The Colonial Period

The Catholic Church in colonial Latin America is often seen as a monolithic institution. In actual fact there were significant divisions within it. The church was divided internally into two basic parts: the secular clergy and the regular clergy. The regular clergy consisted of all priests, friars, and monks who were members of religious orders. Since membership in a religious order called upon the individual to pursue a special rule of life, regula in Latin, these clerics were called regulars. The secular clergy was made up of the clerics and priests involved in the day-to-day affairs of parish life. They lived out "in the world," saeculum in Latin, from which the term secular derives.

The secular clergy in the New World fell under the administrative control of the Iberian monarchs, under the Patronato Real (in Portuguese Padrado Real) as developed during and immediately following the discovery and conquest. Each order of the regular clergy, on the other hand, had its own internal organization and leadership, directly under the pope.

Both seculars and regulars existed in Iberian and indigenous societies, and both relied on the gifts, alms, and taxes of the Iberians to help subsidize their work among the Indians.

EARLY SETTLEMENT

In the first phase of the Spanish and Portuguese settlement of the New World, the regulars played a very important role. In each of the major conquering armies one member of a religious order served as the spiritual director of the expedition; in addition, there were also secular clerics involved in the expeditions. Pope Adrian VI empowered the religious orders to engage in missionary activities with his bull Exponi nobis feciste, known as Omnimoda (1522), which authorized the Franciscans, in particular, to do anything necessary for the conversion of the Indians whenever they were out of the immediate jurisdiction of a bishop (defined as a two-days' ride). Other religious orders eventually received the same or similar powers.

The major effort of conversion fell rather naturally to the religious orders. Structurally they were better suited to the work because they carried with them a sense of institutional direction and oversight, usually arriving in organized groups, normally of twelve, in imitation of the Apostles.

The Iberian powers engaged in an extensive moral debate over the treatment of the natives of the New World. Bartolomé de Las Casas, a Dominican friar, and other outspoken critics, decried the harsh treatment which the conquerors had meted out on the natives. In 1537 Pope Paul III, in his bull Sublimis deus, declared that the natives were fully human and thus were not to be deprived of their freedom or mastery of their possessions. Another camp, manifest in the work of Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda, argued that the natives were naturally inferior to the Europeans, and thus force could be used against them. Legal provisions were adopted to protect the natives, although in actual application most of these failed.

In confronting the huge indigenous population, which spoke dozens of different and mutually unintelligible languages, the missionaries had to adopt certain operational rules, as there were too many converts and too few clergy. For instance, in administering the sacrament of baptism, the clergy could not engage in a long and complex catechumenate before admitting the Indians to Christianity. It was far more practical to baptize the masses and concentrate later on their spiritual preparation. Clearly it was not practical to teach all of the Indians Spanish or Portuguese in order to then instruct them in Christianity. Consequently the clergy learned the native languages and preached and indoctrinated in them; as a consequence there are scores of books, mostly catechisms and other doctrinal works, printed in native American languages. Many missionaries concentrated on amassing as much knowledge about the native cultures as possible and in the process produced such works as the Florentine Codex, a twelve-volume encyclopedia of Aztec life, written in the Aztec language, Nahuatl, by a Franciscan, Friar Bernardino de Sahagún. In Peru one finds the legends of Huarochirí collected by the secular priest Francisco de Ávila. Although modern scholars are thrilled to have this wealth of detail about native culture at the time of contact, one must keep in mind the purpose for which it was compiled: to extirpate all vestiges of the pre-Columbian civilization. The need to learn the native languages also produced scores of other books, grammars, and dictionaries of the New World languages, from Floridian Timucua to Chilean Araucanian, from Aymara of Bolivia to Zapotec of Mexico and Tupi of Brazil.

