15 Christianity in Latin America from the Sixteenth Century

D.A. Brading

In 1524 a band of twelve barefooted Franciscan friars walked from Veracruz to Mexico City, there to be welcomed by the Conqueror, Hernan Cortes, kneeling in the dust before the assembled nobility, both Spanish and Indian.

The mendicants summoned the children of the native elite to their priories for instruction both in Spanish and in the Christian faith, thereafter employing these boys as their interpreters and chief lieutenants in their campaign to extirpate idolatry and preach the gospel. All pagan images were destroyed, temples razed to the ground, and any obdurate native priest or chief who resisted the imposition of the new religion was whipped, imprisoned or, on occasion, even executed. Within a generation, the Indian population, by then suffering grievously from the onslaught of epidemic diseases introduced from Europe, was resettled in new villages, all laid out on a grid system, invariably dominated by a handsome parish church. Evangelisation was thus accompanied by acculturation, with the native elite serving as both collaborators and intermediaries. If the mendicants acted as the instruments of Spanish dominion, with the conquest justified by its harvest of souls won for the Church, nevertheless they also dedicated their lives to the service of their flock with remarkable austerity and devotion. In particular, Bartolome de las Casas, a Dominican, denounced the cruelties and oppression of the conquerors and settlers and obtained from the Spanish Crown some measure of redress. The spiritual foundation of the Catholic Church in Spanish America rested on the apostolic zeal of the Franciscans and the prophetic thirst for justice of Las Casas. The Papacy had entrusted the governance of the New World to the Kings of Spain and Portugal on condition that they ensured the conversion of its inhabitants to the Christian faith, a task which they in turn entrusted to the mendicant orders.

Throughout the three centuries of colonial rule, the Crown maintained the right to appoint to all ecclesiastical benefices, so that the Church, then supported by its own taxes and courts, constituted a parallel arm of government. Indeed, only the common practice of Catholic liturgy united the diverse races and classes that inhabited Latin America, otherwise separated by language and culture.

By the start of the seventeenth century the leading cities and provincial capitals of the New World were blessed with a plethora of ecclesiastical institutions, all created primarily to serve the needs of the European settler community, with wealthy merchants, landowners and officials vying to endow convents and colleges. The Creole children of the first settlers poured into the ranks of the priesthood or entered nunneries. By 1614 Lima, the capital of the viceroyalty of Peru, housed 1,194 priests, both religious and secular, and 1,245 nuns, which together accounted for nearly a tenth of the city’s population of 25,400. The cathedral, the university, the Jesuit colleges, the mendicant priories and the convents all supported veritable battalions of often contentious clerics, their physical fabric and churches dominating entire blocks of the city. Moreover, as architecture entered a cycle that moved swiftly from the classical simplicity of the Renaissance to the extravagant splendours of the Baroque and Churrigueresque, so churches in Mexico, Peru and Brazil became filled with elaborately carved altars that soared to the vaults, their walls covered with paintings and sculpture, and their liturgy celebrated with the maximum of pomp.

From the outset, therefore, the Catholic Church in America was both a European transplant and a missionary enterprise, catering for the needs of Spanish and Portuguese settlers, and seeking to convert Indian peasants and African slaves. At both levels, in the cities and in the countryside, among the elite and the masses, the clergy taught much the same kind of religion, introducing the cult and ethos of late medieval Catholicism as practised in the Iberian Peninsula.

Moreover, as the process of miscegenation between Europeans, Africans and Indians gathered momentum, yielding a numerous population of mestizos and mulattos, the simple antithesis of Hispanic elite and native masses made way for a variegated society characterised by regional diversity and ethnic complexity. At all levels, however, religious devotion and its public practice occupied a central place in men’s lives. African slaves and free blacks in Brazil organised brotherhoods in direct imitation of their Portuguese masters, building chapels, parading through the streets, each inspired by devotion to their particular image or patron saint. So too, Indian religion came to centre on the veneration of images and the celebration of the liturgy, with feast days distinguished by processions and banquets. In both cases, social identity and local hierarchy within each community found expression in institutions such as confraternities and mayordomias, whose principal purpose was the celebration of religious cult. What requires emphasis here, against the views of sceptical anthropologists, is that the Christian faith sank deep roots within the fertile ground of popular religion in Latin America. The appearance of millennial movements both in Mexico and Brazil attests to the strength of that influence. At the same time, the failure of the mendicants to educate or ordain a native priesthood provoked enduring resentment. In southern Mexico both in 1712 and in 1846 Indian rebellions were led by native prophets who assumed the rank and office of the Catholic priesthood. Nevertheless, the Creole clergy sought to advance local saints and devotions. In Lima, the black Dominican lay brother, Martin de Porras, became the object of popular veneration and was later canonised. In Mexico, the devotion of Our Lady of Guadalupe became the vehicle of sentiment that was as much patriotic as religious, in which both Creoles and Indians joined to venerate an image where the Virgin Mary was depicted as an Indian or mestiza, miraculously imprinted, so it was affirmed, on the cape of a poor Indian, Juan Diego, to whom the Mother of God had appeared, promising protection for the people of Mexico.

