Adulteration of cultural heritage

1. Less well-off peoples can never be sufficiently on their guard against this temptation which comes to them from wealthy nations. For these nations all too often set an example of success in a highly technical and culturally developed civilization; they also provide the model for a way of acting that is principally aimed at the conquest of material prosperity. Not that material prosperity of itself precludes the activity of the human spirit. On the contrary, the human spirit, a increasingly free of its bondage to creatures, can be more easily drawn to the worship and contemplation of the Creator. However, modern civilization itself often complicates the approach to God, not for any essential reason, but because it is excessively engrossed in earthly affairs. Developing nations must know how to discriminate among those things that are held out to them; they must be able to assess critically, and eliminate those deceptive goods which would only bring about a lowering of the human ideal, and to accept those values that are sound and beneficial, in order to develop them alongside their own, in accordance with their own genius. (Papal Encyclical, Populorum Progressio, 26 Mar 1967).

2. Any attempt in 1993 to instruct children in the USA in the actual values and assumptions of the Pilgrim settlers of New England and their descendants should be condemned as cultural aggression if the cultural integrity of minority groups is to be respected.