The religious orders were the most active in the early phases of European settlement. The first organized missionary expedition to Mexico, a group of twelve Franciscans, arrived in 1524, led by Friar Martín de Valencia. It was followed in 1526 by twelve Dominicans led by Friar Tomás Ortiz and in 1533 by seven Augustinians under the guidance of Friar Francisco de la Cruz. By 1559 the missionary corps of New Spain had swelled to some 802 religious in some 160 monasteries.

The first missionary efforts in Brazil were conducted principally by Franciscans who accompanied the early voyages of discovery. The first organized missionary effort to Brazil was an expedition of six Jesuits under the leadership of Manuel da Nóbrega in 1544. By the end of the century there were 128 Jesuits active in Brazil. The secular clergy were active in Brazil from a very early date. The first parishes were erected in 1532, and in 1551 the diocese of Brazil was created. The first convent for nuns was not established until 1665, the second in 1735.

In Peru a similar pattern emerged. The Franciscans were among the first missionaries to arrive, along with Dominicans and Mercedarians, shortly following the Conquest. The Franciscan mission was initially led by Fray Marcos de Niza, who came down from Mexico with a small expedition but apparently returned home upon reaching what is southern Panama. In 1534–1535 the Franciscans established monasteries in Quito and in Los Reyes (modern-day Lima). In 1540 twelve Dominicans, the second expedition organized by the order, arrived under the leadership of Friar Francisco Toscano. The first Mercedarians appeared in Lima in 1535, and by 1540 they had established four monasteries, in Lima, San Miguel de Piura, Cuzco, and Guamanga.

Although active in Mexico, the Augustinians did not participate in the early missions in Peru. The Mercedarians arrived in Mexico in the late sixteenth century. In 1593 they established a college and a novitiate under the direction of the Guatemalan province. It was not until 1619 that the Mercedarians established an independent Mexican province. In the mid-sixteenth century the Jesuits became active throughout Hispanic America.

THE SECULAR CLERGY

The first dioceses were erected in the Caribbean in 1511, including Santo Domingo, Cuba, Concepción, and Puerto Rico. On the mainland the first diocese, called Carola, was founded in 1519 and inspired by the ongoing conquest of the Aztecs. Following the confusion of the Conquest, the diocese was resurrected as Tlaxcala in 1526. The seat of the diocese later moved to the Spanish city of Puebla de los Ángeles, and thus the diocese is known variously as Tlaxcala, Puebla, or Tlaxcala-Puebla. The diocese of Mexico was erected in 1530 with Friar Juan de Zumárraga as first bishop. In South America, the diocese of Cuzco was the first to be erected, in 1537, with Vicente de Valverde, a Dominican and chaplain to Pizarro, as first bishop. Lima was founded in 1541. Both Mexico and Lima became archbishoprics in 1546, along with Santo Domingo.

The church in the Hispanic Americas was divided into three provinces, under the three archdioceses. Each of the three archdioceses had a number of suffragan, or subject, dioceses. The Province of Santo Domingo included all the dioceses erected in the Caribbean. The Province of Mexico included all the dioceses of Mexico, Central America, and the Philippines, until 1595, when Manila was elevated to an archdiocese. Later, in 1743 Guatemala became an archdiocese. The Province of Peru included all of South America. In 1564 Santa Fe de Bogotá became an archdiocese, controlling the northern part of the continent and Panama. In 1609, La Plata (modern-day Sucre, Bolivia) was elevated to an archdiocese.

The Portuguese placed all of their overseas possessions into one ecclesiastical province, centered in Funchal, on the island of Madeira. In 1551 the various territories within Brazil were placed under the administrative control of the newly created bishopric of Salvador da Bahia. In 1676 Bahia was made an archdiocese and Rio de Janeiro and Pernambuco were made suffragan dioceses. The African dioceses of São Tomé and Angola were also placed under the administrative control of the archbishop of Bahia. The following year Maranhão became a diocese, followed in 1719 by Pará, and in 1745 São Paulo and Mariana (Minas Gerais).