The popularity of this cult at all levels of society illustrates the degree to which Tridentine Catholicism succeeded in uniting elite and masses, clergy and people in common devotion.

By the middle years of the eighteenth century the chief ministers of Portugal and Spain had become disenchanted with the preponderant weight of clerical institutions in the sphere of education and culture. In particular, the Jesuit order attracted their hostility. For since their arrival in 1570 the Jesuits had grown steadily in numbers, wealth and influence, opening colleges for the education of the Creole elite in all leading cities, ministering to the urban poor, especially to black slaves and free men, and maintaining an extensive circuit of mission-stations on the frontiers of empire, their multiple operations supported by an evermore prosperous chain of great estates. In both Amazonia and in Paraguay the Jesuits effectively governed thousands of Indian neophytes, with settlers excluded from their domains. Whereas the mendicant orders had fallen into disorder and decay, the Jesuits had preserved their discipline, rigorously expelling all backsliders from their society. Although many cultivated the Creole elite, others still followed the apostolate of St Peter Claver, who had devoted his life to serving slaves at Cartagena brought in from Africa. But Jesuit achievements bred pride, yielded great wealth and influence, and in turn provoked the inordinate jealousy of religious, bishops, royal governors and colonial landlords. At the same time, there occurred within the Catholic world a shift in sentiment, in part attributable to Jansenism, in which the Tridentine emphasis on liturgy and religious life was replaced by a preference for education, good works and simple piety. So too, baroque extravagance was condemned and a frigid neo-classicism introduced by royal fiat. Portugal, under the influence of the Marquis of Pombal, took the lead in expelling the Jesuits, an example followed in 1767 by Charles III of Spain.

Enlightened despotism would brook no rivals to its power. At the same time, the parishes still administered by the mendicants were handed over to the secular clergy. There followed an entire campaign directed against the Church, inspired by an attempt to nullify ecclesiastical jurisdiction, expropriate, where possible, church wealth and curtail the public manifestation of popular religion. By the close of the eighteenth century, as the Enlightenment entered the Hispanic world, anti-clericalism offered a cloak for outright religious scepticism among the educated classes. The very clergy were affected, with hundreds of religious seeking release from their vows. This crisis of belief and devotion obviously centred among the elite: the masses remained loyal to traditional faith, more offended than attracted by the Crown offensive against often cherished practices and cults. Moreover, a gulf had opened between the outlook of the clerical elite and popular religion.

The achievement of independence for the countries of the region in the early nineteenth century plunged the Church in Latin America still further into crisis, since in most countries it suffered a profound loss in authority, wealth and numbers of clergy. In Brazil Emperor Pedro II, a typical liberal of that epoch, continued to assert state control over all clerical appointments, leaving the Church to wither through shortage of funds and curtailment of activity. By 1860 a population of fourteen million people was served by little more than 700 priests. With the advent of the Old Republic in 1889 Church and State were separated and the religious orders temporarily expelled. So too, in Mexico the clergy who had led out the masses in insurgency against the Crown in 1810, their followers marching under the banner of Our Lady of Guadalupe, were subsequently the object of Liberal attack, a campaign which culminated in the 1850s with the separation of Church and State, the expropriation of all Church property and the expulsion of the religious orders. Elsewhere, the religious orders were affected by the loss of their Spanish members and the continuing decline in vocations.

In the Andean countries, particularly in Peru and Bolivia, the absence of a numerous middle class led to a severe decline in the number of clergy, both secular and religious, so that the Church retained but a shadow of its past predominance. By the middle years of the nineteenth century the educated elite who directed public affairs in Latin America viewed Catholicism as a remnant of the past, still dangerous, however, by reason of its influence among the masses. Education was secularised and was soon dominated by the doctrines of Positivism, with science accepted as the gospel of progress. The State thus became actively hostile to the pretensions of the Church to act or to pronounce on matters of public or social concern; its only tolerable sphere of action was private devotion and corporate worship.

Despite, or possibly because of, this Liberal assault, the Church in Latin America experienced a marked revival in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. By this period, however, national characteristics had become pronounced, so that the process of revival exhibited a different momentum and scope from country to country. Throughout the New World, however, the Papacy now intervened to secure control over all clerical appointments, thus acquiring a power it had never exercised during the colonial period. An epoch of Romanisation now ensued. The Holy See established a college in Rome for the education of the clerical elite of Latin America, thereafter frequently promoting these favoured priests to dominant positions in the national hierarchies. The Papacy also acted to create new dioceses, urging bishops to open seminaries and to divide existing parishes into smaller units. In Brazil the number of dioceses thus increased from a mere twelve in 1889 to no less than fifty-eight in 1920. At the same time, the Papacy mobilised the religious orders, so that over the years several thousand missionaries arrived in Latin America, training the local clergy in seminaries, opening colleges and schools, and entering the parochial ministry. This reHance on European clergy, when combined with the new-found authority of Rome, aroused Liberal charges that the Church in Latin America was no longer a national body, but rather an instrument of papal intervention. However, it must be remembered that in the same period Latin America received millions of immigrants from Europe, so that much of the efforts of the imported clergy went to serve the needs of this new population. This was especiaUy the case in Argentina, Uruguay and southern Brazil. Moreover, in countries such as Peru and Mexico, which did not receive a mass immigration, the urban middle class was reinforced by European merchants and artisans, who often strengthened the constituency of the Church. Romanisation thus should be viewed within the context of the reincorporation of Latin America in the North Atlantic economy, a process characterised by massive transference of population, capital and trade goods.

