The History of the Catholic Church in Latin America

From Conquest to Revolution and Beyond

John Frederick Schwaller

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9780814783603
• Topic: Théologie et religion
• Subtopic: Dénominations chrétiennes

One cannot understand Latin America without understanding the history of the Catholic Church in the region. Catholicism has been predominant in Latin America and it has played a definitive role in its development. It helped to spur the conquest of the New World with its emphasis on missions to the indigenous peoples, controlled many aspects of the colonial economy, and played key roles in the struggles for Independence. The History of the Catholic Church in Latin America offers a concise yet far-reaching synthesis of this institution's role from the earliest contact between the Spanish and native tribes until the modern day, the first such historical overview available in English.

John Frederick Schwaller looks broadly at the forces which formed the Church in Latin America and which caused it to develop in the unique manner in which it did. While the Church is often characterized as monolithic, the author carefully showcases its constituent parts—often in tension with one another—as well as its economic function and its role in the political conflicts within the Latin America republics.

Organized in a chronological manner, the volume traces the changing dynamics within the Church as it moved from the period of the Reformation up through twentieth century arguments over Liberation Theology, offering a solid framework to approaching the massive literature on the Catholic Church in Latin America. Through his accessible prose, Schwaller offers a set of guideposts to lead the reader through this complex and fascinating history.

1

Religious Origins of Catholicism in Latin America

Thousands of pilgrims gather in the mammoth sanctuary of Santiago Campostela, in the northwestern corner of Spain, to celebrate the life of Saint James the Greater, brother of the apostle Saint John. A huge censer (a large pierced metal ball in which incense is burned) called the botafumeiro, swings on a chain from the highest point in the transept, making long passages over the heads of the pilgrims. The faithful wear cockle shells on their hats and sleeves, the symbol of the saint. The pilgrimage route to Santiago is one of the most traveled medieval trails of Europe. The focus of this devotion, Saint James, is credited with being the first Christian missionary to the region, arriving within a decade of the death of Christ.

A richly dressed Aztec noble stands atop a tall pyramid. He has a feathered headdress, and shell rattles on his ankle. He dances while playing a flute. He is surrounded by priests dressed in black. Their robes and hair are matted with dried blood. The nobleman performs a brief ritual, pricking his ear lobe and placing a drop of blood on a piece of paper. The paper is then burned in a large censer along with copal, incense made from pine resin. The multitudes break into song, dancing in the courtyard of the temple.

Reconquest

The story of the Catholic Church in Latin America, begins with the Church as a religious and political entity as it developed in Spain and Portugal in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. There is no doubt that Christianity has deep roots in the Iberian world. The missionaries who would carry the banner of Christ to the Americas came from an environment in which Christianity had thrived, suffered, and recovered again and again over fifteen hundred years. Yet for nearly all of its history on the Iberian Peninsula, Christianity never enjoyed exclusive status. Even in early Roman times, significant Jewish populations existed there. Within the religiously pluralistic society of the peninsula, Christianity gained a strong hold in Iberia. Its predominance as a state religion was confirmed and augmented when the Roman Empire adopted the faith officially in 312 CE. This position of dominance was threatened in the eighth century when Muslims from North Africa overran the peninsula. In 711 CE, as part of the initial Muslim expansion following the death of Mohammed, Muslim forces crossed the Straits of Gibraltar and occupied the Iberian Peninsula. Within less than a decade of the invasion, the Muslims had defeated all of the existing states lying south of the two northern mountain ranges, the Pyrenees and the Cantabrian mountains. The nearly eight-hundred-year period in which the Christians of the north engaged in an on-again, off-again war against the Muslims is called the Reconquista or Reconquest.

The Reconquest did not involve continual warfare throughout those eight centuries, but rather several sporadic eras of conflict. Moreover, the initial conquest by the Muslims hardly swept away all traces of Christianity. For the first few centuries under Muslim rule, Christians and Jews remained free to practice their religion. In reality, Christians constituted the majority in most areas. While tensions could and did flare up, in general the Christians lived peaceably under Muslim domination. Indeed, the taxes they paid due to their status as “People of the Book” under Muslim rule were frequently less than they had paid to their older Christian overlords.