The secular clergy was organized under the authority of the local bishop; clerics were assigned to the cathedral, to provide it with ecclesiastical staff and to assist the bishop in his administration of the diocese. These clerics were collectively known as the cathedral chapter, or cabildo eclesiástico, which had a maximum of twenty-seven clerics, including five dignitaries, ten canons, six racioneros, and six medio-racioneros. The dignitaries, dean, archdeacon, chantre (precentor), maestrescuelas (schoolmaster), and treasurer, all received the honorific title don, and theoretically oversaw specific areas of the church's life. The canons and racioneros both participated in the daily round of religious observations. All these functionaries received stipends from the ecclesiastical tax, the tithe. The terms racionero and medio-racionero signify that these clerics received either a full or half ration from the tithe.

The organization of the cathedral chapters in Brazil was very similar to that in Spanish America. Yet in addition to the structure seen in the Hispanic world, the Brazilian church was also divided into prelacies. There were territories within established dioceses, which functioned as proto-dioceses. For example, in 1575 the Prelacy of Rio de Janeiro was created by Pope Gregory XIII. The territory was fully subject to the bishop of Bahia, but had its own local prelate. The prelate, often called a vicar, exercised most of the functions of the bishop for the southern territories of Brazil. At the same time a prelacy was created for the far north, in Pernambuco. Both would become independent dioceses in 1676.

The parish priest might fulfill several obligations. His principal responsibility was the spiritual cure of souls. If he enjoyed an income guaranteed by the crown or by some other patron, he would be the beneficiary of that stipend, or beneficiado, signifying that he held his office for life. If he served as an ecclesiastical judge, whose power emanated from the bishop, the ordinary ecclesiastical judge of the diocese, he would be known as a vicario.

THE REGULAR CLERGY

Just as the secular clergy was divided into dioceses and grouped into provinces, so, too, was the regular clergy divided into provinces. In Mexico, the Franciscans had two. The Province of the Santo Evangelio de México encompassed the central region of the colony, mostly the dioceses of Puebla and Mexico; the Discalced Franciscans administered the Province of San Pedro y San Pablo in the western area, in the dioceses of Michoacán and Guadalajara. The Augustinians likewise had two provinces: in the west was the Province of San Nicolás Tolentino, and in the central zone was the Province of the Santísimo Nombre de Jesús. The Dominicans had a province in the central area, the Province of Santiago. In the south, in the dioceses of Oaxaca and Chiapas, there was another Dominican province, that of San Hipólito. Thus, in each instance the orders established one province in the central area and another in a more distant region. As the church developed, additional provinces were added, especially in Central America.

Likewise in South America the orders divided into provinces. The Dominicans had the Province of San Juan Bautista, serving Peru; the Province of Santa Catalina Mártir for Quito and Popayan; and the Province of San Lorenzo Mártir for Upper Peru and Río de la Plata. The Franciscans had the Province of the Twelve Apostles for Peru, the Province of San Francisco for Quito, the Province of La Santísima Trinidad for Chile, the Province of San Antonio for Upper Peru, and the Province of Santa Fe for Bogotá. Similarly the Mercedarians and Augustinians divided the region into their own provinces.

Several of the religious orders were active in Brazil. The Jesuits and the Franciscans had the longest history in the region, dating from the first decades of Portuguese occupation. Each order had one province to administer their activities in Brazil. In the seventeenth century the Benedictines, Carmelites, and Trinitarians established missions, convents, and monasteries. Other orders had a smaller presence, including the Capuchins, the Discalced Carmelites, and the Oratorians. The Mercedarians and Augustinians arrived only in the eighteenth century.

NONRELIGIOUS ACTIVITIES

In addition to providing for the spiritual needs of the faithful, the church took an active role in education. While the Dominicans had established some grammar schools, as had the Franciscans, education in Ibero-America came to be dominated by the Jesuits. Three universities were founded in the mid-sixteenth century in Santo Domingo, Mexico, Peru. Most dioceses established seminaries for the secular clergy in the seventeenth century, although these relied heavily on the Jesuits.

