By the middle of the eighteenth century the Catholic Church was by far the single most powerful institution in New Spain, rivaling even the royal Government.
John Schwaller, 1985195
In 1493, Pope Alexander VI responded to Columbus’s first voyage to the New World by issuing papal bulls that awarded Spain and Portugal sovereignty over the Americas. The bulls drew an imaginary line through the poles that ran one hundred leagues west of the Azores and the Cape Verde islands. Spain was granted the newly discovered lands west of this line. These bulls provided the religious justification for the Spanish Conquest and control of the New World. The Spanish jurist Juan de Solorzano y Pereyra succinctly stated this rationale in his Politica Indiana, published in 1648. He claimed that the Indians:
Because they are so barbarous. . . needed somebody who, by assuming the duties of governing,
Defending and teaching them, would reduce them to a human, civil, social and political life, so
That they should acquire the capacity to receive the Faith and the Christian religion.196
Since the Vatican did not have the resources to spread the Gospel in the New World, it transferred unprecedented control, known as the patronato real (royal patronage), over the Church to the Spanish monarchs as incentive for them to Christianize their colonies. In 1501, to compensate for the financial outlay required by missionary work in the New World, Pope Alexander VI allowed the Spanish monarchs to collect tithes in the New World. As a further incentive to evangelization, Spanish monarchs received the right to establish diocesan boundaries, administer church finances, nominate bishops, and review (or censor) all communications between the pope and the Church in Spanish America. Given the number of bishoprics, the Council of the Indies made the actual selection of bishops. While this transfer of power later had immense significance, at the dawn of the sixteenth century it did not seem as significant since little was known of the extent and wealth of the New World.197
In 1524, twelve Franciscan friars arrived in Veracruz and walked barefoot in patched robes to Mexico City. Upon their arrival, Cortes knelt in the dust and kissed their hands and the hems of their robes, to the amazement of nearby Indians. These friars began what has been called “the spiritual conquest of Mexico.” By 1559, approximately 800 friars were working among a native population of 2.65 million. The mendicant orders—the Franciscans, the Dominicans, and the Augustinians— dedicated themselves to missionary work. Their devotion to preaching and teaching, and their flexibility, mobility, superior education, and intense zeal made them ideal for this task. Missionaries willingly endured harsh climate, new foods, disease, and even martyrdom. As historian Alan Knight remarked, “Like Castilian society as a whole, the Church was a crusading institution, newly invigorated by the heady triumph over Moorish Granada. . .”198
Clergymen vied with encomenderos for influence over Indians and protected them against extortion by merchants and abuse by corregidores. Priests supported the continued separation of the Indian and Spanish populations, believing they could create a new society under Church, not secular, control. The friars not only sought to uproot indigenous religious belief but to preserve the pristine, non-materialistic, and somewhat idealized Indian community. The desire to separate Indians from Spaniards reflected the clergy’s concern that otherwise Spanish abuse would decimate Mexico’s Indian population, as had already occurred in the Caribbean.199
Missionaries generally learned indigenous languages rather than preaching to their flock through an interpreter. They often formed the only communication channel between colonial authorities and the indigenous population. Indians were aware that conversion to Christianity allowed them to appeal to both the friars and the Crown for protection. Despite clerical efforts to isolate Indians physically and spiritually from the rest of colonial society, labor demands and the marketing of Indian products inexorably linked the two groups.200
The vast area of Spanish America, which stretched from Argentina to California, presented missionaries with a monumental challenge. The area’s extreme linguistic diversity compounded the difficulty of their task. Missionary priests rejected imposing Spanish on Indians. They argued it would be better to convert infidels by learning indigenous languages and translating Christian precepts into these languages. Many languages they encountered lacked the vocabulary to express central concepts of Christianity such as “soul” and “devil.” To facilitate their ministry, the Franciscans, who took the lead in learning native languages, published vocabularies and catechisms in such Indian languages as Tarascan, Nahuatl, Mazahua, and Otomi. The 1571 Spanish—Nahuatl/Nahuatl—Spanish dictionary prepared by Franciscan Fray Alonso de Molina remains a prime reference for classical Nahuatl.201
In numerical terms, the early friars’ efforts at converting Indians to Christianity proved fabulously successful. The Franciscan Fray Toribio de Benavente commented on early conversion efforts, “I believe that after this land was won, which was in 1521, up to the time I am writing this, which is in the year 1536, more than four million souls have been baptized.” Another missionary, Pedro de Gante, boasted that in one day, with the aid of only one companion, he had baptized 14,000 Indians. The takeover of entire high cultures, such as the Tarascan, facilitated such mass conversion. In addition, the poverty and simplicity of the first friars impressed an indigenous population accustomed to deferring to an ascetic priesthood.202
Many of those baptized had only a rudimentary understanding of Christianity. Due to the lack of personnel and problems with translation, instruction dealt only with the fundamental tenants of Christianity. In one instance, Jesuits in northern Mexico used the example of a dammed soul surrounded by rings of fire and serpents to explain the concept of hell. Indians responded with smiles, noting that in such a place surely no one would suffer from cold nights or go hungry thanks to the snakes, which they considered a delicacy.203
