14 - The Catholic church in colonial Spanish America

Summary

THE TRANSPLANTATION OF THE CATHOLIC CHURCH TO THE NEW WORLD

To comprehend fully the establishment and organization of the Catholic church in the Americas in the sixteenth century it is necessary first to consider conditions in the Iberian peninsula at the time. In the later Middle Ages the Iberian kingdoms had undergone a decisive experience: the reconquest of once-Christian territory from the Islamic invader. It is an over-simplification to identify the Reconquista directly with the general model of the crusade, but there was in it the same interplay of worldly enterprise and religious purpose. There was also the idea that the faith could and should be propagated by military means. It is even possible to argue, with Américo Castro, that the Castilian participants in the Reconquista had absorbed some ideas and beliefs – above all, religious messianism – from their Muslim adversaries. Within their territories the rulers of the Hispanic kingdoms had for many centuries practised relative tolerance towards their non-Christian subjects. However, from the early fifteenth century onwards insistence upon assimilation into the body of Christianity grew steadily. Spanish Jews had in 1492 to choose between baptism as Christians or banishment from the realms of Ferdinand and Isabella; the Moors were faced with the same choice in Castile in 1520, and in Aragon in 1526. Spain was by then already far removed from the missionary attitude held in the thirteenth century by such as Ramon Llull; the emerging modern state demanded at least the facade of uniformity of belief. At the same time ideas propounded by Italian jurists since the fourteenth century on the secular justification of the polity, in which state authority had to control every force in society, including the ecclesiastical, increasingly gained acceptance.