From the tenth through the thirteenth centuries, the Reconquest faced a changing landscape. On the Muslim side African influence increased. Several Muslim fundamentalist movements originating in sub-Saharan and North Africa spilled over into the Iberian Peninsula. The most pronounced of these were advanced by the Almoravids, who preached an extreme form of Islam. Their name later became synonymous with the term “Muslim” in Spain, and is the origin of the term “Moor.” By the middle phases, the Reconquest also took on an important philosophical character as a holy war. As the Muslims became more extreme in their embrace of Islam, so the Christians also emphasized the crusade-like quality of the conflict. Finally the papacy came to recognize the struggle against the Iberian Muslims as part and parcel of a greater crusade against Muslims throughout the Mediterranean world, extending spiritual benefits to those who participated in the warfare.

The Christians of the north developed several institutions and mechanisms to assist both in the actual warfare and in the incorporation of the newly conquered areas. In both the warfare and the resettlement the Church played an important role. In order to assist with military operations against the Muslims, the Christian kings of the north of the Iberian Peninsula enlisted the aid of warriors from France and other areas of Northern Europe. As early as the 1060s the pope offered dispensations to warriors who fought the Muslims on the Iberian Peninsula. The Christian lords of the north would invite foreign nobles to join in the Reconquest, offering them temporal control over the lands they gained, providing they pledged fealty to the king for whom they fought. Important counties, such as Portugal, were carved out of the Muslim-held territories by these noblemen.

The Christian realms were a patchwork of contesting authorities. Local nobles enjoyed many privileges, including the right to collect local duties and taxes, control the local judiciary, and make appointments to Church offices. Some of these privileges came as a result of participation in the Reconquest, others had simply been accumulated from time immemorial. In the later Middle Ages the local nobles exercised a great deal of authority and frequently opposed the designs of the monarchs to wrest that authority from them.

Cities and towns acquired certain privileges from the monarch and other nobles that allowed them to exercise a degree of independence. These rights and privileges were known as fueros (forais in Portuguese). Some cities held the privilege of always being called to parliaments, known in Spanish and Portuguese as Cortes. Other privileges included the right to hold markets, to collect certain local taxes and duties, and especially to have an independent judiciary to hear cases involving local laws and customs. Additionally, during the Reconquest, the Christian monarchs often granted additional rights and privileges to towns that organized units to fight in the wars. In order to stabilize the frontier between Christian- and Muslim-controlled territories, the monarchs also often granted special privileges to residents of border towns both to encourage settlement and also in recognition of their more tenuous link to the monarch because of distance and turmoil. Nevertheless, by the late fifteenth century, the monarchs of Spain and Portugal viewed the fueros/forais as troublesome and as limitations on regal authority.

Ecclesiastical institutions also enjoyed a certain independence from the crown. They generally benefited from the fuero eclesiástico—fora eclesiastico in Portuguese—or clerical immunity. This fuero specifically granted members of the clergy immunity from royal courts. If a priest was accused of a civil crime, or of many petty criminal offenses, he had the privilege of having the suit heard in an ecclesiastical, rather than a royal or local, court. This privilege was extended to all clerics, priests and nuns, friars and monks, as well as to members of some of the military orders, and many members of ecclesiastical households, such as retainers of bishops and the like. It also extended to the lands owned or controlled by these individuals and institutions, such that the crown could neither exercise justice upon them physically nor collect taxes from them.

Alfonso X of Castile (1221–84), known as El Sabio, “the Wise,” initiated an early attempt to curb the power of the nobles and cities. A very devout Christian, his Cantigas de Santa María (Songs to the Virgin Mary) represent a high point in early Castilian letters. His legal code, the Siete Partidas (the Seven Books or Parts) represents a significant attempt to regain power to the crown at the expense of the cities, towns, nobles, and the Church. Alfonso based his code on several basic principles. Central to these was the notion that the core function of the king was judge. All other functions emanated from that. Alfonso also posited that royal law superseded local law, and he envisioned a uniform royal law that could be applied throughout the realm in spite of local laws and jurisdictions. Alfonso’s successors would extend this principle so that the decision of any local court could be appealed to the royal courts, effectively challenging the Church and local nobles.

In the twelfth century two Christian orders, the Knights Templar and the Hospitalers of Saint John, arrived in Spain. These pious gentlemen had organized themselves into military-religious orders to seek to regain the Holy Land and to assist in the crusade against the Muslims. They provided an important example for the rest of Europe. For centuries warriors had felt moral conflict about killing vis-à-vis the teachings of the Church. The establishment of military-religious orders granted the blessings of the Church to the knight for his calling. The mission of the warrior was linked to that of the monk in that both participated in a unified effort, waging war, and ministering at the same time.

