Empires of the Atlantic World: Britain and Spain in America 1492-1830 (44 page)

The Virgin of Copacabana never quite achieved the same transcendence in viceregal Peru, but on the other hand the viceroyalty was to secure the first American saint, a creole visionary called Isabel Flores de Oliva (1584-1617), who, in her struggles with the devil, subjected herself to extraordinary mortifications and was canonized in 1671 as Santa Rosa of Lima.67 The cult of Santa Rosa was to spread throughout Spanish America, of which, on her canonization, she was named patron saint. In a powerful painting in the cathedral of Mexico City she was depicted locked in the devil's muscular embrace (fig. 19).68 Transcending local, and even viceregal, boundaries, this striking image, pitting the spiritual serenity of the saint against the malignity of the devil, epitomizes what was perceived as a cosmic struggle between the forces of light and darkness throughout Spain's dominions in the Indies.

The sacralization of space reflected in the appropriation of saints and images by different localities right across the Spanish Indies was accompanied by the sacralization of time, as their feast-days were celebrated in massive demonstrations of popular devotion. Taking Sundays into account, over 150 days a year in seventeenth-century Peru were given over to festivities in celebration of important events in the life of the church and of the Spanish crown.69 This made a striking contrast with the calendar of Puritan New England, where traditional Christian holy days, like Christmas and Easter, were rigorously suppressed, and only Sundays were kept. Yet the routine of the day's work in Massachusetts could be disrupted at any moment if a minister were moved by the spirit to give a lecture or sermon, and the General Assembly found it necessary in 1639 to ask the clergy to cut down on their preaching. There was a proliferation, too, of special prayer days, of days of fasting and thanksgiving, both in New England and elsewhere. New England is said to have observed 664 fast days and days of thanksgiving for 'providential events' over the course of the seventeenth century. With Sundays included, this meant that some sixty days a year - compared with Peru's 150 - were set aside for religious purposes. In Anglican eyes this was inadequate. In 1681 royal pressure forced the General Council of Massachusetts Bay to repeal its law against the celebration of Christmas, and Governor Andros encouraged the observance not only of the major Christian feast-days but of nearly twenty annual saint's days.70

Removing ritual from time, the Puritans of New England also removed it from space. `Holiness of Places', wrote Cotton Mather, `is ... no more believed among them, than it was in the Days of Clemens Alexandrinus, who says ... Every Place is in truth holy, where we receive the knowledge of God.'7' With no specifically sacrosanct spaces in Puritan `Christiano-graphy', the ministers, unlike the friars in Spanish America, made no effort to adapt places revered as sacred by the Indians to Christian purposes. It was true that their religious buildings - simple, unadorned meeting-houses, not churches - were situated at the centre of settlements, but their position was dictated as much by civil as by religious considerations, and meeting-houses and cemeteries conferred no special sanctity on the ground they occupied.72 If the New England congregations duly developed their own rituals, in the form of public and private prayers, fasting and confessions, and took communion from silver vessels '71 they were engaged in a ritualism whose credentials remained firmly anti-ritualistic.

For those who did not share the sense of participating in an errand into the wilderness, and had no wish to see their settlements transformed into cities on a hill, the Puritans of New England were likely to give the impression of profaning the sacred and sacralizing the profane. But even the luminous churches that began to embellish the countryside of Anglican Virginia from the late seventeenth century were places of civil as well as of religious encounter.74 No special shrines, no local saints, no holy images - the spiritual landscape of British America, outside a few Roman Catholic places of worship in Maryland, was coming to bear the imprint of the Protestant Reformation, just as the spiritual landscape of Spanish America had come to bear the imprint of the Catholic Reformation and CounterReformation, with Spanish local religion and hybrid forms of Indian religion thrown in for good measure.