Churchmen soon became aware that initial, euphoric conversions had been neither as pervasive nor as profound as the early missionaries had hoped. Persuading Indians to reject their old gods after they accepted the Christian one presented an enduring problem. Rather than simply switching religions, Indians frequently added or reworked Christian concepts and rituals according to their existing belief system. In 1530, Benavente commented that Indians concealed idols “at the foot of the crosses or beneath the stones of the altar steps, pretending that they were venerating the cross, whereas they were actually adoring the demon.”204 He also noted that the Indians’ acceptance of the image of Christ merely resulted in the Indians having 101 idols, where a hundred had existed before. In 1581, the Dominican Diego Duran wrote, “They believed in God and at the same time practised the old ways and ritual of the devil.”205
Despite the clergy’s persistent efforts to eradicate them, pagan beliefs endured throughout the colonial period. Even though the Maya were baptized and thus officially converted, they continued old family rituals in the house and agricultural rituals in the fields. In Yucatan, even the wealthiest and most influential colonists acknowledged the superior supernatural powers of the Maya belief system and sought their help when in need to exorcise a bewitched cow, to remove a curse from a field, or to cure an ailment or infertility.206
In 1700, two Dominican fathers surprised the majority of the population of Francisco Cajonos, an Oaxacan village, as they sacrificed a deer and birds and said prayers in Zapotec. Two members of their own community, Juan Bautista and Jacinto de los Angeles, had denounced them to the priests. The next day the two were savagely beaten and executed by their enraged fellow townspeople. In reprisal, the Spanish hanged fifteen people from the town.207
Even though the early friars plunged into mission work, from a theological point of view the Indians’ nature remained unclear. Some conquistadores claimed the Indians were animals. This had more than theological implications. If indeed Indians were deemed to be animals, the clergy would be in no position to check the conquistadores’ abuse of Indians and their property. As a result, the clergy waged a concerted effort to persuade the pope to declare unequivocally the Indians’ humanity. As part of this effort, in about 1535, Julian Garces, the bishop of Tlaxcala, lauded the Indians’ intelligence and willingness to receive the faith and declared they were not “turbulent or ungovernable but reverent, shy and obedient to their teachers.”208
Pope Paul III responded to these efforts by declaring the Indians’ humanity in a 1537 bull entitled Sublimis Deus, which established that “Indians are truly men and that they are not only capable of understanding the Catholic faith but, according to our information, they desire exceedingly to receive it.” The bull also stated, “The said Indians and all other people who may later be discovered by Christians, are by no means to be deprived of their liberty or the possession of their property, even though they be outside the faith of Jesus Christ.”209
Within half a century, the early missionaries’ zeal began to wane. In 1561, King Felipe II wrote:
We have been informed that monasteries are built very close together, because the religious prefer to establish themselves in the rich green lands near the city of Mexico, leaving stretches of twenty to thirty leagues untended, because the religious avoid the rough, poor, and hot regions.210
During the early sixteenth century, there existed a genuine, though unequal, alliance between missionaries and Indians. Priests defended Indian rights and served as intermediaries between village authority and civil authority at higher levels. As time passed, this alliance weakened. In 1555, the First Provincial Council of Mexico prohibited the ordination of Indians. In 1571, the Church removed Indians from the authority of the Inquisition after deeming them mentally incapable of understanding the faith.211
Missionaries generally treated Indians in a paternalistic and sometimes abusive manner. The bishop of Michoacan, Vasco de Quiroga, commented that the missionaries:
Have inflicted and are now inflicting many mistreatments upon the Indians, with great haughtiness and cruelty, for when the Indians do not obey them, they insult and strike them, tear out their hair, have them stripped and cruelly flogged, and then throw them into prison in chains and cruel irons, a thing most pitiable to hear about and much more pitiable to see.212
Gradually the Church lost interest in native languages and became less optimistic about its ability to alter the indigenous world view. The missionaries’ initial optimism gave way to viewing Indians as idle, barbarous, and backsliding in religious matters. Priests increasingly complained that rural assignments exiled them from the civil world they had known as students. Many priests would only settle in parishes where numerous non-Indians lived. Such priests made infrequent visits to remote villages to administer sacraments. This trend became more pronounced near the end of the colonial period. In 1791, seventy-five priests lived in the city of Queretaro and only thirteen lived in the rest of the corregimiento, despite its having twice the population of the city. Historian Colin MacLachlan commented, “The colonial church, increasingly institutionalized, became an enclave and sanctuary of European culture amid a no longer pliable mass of Indians who had drawn a line beyond which they would not go.”213
The role of the Church evolved from initial conversion of Indians to ministering to long-established communities. Villagers depended on priests for spiritual consolation, for certain leadership and social welfare functions, and to mediate between community and state. These priests depended on their flock for sustenance and legitimacy.214
The Bourbons were not anti-clerical in the sense of questioning the validity of Catholicism. However, they did seek to curtail the power of the Church, which they considered politically offensive, economically retrograde, and culturally stultifying. As a result, priests’ legal privileges— the ecclesiastical Juero—were reduced, and church courts were prohibited from inflicting corporal punishment. Popular religion came under increased official scrutiny, because it was associated with drink, degeneracy, sloth, profligacy, and backwardness. Many clerics shared this official view.215
World History