On the Iberian Peninsula, these orders spawned several imitators. The most famous of these were the military-religious orders of Calatrava, Alcántara, and Santiago in Spain, and the Order of Christ and Order of Aviz in Portugal. Although the Order of Calatrava was the oldest, Santiago became the most important in Castile. The military-religious Order of Santiago was founded with a dual purpose. As with the other Iberian orders, participation in the Reconquest was an important vocation. Yet the other vocation of the Order of Santiago was to provide hospitality to travelers and hospitals to the sick. Eventually the order came to protect pilgrims who traveled through northern Spain en route to the shrine of Saint James at Santiago Campostela.

The military-religious orders manifested a perfect combination of ministries to assist in the Reconquest: a military branch to defeat the Muslims on the field of battle, and a religious branch to provide moral, physical, and spiritual assistance. In recognition of their service to the crown, they received grants of lands from which they would receive taxes and over which they exercised temporal authority. Large sections of the middle of the Iberian Peninsula fell under the control of the military religious orders when Alfonso VIII of Castile granted huge tracts to protect the approaches to Toledo from the south, west, and east. The orders then chose officers to whom they entrusted the oversight of the territory. The territories were called encomiendas¹ and the officers who administered them were called comendadores or encomenderos. These officers received a stipend for their efforts and served at the pleasure of the order. The ultimate rights over the administration of these encomiendas remained vested in the order. The orders were also called upon to populate the region, founding towns and villages to better hold and pacify the local area. The orders received certain judicial and fiscal privileges in these territories: the right to collect local taxes and duties and the right to control the judiciary.

The Church participated in the Reconquest in other ways. The famous missionary orders of the Middle Ages were created to address the demands of converting the heathens, bringing heretics back into the Catholic faith, and renewing the faith of the community at large. One of these, the Dominicans, was founded by a Spaniard, Domingo de Guzmán, who would later be canonized as Saint Dominic, Santo Domingo. He came to believe that the proper method of bringing people to the faith, be they heathen, heretic, or already Christian, was through preaching. He developed a Preaching Order of mendicant brothers whose mission was preaching the Gospel. The friars of the Dominican Order took an active role in the reestablishment of the Catholic faith in the newly conquered regions of the Iberian Peninsula.

Since the time of Constantine in the early fourth century, Christianity had developed in a world in which the limits of political authority and the limits of ecclesiastical authority merged. The world of Christendom was politically and religiously homogeneous. Those who differed in faith also followed a different political system. Consequently, while some non-Christians physically were living within the state, they could not be part of the political state because their religious faith differed. They were excluded from holding office or taking a role in public affairs. From the eleventh through the thirteenth centuries, the atmosphere of religious tolerance that had marked the earlier centuries disappeared. Ultimately, the Reconquest became a crusade against the Muslims in which the Jews were also targeted, as the Christians began to develop a new ideology of “One Faith, One Law, One King.” This stance was far more marked in the Spanish kingdoms than in Portugal. Portugal achieved its modern borders by the middle of the thirteenth century. Although it continued to assist in the ongoing struggle against the Muslims, the kingdom was far more concerned about Castile and León than about a Muslim threat. Moreover, Portugal increasingly looked to England and France as allies, as it feared the growing power of Castile and Leon.

At the end of the fifteenth century, Queen Isabel of Castile and King Fernando of Aragón found themselves as the inheritors of a complicated system of authority, which had developed in the Christian Kingdoms of Spain. At this time what is now modern Spain consisted of two independent kingdoms, León and Aragón. Castile, in turn, contained yet other kingdoms and jurisdictions such as León, Asturias, and Navarre. In the late 1460s, Isabel’s brother, Enrique, declared her to be his heir. At approximately the same time she accepted a marriage to Fernando, the heir of the Aragonese throne. Isabel ascended to the combined Castilian and Leonese throne through a civil war. The civil war pitted her supporters against those of her half-sister, who was backed by the Portuguese crown. The war split the Castilian nobility and was also a war between Aragon and Portugal, each backing a different sister.

Isabel survived the civil war. Yet because of the demands of the Recon-quest, her predecessors had given much power away to the other estates: towns, the nobility, and the Church. Following the civil war there were other uprisings of the Spanish nobility against royal authority. Fernando and Isabel recognized the political and ideological value of conducting a war against a foreign enemy in order to galvanize sentiment at home. The Muslim kingdom of Granada provided them with a foreign enemy on soil, which the Spaniards claimed was their own, unjustly taken in the Muslim invasion of 711.

The monarchs were successful in conquering Granada and in increasing their own control over their domains. At just the same moment that they were engaged in the final assaults on Granada, Christopher Columbus offered them the opportunity to continue the efforts at conquest beyond the bounds of Europe. As we know, he eventually gained their support. For their part, Fernando and Isabel, for having led the Reconquest of Granada, were awarded the title of the “Catholic kings” by Pope Alexander VI.

