfectly legitimate to look for the preservation of the proper spirit in your various cultural expressions.”

At the halfway point of his 12-day journey to three South American countries and the island nation of Trinidad and Tobago, the Pope, a one-time mountaineer, looked almost wistful as he gazed at towering Mt. Cotopaxi, at 19,360 feet among the tallest active volcanoes in the world. Its snow-clad slopes reflected a dazzling light across the mountain airstrip here when he met the Indians.

Three-Day Trek

Among them, standing directly in front of the altar from which he spoke, were about 200 Schuaras, formerly called Jivaros when they hunted down other tribesmen, took their heads and shrunk them for trophies and talismans. They had walked three days from the jungles near the Peruvian border and then had been flown to Latacunga so that they could present the Pope with one of their spears.

“The spears are symbols of their willingness to defend their faith to the death,” said a missionary who accompanied them.

One of the tribesmen explained in Spanish that “we stopped that (headhunting) about 20 years ago because a priest came and told us it was a sin. You can’t kill people anymore.”

But most of the natives at the papal ceremony were Andes mountain people, mostly mixed-race descendants of the Incas who had a flowering civilization in the Andes before the arrival of the Spanish in the early 16th Century.

King of the Incas

Among them, accorded a place of honor on the altar platform with the Pope and other dignitaries, was Luis Philippe Duchisela, 38, an economist who is recognized by many, but not all, of the mountain tribes as the present-day king of the Incas. The Duchisela family claims direct descent from Atahualpa, the Inca king executed in 1533 by the Spanish conqueror Francisco de Pizarro.

Also on the platform was 75-year-old Bishop Leonidas Proano, head of the local Riobamba bishopric here, who was once jailed by a military government of Peru for his outspoken support of the persecuted Indians. Called the “Red Bishop” by the old oligarchy of Ecuador, his controversial work later received the endorsement of the Vatican.

The pontiff urged members of the densely packed audience to cling to their family values, and he gently chided them for one of their most severe problems, alcoholism. But he also called upon Ecuadorean society to correct the harsh elements of Indian life that tend to drive many of them to drink.

John Paul continued by air from Latacunga to the crisply clean mountain city of Cuenca, where he conducted an outdoor Mass, then proceeded to Guayaquil on Ecuador’s Pacific Coast, where he will remain until he flies today to Lima, Peru.

MP, Ecuador, Los Angeles Times