A primitive Christian church built on Indian foundations or a republic of the saints? The two most radical dreams for the spiritual appropriation of America - one cherished by the first generation of friars in New Spain, the other by the Puritan communities established in New England - were to prove equally difficult of realization. The Indians turned out to be wayward and dissembling; the saints showed an alarming proclivity for backbiting and backsliding. In both instances, the requisite response appeared to lie in the direction of more discipline and control. The friars fought to establish an exclusive control over their erring Indian charges; the Puritan ministers to impose and preserve their authority over recalcitrant congregations. But discipline brought institutionalization, and institutionalization, in turn, was all too prone to quench the fervour of the spirit.

Mendicants and ministers who struggled to preserve the original vision in all its pristine purity had to do so in an environment in which it soon became clear that they held no spiritual monopoly. The authority of the mendicants was to be challenged by a state church that rapidly consolidated the institutional basis of its power, while the New England ministers were to find themselves in competition not only with an increasingly assertive Anglican establishment but also with religious groups claiming to have received their own distinctive revelation. The sacred soil of America lent itself all too well to turf wars.

The mutually reinforcing alliance of throne and altar in Spanish America created a church whose influence pervaded colonial society. Philip II, in his capacity as Vicar of Christ, and using the enormous powers granted him under the Patronato, shaped an institutional church which he sought to conform to the requirements of the Council of Trent while ensuring that it remained strictly subordinate to royal control.71 Authority was firmly placed in the hands of the bishops, all of them chosen by the crown. But the colonial church that was constructed on the twin foundations of the royal Patronato and the Tridentine decrees was to be neither as monolithic nor as subservient to royal control as Philip would have wished.

Just as royal government in Spanish America was made up of different power centres - viceroys, Audiencias, and royal officials with visitorial powers - all of them with competing and overlapping areas of jurisdiction, so the clerical establishment was divided among competing bodies, with their own priorities, interests, and areas of autonomy. A fissure ran down the centre of the colonial church between the secular clergy and the religious orders, which in turn were divided by their own institutional affiliations and traditional rivalries. During the sixteenth century the crown turned primarily to the religious orders to fill the bishoprics, pursuing a policy that reflected the primacy of the regulars in the evangelization of the Indies. Of the 159 bishops who took up their appointments in Spain's American territories between 1504 and 1620, 105 were members of the religious orders (52 of them Dominicans), and 54 were secular clergy76 For the remainder of the seventeenth century the numbers were more evenly balanced, before tilting in favour of the secular clergy in the eighteenth century.77

The acrimonious rivalries between the regular and the secular clergy over episcopal appointments were repeated at ground level across the Indies as the crown, against fierce mendicant opposition, sought to comply with the provisions of the Council of Trent by `secularizing' many of the parishes (doctrinas) run by the friars, replacing them with secular priests. But by the end of the sixteenth century the crown's campaign was stalled, and a large and impressive mendicant establishment - some 3,000 in mid-seventeenth-century New Spain alone, as against some 2,000 secular clergy78 - largely succeeded in holding its own until the mideighteenth century, when the campaign was renewed with more success under Bourbon auspices.79

In fighting their stubborn rearguard action the religious orders could draw on their record of success with their Indian charges, on the support they enjoyed among influential circles in Rome and Madrid, on the goodwill of their devotees among the creole population, and on their own rapidly growing resources as they accumulated property through gifts and endowments. But, in common with other sections of the clerical establishment, they exploited the internal divisions within the structures of royal government to defend their position and promote their cause. The result was a continuous interplay of ecclesiastical and secular disputes in Spain's American territories throughout the colonial period, as religious issues shaped and distorted political alignments.

A classic example of this process occurred in New Spain during the troubled viceroyalty of the Marquis of Gelves. Arriving in Mexico in 1621, Gelves embarked on a programme of root-and-branch reform that polarized colonial society. Sudden and unexpected alliances were formed as church and state were split down the middle. Gelves' decision to support the friars over the secularization of parishes antagonized the Archbishop of Mexico, Juan Perez de la Serna, who had been supportive of his campaign to reduce corruption among royal officials. He now made common cause with his old enemies among the judges of the Audiencia. Finding their interests threatened by the viceroy's moves against corruption, the judges reversed their position and came out in support of control of the parishes by the secular clergy. The religious orders, as was to be expected, ranged themselves behind Gelves, with the exception of the Jesuits, traditionally at loggerheads with the mendicants, and the Carmelites, who had no Indian parishes of their own. The Inquisition, for its part, was on bad terms with the viceroy, and may have conspired against him behind the scenes, although the inquisitors attempted to pacify the menacing crowds by going in procession to the central plaza with crosses uplifted. But passions were running high, and on 15 January 1624, in the famous `tumult' of Mexico City, the mob attacked and looted the viceregal palace, forcing Gelves to flee for his life.80