While the reign of Isabel and Fernando marked the end of the Recon-quest, it was also a period of reform within the Church, both in the ecclesiastical hierarchy and in the religious orders. The efforts to reform the Church had three main targets. One was the concern over orthodoxy and the threat posed by the presence of unconverted Muslims and Jews in Christian Spain. The second was the ecclesiastical hierarchy of bishops and archbishops who had gained considerable power during the Reconquest and whose offices were frequently points of contention between the monarchs and the papacy. Third, the religious orders of Spain had needed reform for years.

The religious character of Spain at the time of the Granada war had become less tolerant of the Jews and Muslims. In the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries Northern European states had expelled their Jewish populations, many of whom took refuge in Spain and Portugal, among other longtime Jewish residents. Jews were openly welcomed by the Iberian monarchs in the Middle Ages because of the skills they brought with them, particularly in the areas of finance and administration. As the Reconquest entered its final stages, however, religious tolerance turned against the Jews, who often were among the wealthiest subjects of the realm. The final success of the Reconquest also brought the expulsion not just of the Muslims but also of the Jews from the Spain and Portugal. Jews who converted to Christianity were known as conversos; Muslims who converted to Christianity were known as moriscos. While the act of conversion protected these individuals from the immediate threat of expulsion, jealousies subsequently occurred since many conversos were both wealthy and powerful. Furthermore, the popular opinion was that some conversos had betrayed their conversion to Christianity and secretly continued to practice Judaism. The moriscos faced all of the same issues of discrimination that were faced by the conversos, with status issues added to the mix, because moriscos who remained in Spain tended to be of a lower economic status than the conversos who remained.

As part of the larger program to extend Christendom within the Christian kingdoms, in 1478 the monarchs requested that the pope grant them permission to establish the Holy Office of the Inquisition under royal control. The Inquisition was historically an institution attached to the office of the local bishop as the ordinary of the diocese.² When the pope agreed with the request, what had been an essentially ecclesiastical institution was taken over by the state. Strictly speaking the Inquisition did not have jurisdiction over nonbelievers, merely over those who had professed the Christian faith and been baptized. In Portugal the Inquisition was not formally established until 1536.

The presence of so many Christians who had recently converted from Islam and Judaism caused concerns about the orthodoxy of their faith; for decades the conversos and moriscos would be viewed as second-class Christians. During this same period, all of the elite institutions and ecclesiastical councils increasingly demanded that aspirants for office and preference demonstrate purity of lineage, limpieza de sangre: that is, to demonstrate that they were not descended from Muslims, Jews, or heretics within four generations.

Purity of blood statutes had the effect of creating a caste system in the Iberian Peninsula. Because such statutes came to rule in the Church, universities, most religious orders, the military-religious orders, and most government positions, conversos and moriscos were prohibited from a wide range of occupations and important offices. The crown could, and did, provide some relief from these statutes by waiving the purity of blood statutes in some specific instances. Nevertheless, the statutes developed clearly defined categories based upon lineage and ethnic origin.

The other area of concern regarding orthodoxy came from within the Christian community. In Spain and in the rest of Europe many thinkers began to question the power of the Catholic Church and some of its practices. Two major reforms emerged in Spain, centering on the relationship of the Church to the crown and on the internal organization of the religious orders. Many believed that the clergy in particular needed reform. As a result of long-term traditions and privileges granted during the Reconquest, the Church hierarchy of bishops, archbishops, and cathedral chapters remained well beyond the control of the monarchs. While bishops and archbishops exercised dominant control in their territories, they were subject to scrutiny only from the papacy. Traditionally these princes of the Church were elected by the clergy of the diocese, or archdiocese, and certainly by the members of the cathedral chapter, those high-ranking clerics assigned to ceremonial and administrative posts in the principle church of the diocese.³ Yet the papacy held the ultimate right to approve the election, or appointment, and to confer on the candidate all of the ecclesiastical authority of the office. In the fifteenth century many of the main dioceses suffered from internal divisions, which made the selection of a bishop nearly impossible. In light of this, the crown would also put forward candidates, and the papacy would exercise its right to make the final approval. Yet the papacy used this situation to place its own favorites in the leading cathedrals of Spain.

When disputes occurred in the selection of new bishops, Isabel and Fernando pressed the papacy to recognize what the monarchs felt were their innate powers. Embodied in the Siete Partidas, the legal code of Alfonso X, was the principle that the monarch could med...