In Brazil the Jesuits were also at the forefront of higher education. The Jesuit colleges in Bahia and Rio de Janeiro were the first authorized to grant degrees and prepare students for further study at the University of Coimbra, in Portugal. Later in the colonial period other schools were founded by the Jesuits, Oratorians, and local bishops, yet none was ever granted the title of university.

The church also acted as a bank. In general, colonial Hispanic and Portuguese America was cash poor. Many transactions relied on credit. The principal source of institutional credit was the church. Through the institution of pious works, and specifically chantries, Capellanías, the church acquired significant amounts of cash which had to be loaned at interest to generate more income. The church only loaned money when real estate was used as collateral. The loan took the form of a mortgage or lien. The important difference was that the church did not want, or expect, the loan to be paid off or the mortgage amortized. The church needed the constant income to pay for her various ministries and projects. Thus the impositions became nearly perpetual. If an individual lacked cash but still wished to found a capellanía, he could do one of two things: he could give real estate to the church, which would then rent or sell the property to generate the needed income; or he could give part of a piece of property or voluntarily impose a lien on a free and clear property and begin to pay the interest, thereby donating money which he did not actually possess. This latter method provided the colonial economy with a means of capital formation.

The secular clergy and religious orders acquired large tracts of land. By far the leader in this regard was the Society of Jesus (Jesuits). The religious orders depended on the rents and revenues generated by rural and urban property for their long-term sustenance. The only order to eschew this practice was the Franciscans. The Franciscans found that the possession of property was antithetical to their ideal of apostolic poverty. Nevertheless, when taken as a whole, the lands held by the church constituted a significant portion, some estimates have even placed it as high as a third, of the arable agricultural land of the Ibero-American colonies.

INTERNAL STRUCTURE

As the religious orders accepted sons of the local elite, a significant change occurred in their social composition. By the beginning of the seventeenth century, membership in the religious orders was evenly divided among those born in Europe (peninsulars) and those born in the New World (Creoles). As the orders were largely self-governing on the local level, the social division between peninsulars and creoles led to factionalism whenever elections were held. In order to ameliorate the effects of this division, a system in which control would alternate between the two factions was developed. This system, the alternativa, eventually was adopted throughout most of the religious orders and also came to include the European-born Spaniards who had entered the orders in the New World.

In the seventeenth century there were many conflicts between the secular and regular clergy. In 1574 Phillip II of Spain had decreed that all parishes would eventually be subject to the control of the seculars, but the indigenous population was so large and the clerical population still so small, that it was necessary to keep the regulars in the parishes. The process through which parishes passed from the regular to the secular clergy was usually a bitter one and did not end until the 1740s.

The second area of conflict between the seculars and regulars concerned the payment of the tithe. The regular clergy claimed to be exempt from payment, since the church should not rightly tax itself. On the other hand the local bishops felt that as long as the religious orders did not recognize the bishop's supervisory power over their actions in the parishes, the orders were not truly subject to the bishop. Therefore, they had to pay the tithe. This conflict came to a head in the diocese of Puebla, in New Spain, during the episcopacy of don Juan de Palafox y Mendoza (d. 1659), when the Jesuits refused to tithe. Eventually the religious orders accepted both the duty to tithe and to subjugate themselves to the local bishop.

THE CROWN VERSUS THE CLERGY

What had been a series of conflicts between the seculars and the regulars in the seventeenth century turned into an assault by the monarch on ecclesiastical privilege in the eighteenth century. The monarch favored the seculars, since under the patronato real he controlled the seculars far more completely. Consequently the monarch attempted to limit the independent action of the regulars or to place them firmly under the control of local bishops. There were several decrees of the early eighteenth century which placed limits on the construction of new monasteries, moratoria on entrance into the religious orders, and limits on bequests to the orders. This pattern came to a dramatic conclusion in 1767, when the crown expelled the Jesuits from the New World. (They had been expelled from Brazil in 1759–1760.) While the expulsion of the Jesuits responded to many concerns emanating from Europe, it can clearly be seen as part of a general royal attempt to bring the orders under royal authority.

