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MEXICO MAGICO
TRIUMPHS and TRAGEDY... A history of the Mexican people |
CHAPTER IV, The Forefathers - The Baroque Years (71th part continues...)
By Prof. German Estrada - January 2007 |
The Baroque Age welcomed the secular church. From the time of Isabel, the crown had relied on it to teach obedience, to label dissent a sin. This fitted in nicely with the views of the prelates, imbued equally with the hierarchical ideal, who employed bishops to ensure loyalty to the clerical apparatus. Crown and secular clergy distrusted the regulars, semifeudal orders with ties to the Vatican. Not to be forgotten, the sons of Spanish nobles commonly held the best jobs in the clerical panoply. Along with the nobility, they formed the establishment. From the days of Don Luis de Velasco, therefore, the crown sided with the priest who wanted to secularize the missions. By 1600, the seculars, who had opened their doors to mestizo priests, were on their way to winning the upper hand, breaking the hold of the friars on the Indian communities and compelling them to travel north to baptize heathens on the “rim of Christendom” or to stay in Yucatán where the Franciscans held on until the eighteenth century.
In time, priests largely replaced friars in the Indian pueblos. Tiny hamlets had visiting priests who said mass, but pueblos of any size supported one of their own. After the Alcalde, the priest was the highest authority in the pueblo. What he said carried the weight of the church and crown. Also, the big haciendas had priests who, if they wanted to stay, did mostly the bidding of the hacendado. The size of the mining operation determined the number of priests in the reales de minas. The plight of the orders, nevertheless, merited no tears. In 1611, when Fray García Guerra governed New Spain, the Franciscans alone had 172 monasteries, the Augustinians 90, and the Dominicans 69. Their huge numbers, as well as the religious houses of the rest of the orders, led Pope Paul V to order the closing of every one with fewer than eight monks. No one heeded his command. The “glory years of the orders,” recalled Jerónimo de Mendieta, were between 1524 and 1564. After that, a decline in apostolic ardor set in. Soon, the friars were asking to return home; few bothered to learn an Indian language. Doctrinal differences, jurisdictional disputes, and, undoubtedly, the pursuit of personal gain dampened the crusading spirit, while the secular clergy had undertaken to fatten its pocketbook. Bishops and Archbishops led the way, but parish priests, on occasion, did not lag far behind. Ultimately, priests, monks, and nuns, their numbers swollen out of proportion to the spiritual needs of their flocks, became a burden on New Spain.
Corruption, to the despair of the devout, went beyond money grabbing. Equally blatant was the moral laxity of much of the clergy. Profits from business made possible a hedonistic life-style for much of the clergy. Sundry priests and monks, cloistered supposedly behind walls, lived a double life, more than once with concubines and families or soliciting women in the confessional. They drank hard liquor and gamble ---as Thomas Gage, the English friar testified---and fornicated freely. As in the outside world, Spanish and criollos, whether priests or monks, quarreled over jurisdictional rights. The unmarried daughters of the rich became nuns, “brides of Christ,” but demanded frilly cells where servants and slaves waited on them hand and foot.
That was not the entire sordid picture either. Superstition and fanaticism bred neurotic behavior. Frenetic monks and nuns, praying for salvation, flagellated themselves, beating or starving themselves to death. In Paraíso Occidental, Carlos de Sigüenza y Góngora, himself a priest, set forth the distraught acts of mortification of the nuns of the convent of Jesús María, describing how Sister Francisca de San Lorenzo splattered the floors and walls of a cell with her blood, begged to be whipped, and rewarded handsomely the servant who did it best. Tomasina de San Francisco, the mother superior, bound her body with chains and drove wooden splinters into her feet, and one nun branded her own forehead with the inscription “Slave of the Saintly Sacrament.” Outside of the walls of convent and monastery, the misery and ignorance of the poor rendered them easy prey of quacks, sorcerers, and witch doctors. Nor were Spaniards and criollos, usually the upper class, beyond the appeal of the occult.
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Monastery of San Agustin at Yuriria, Guanajuato, Mexico, founded in 1550
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In the next issue we’ll continue with Chapter V of this fascinating book, The Baroque Years.
Prof. Germán Estrada
E-mail: estradanav@yahoo.com
Source: From the book Triumphs and Tragedy, a History of the Mexican People by his author Ramon Eduardo Ruiz, and with his authorization. (W.W. Norton & Company. New York-London).
Prof. Germán Estrada is the author of the best selling book, México Mágico: Everything You Wanted To Know About... But Nobody Told You..." available in Puerto Vallarta at The Net House, Mail Boxes, Etc., Books, Books as well as directly from his website.
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