The overthrow of Gelves, whose recall to Spain was made inevitable by the public humiliation he had suffered, vividly illustrates how even a church-state partnership drawn up on the state's own terms was unable to guarantee the crown's supreme representative immunity from clerical attack. `Thus', observed the renegade English Dominican Thomas Gage of the role played by Archbishop Perez de la Serna in the Gelves affair, `did that proud prelate arrogantly in terms exalt himself against the authority of his prince and ruler ... trusting in the power of his keys, and in the strength of his Church and clergy, which with the rebellion of the meaner sort he resolved to oppose against the power and strength of his magistrate."' A dependent church still possessed considerable room for manoeuvre in a corporate society in which each corporate body and institution enjoyed a semi-autonomous status and its own permitted sphere of action. Yet the church itself rarely spoke with one voice, thanks to the conflicting character and interests of its different constituent parts. While acting, or claiming to act, in pursuance of the highest ideals, these different branches of the clerical establishment were also responding to the more mundane pressures created by the nature of their relationship with the society in which they were embedded.

The consolidation of creole society in the viceroyalties of New Spain and Peru during the later sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries inevitably generated pressures for the `creolization' of the institutions of both church and state. In the early stages of colonization the Iberian peninsula had necessarily provided the bulk of recruits for the regular and secular clergy, but an increasing supply of qualified candidates became available among the children and grandchildren of the colonists as seminaries were founded in the Indies in accordance with the provisions of the Council of Trent. At the same time, Philip II's policy of secularizing parishes increased the availability of benefices for creoles entering holy orders, especially as Indians, and, for the most part, mestizos, were denied ordi- nation.82 Since Spanish-born secular clergy showed little interest in making a career in the Indies at the parish priest level, the lower and middle ranks of the clerical establishment in the Indies came to be occupied largely by creoles. Bishops for the most part continued to be appointed from Spain, but the numbers of native-born bishops began to rise from the reign of Philip III (1598-1621), who appointed 31 of the 38 creoles occupying American sees between 1504 and 1620.83

The secular church, therefore, offered an important extension to the employment possibilities open to creole youth, with the younger sons of the elite securing privileged access to the richer parishes and cathedral benefices. The extraordinary proliferation of religious houses across the continent also opened up new opportunities, this time for daughters as well as sons. Nunneries - a number of them, like Santa Clara in Cuzco, first intended primarily for the illegitimate mestiza daughters of the encomenderos - were conveniently appropriated by wealthy creoles for the accommodation of their female relatives, who brought dowries to the community in which they professed.84 Yet if the houses of the female orders established in town after town of Spanish America were locally founded institutions, designed to meet the needs of creoles and, to a lesser extent, of mestizos, the relationship of the creole community to the majority of the male religious orders was much more problematic.

The mendicants recruited heavily in Castile and Andalusia, and had an organized system for the despatch of their members to the mission field.85 Having pioneered the evangelization of the Indies, the several orders - Franciscans, Dominicans, Augustinians, Mercedarians - showed no enthusiasm for passing the spiritual baton to American-born colleagues, whose training for mission work and standards of religious discipline seemed to them to leave much to be desired.86 As a result, religious houses became an early battleground in the conflict between creoles and peninsulares, or gachupines, which was to become a permanent feature of Spanish American colonial life. Thomas Gage, moving from one religious house to another in Mexico and Guatemala during his ten years in America from 1627 to 1637, was eyewitness to the bad blood which turned the religious houses into warring communities: `they told us plainly that they and true Spaniards born did never agree.'87