Emphasis on external influences should not lead us to neglect the internal forces which also assisted in the revival of the Church. In several countries, notably in Mexico, Columbia and north-eastern Brazil, the Liberal assault and erosion of elite adherence drove the Church back into the countryside and into provincial towns where the priesthood, now often recruited from the sons of prosperous farmers and shopkeepers, still wielded influence as leaders of their communities. At times, new bishoprics were established in such towns and their seminaries became the centre of local cultural life. In Brazil a series of messianic movements erupted, culminating in the 1890s in the rebellion at Canudos led by Antonio the Counsellor, a wandering mystagogue, who defied the might of the new republic in the name of traditional beliefs. In Mexico during the 1920s the western peasantry rose in rebellion against the anti-clerical measures of the revolutionary regime ofPresident Calles, assuming the name of Cristeros. In both countries the enduring influence of popular Catholicism drove the rural masses to challenge the Liberal ideology of the urban political elite.

By the 1930s the intellectual climate of Latin America had changed sufficiently to prompt a revival in the cultural appeal of Catholicism, a shift in part attributable to the influence of German idealism on the modernist movement at the turn of the century. In Brazil Jackson de Figueiredo and in Mexico Jose Vasconcelos exemplified the new-found attraction of the Church for intellectuals. Moreover, the colleges and universities established by the Jesuits and other orders now began to bear fruit in the emergence of a class of educated laity and clergy anxious to controvert the dominance of Liberalism. It has to be confessed that many Catholics of this period flirted with Fascism, participating in the Integralist movement in Brazil and in the movement of the Sinarquistas in Mexico. With the defeat of the Axis, however, political action entered a democratic phase, and the 1940s witnessed the emergence of Christian Democratic parties in Chile and Venezuela, both of which succeeded in winning elections and forming governments. But the mounting problems caused by economic modernisation in Latin America, a process of rapid growth accompanied by mass migration to the cities and by rapid population increase, ushered in a phase of revolutionary idealism and savage military reprisals that offered a stark challenge to the Christian conscience of all socially concerned Catholics. The seizure of power by Fidel Castro in Cuba strengthened yet further the attraction of Marxism as the one ideology that united a critical analysis of capitalism to an advocacy of revolutionary action. If young militants from the universities were prepared to lay down their lives in this cause, what role did the Catholic clergy and committed laymen have to play in such an agitated continent? In Nicaragua priests joined the Sandinista rebellion against the Somoza dictatorship and thereafter participated in the revolutionary government, defining the achievement of social justice as an essentially Christian goal. By contrast, the growing number of evangelical Protestant communities, essentially the creation of fundamentalist missionaries sent in from the United States, tended to embrace right-wing doctrines of a free enterprise variety. Their appeal derived from their emphasis on lay action and self-help as against the clerical dominance of the traditional Church.

The Church in contemporary Latin America offers a bewilderingly complex picture to any observer, with different strata of its history still present in many countries. The folk Catholicism of Indian communities still survives in the Andean highlands or in Mesoamerica virtually untouched since the colonial period, with veneration of images still generating customary consolation. At the same time, the reliance on foreign missionaries, now as much North American as European, continues, with no less than 60 per cent of priests in Peru recruited from overseas. Throughout Latin America, however, the Church is confronted with the challenge of rapid, mass urbanisation, a process which threatens to bring to a summary end its influence among the masses. In reaction the clergy have organised the laity into ‘base communities’, groups of devout Catholics engaged in mutual help and social welfare, recruited from the poorer strata of the urban populace. Whether these groups will become a permanent vehicle of social organisation only time will tell. Whatever the result, the Church, both at the level of its national hierarchies and on the part of individual priests, has increasingly expressed a public voice and concern on matters of social justice. The theology of liberation has adopted a prophetic voice, placing the issue of social justice at the very centre of the Christian message. The poor are defined as Christ’s own flock, blessed in their deprivation. Proponents of these doctrines differ as to the morality of armed insurrection against tyranny, with most theologians advocates of peaceful solutions. At the same time, the hierarchy in countries such as Brazil and Chile, subject to military rule, have emerged as spokesmen of human rights and political liberty. Once more, it is the pressure of circumstances that has driven the Church into intervention in political affairs. By contrast, in Mexico the hierarchy preserves a discreet silence, seeking to maintain its institutional life without challenge to the authority of the State. In sum, with Latin America caught in the maelstrom of massive, all-pervasive economic and social change, the Catholic Church seeks desperately to preserve its hard-won position, adapting the message of the gospel to modem conditions. As it began, so it now continues, characterised (at its best) by a Franciscan zeal for the popular apostolate and a prophetic plea for social justice reminiscent of Las Casas.

15 Christianity in Latin America from the Sixteenth Century

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