The fourth provincial council of Mexico (1771) and the sixth provincial council of Peru (1772) clearly recognized the monarch's rights and privileges as patron of the church and accorded him all deference and honor, in essence making him the pope for the New World. The Mexican decrees were so excessively favorable to the monarch that they were somewhat of an embarrassment in Madrid and received neither royal nor papal approval.

The pattern of increasing royal control over the church culminated in the early nineteenth century. In 1804 the monarch called in all of the loans, liens, and mortgages extended by the church. In a desire for more capital the crown demanded the amortization of the loans and promised to pay the church the annual interest based on royal bonds, or juros. In 1812, in the wake of the French invasion of Spain and the flush of liberal power, the ecclesiastical fuero, the right of clerics to have their legal cases heard in church courts, was abolished—an act that clearly defined the clergy as just another royal bureaucracy.

See alsoAnticlericalism; Augustinians; Capellanía: Dominicans; Franciscans; Mercedarians.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Mariano Cuevas, Historia de la iglesia en México, 5 vols. (1921–1928).

Lewis Hanke, The Spanish Struggle for Justice in the Conquest of America (1949).

Antonine Tibesar, Franciscan Beginnings in Colonial Peru (1953).

Rubén Vargas Ugarte, Historia de la iglesia en el Perú, vols. 1 and 2 (1953–1959).

Leon Lopetegui and Antonio De Egaña, Historia de la iglesia en la América española, 2 vols. (1965–1966).

Robert Ricard, The Spiritual Conquest of Mexico (1966).

Michael P. Costeloe, Church Wealth in Mexico, 1800–1856 (1967).

Nancy M. Farriss, Crown and Clergy in Colonial Mexico, 1759–1821 (1968).

Eduardo Hoornaert et al., História da igreja no Brasil (1977).

John F. Schwaller, Origins of Church Wealth in Mexico (1985) and Church and Clergy in Sixteenth-Century Mexico (1987).

Arlindo Rubert, Historia de la iglesia en Brasil (1992).

Additional Bibliography

Brading, D. A. Church and State in Bourbon Mexico: The Diocese of Michoacán, 1749–1810. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994.

Brading, D. A. First America: The Spanish Monarchy, Creole Patriots, and the Liberal State, 1492–1867. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991.

Burns, Kathryn. Colonial Habits: Convents and the Spiritual Economy of Cuzco, Peru. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999.

Dean, Carolyn. Inka Bodies and the Body of Christ: Corpus Christi in Colonial Cuzco, Peru. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999.

Díaz, María Elena. The Virgin, the King, and the Royal Slaves of El Cobre: Negotiating Freedom in Colonial Cuba, 1670–1780. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000.

Mills, Kenneth. Idolatry and Its Enemies: Colonial Andean Religion and Extirpation, 1640–1750. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997.

Peñafort, Luisa Zahino. Iglesia y sociedad en México, 1765–1800: Tradición, reforma y reacciones. México: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, 1996.

Schwaller, John F. The Church in Colonial Latin America. Wilmington, DE: Scholarly Resources Books, 2000.

Souza, Laura de Mello e. The Devil and the Land of the Holy Cross: Witchcraft, Slavery, and Popular Religion in Colonial Brazil. Trans. Diane Grosklaus Whitty. Austin: University of Texas Press, Teresa Lozano Long Institute of Latin American Studies, 2003.

Taylor, William B. Magistrates of the Sacred: Priests and Parishioners in Eighteenth-Century Mexico. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1996.

Vainfas, Ronaldo. A heresia dos índios: Catolicismo e rebeldia no Brasil colonial. São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 1995.

                                                 Jeffrey Klaiber