The work and ministries of the Roman Catholic friars who gave their lives, both as martyrs for the cause of their church and in years of hard and often thankless labor, are the inspiration and basis for Missionary Practices and Spanish Steel, a theological and practical narrative that seeks to remember and understand their accomplishments in Christian mission. Missionary and theologian Andrew L. Toth investigates the roots of Christian mission as it developed into the field of Christian missiology in the chaotic, terrible, and incredibly diverse three-hundred-year Spanish conquest of North America indigenous nations. Through his research Toth shows that, in the great majority of the cases studied, the friars accomplished their goals to transform these native cultures into their own Spanish culture to account them as Roman Catholic Christians. This study us more than just a history of the friars' missionary movement. Toth not only explores how Spanish Catholic missionaries approached their work, but also asks to what extent their approach conformed to a particular theological perspective. Toth rounds out his argument by speculating on what the friars can teach us about the role of missionaries today. Comprehensive and thought-provoking, Missionary Practices and Spanish Steel offers a new perspective on the current missionary movement by looking through the lens of the past.

MISSIONARY PRACTICES and SPANISH STEEL

The Evolution of Apostolic Mission in the Context of New Spain ConquestsBy ANDREW L. TOTH

iUniverse, Inc.

Copyright © 2012 Andrew L. Toth
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4759-4743-4

Contents

Preface................................................................................................ixChapter I. Introduction................................................................................1Chapter II. The Preconquest European Context...........................................................13Chapter III. The Council of Trent......................................................................29Chapter IV. First Epoch: Discovery—Caribbean/Florida.............................................38Chapter V. Second Epoch: The High Central Valleys......................................................80Chapter VI. Third Epoch: The Yucatan Region............................................................119Chapter VII. Fourth Epoch: The Gran Chichimeca.........................................................136Chapter VIII. Fifth Epoch: The Nueva Vizcaya...........................................................160Chapter IX. Sixth Epoch: The Nuevo Mexico..............................................................187Chapter X. Seventh Epoch: The Rio Grande Valley........................................................216Chapter XI. Eighth Epoch: The Upper California.........................................................241Chapter XII. The Evolution of Tridentine Missiology Through the Epochs of Conquest.....................261Chapter XIII. The Missionary Legacy: Approaching Indigenous North Americans Today......................279About the Author.......................................................................................289Bibliography...........................................................................................291Notes..................................................................................................301

Chapter One

Introduction

The sweat-soaked missionary struggled both to maintain his balance and to keep up with Rutillio, his Native American guide. The humid air brought no relief on the steep, rocky, and muddy jungle trail. Rutillio had pastored the small congregation for several years in the Pame village that was their objective for that day. Spanish was the common language of these two apostles of the Christian faith, though Rutillio also spoke Tenek, Aztec, and even a little English. Neither of them spoke Pame or Xi'iuy, as the North American indigenous people of the village call themselves.

Cresting another hill, they paused for the missionary to catch his breath and slow down his heart rate. They noticed an opening to a cave close by and the missionary got up to explore it. Rutillio nearly panicked and demanded the missionary stay away from the sacred cave. With concern for the possibility of snakes and large cave spiders, the missionary retreated, asking why the sudden alarm. Rutillio explained that in this area the people believed spirits lived in the underground and could come out through that cave. Some believed babies lived when born because good spirits came from the cave and inhabited the newborn baby giving them spirit and life. Other times, bad spirits came out from the same cave and the baby only lived a short while or died at birth. This belief explained why the mortality rate of the newborn babies was over 50% in this village—there were just too many bad spirits coming out from this cave.

As they moved along, the missionary attempted to grasp the implications of this Mexican pastor's explanation. What were the historical roots of this strange mixture of animistic and Christian beliefs? After three hours of walking mountain trails from the nearest road, they arrived at a beautiful, high valley with the Pame village scattered over one side of it. People had lived there for many hundreds of years, and it was as if time had stood still. The rugged mountains of the Sierra Madre Occidentales were considered unfit for human habitation by the Spanish—certainly not worth fighting for them. This left the culture of the indigenous Pame people relatively undisturbed as the centuries went by.

The homes there were mud and stick walls with thatched roofs; three to seven one-room houses together defined a family complex. There were several natural springs that supplied water for the village and their animals—all drinking from the same crude cistern. There were no roads, no electricity, almost no outside interference with the daily lives and routines of these subsistence farmers. They ate what they grew or starved if there was not enough—and no one from the outside seemed to care one way or another. After all, they were just Indios. For more than 500 years, the gospel of Jesus Christ had been in the land. Why then was this village so unaffected spiritually, without the normal lifting of moral and living standards that usually accompanies the entrance of the gospel message into a new culture?

The missionary went to the village Juez, the judge or leader, to introduce himself and was informed that, "In this village we are all Catholic." He was also informed that no other religions were permitted there. There were no church buildings in the valley of any kind. Worship consisted of processions to sacred places where men and women would drink themselves into a stupor while sacrificing small animals or birds. Once per year a Roman Catholic priest would try to come up the trail, if it was passable, to celebrate the Eucharist, baptize living babies for that year, collect tithes and offerings to cover the costs of his trip, and then leave. There was a cross which was also considered a sacred place set up on a hill in the distance overlooking the valley. For daily worship, a number of houses had a type of altar set up in a corner, often with a picture of Mary and baby Jesus or the popular Spanish Virgin of Guadalupe—usually with a garlic wreath as an adornment and a candle to burn on special occasions. When the missionary asked, "Who does this represent?" The typical answer was usually: God.

Most of life's milestones were still held in the traditional Pame ways. Marriages were done without the benefit of church, clergy, or even a celebration. Burials were a cause for drunken excesses and ancient Pame customs. In fact, the burial place was the most sacred place of all and the only one strictly maintained by the villagers. Every year on Day of the Dead the whole village turned out to clean away rubbish, restore the rock walls, and spend a day or two in feasting and drunkenness. It was from here that the departed spirits left the bodies and fled out over the eastern sea and then returned to the ground until new life called them forth from the caves again. The missionary marveled at just what it meant for these indigenous villagers to be Catholic, or what they really understood of the Christian faith as expressed in the biblical concepts of sin, propitiation, redemption, forgiveness, being in Christ, and filled with the Spirit of the Living God.

The Roman Catholic Church states that these indigenous people in the Mexican rural villages are Catholic. The village leaders themselves in many of these nearly forgotten rural towns also say that they are Catholic. But aside from a few borrowed Christian symbols here and there, and perhaps a visit from some outsider that represents being Roman Catholic to the rest of the world, one would look in vain for any semblance of Christianity in any of its multicultural manifestations. The rituals, the world views, and most of the Pame symbols were and are a continuation of ancient indigenous religious practices. These practices included animal sacrifices, drunkenness, and many other practices well outside the bounds of any definition of biblical morality.

Pondering the situation, it can be concluded, as the Friar Bernardino de Sahagún did over 490 years ago: "Whatever evangelism was done here did not work out the way it was intended." A goal of this book is to understand why. What theological teachings or practical applications of Christian principles resulted in these North American indigenous people believing as their animistic forefathers did, while claiming to be ardent Roman Catholics to the exclusion of all other outside religious expressions?

The Spanish Mission and the friars that penetrated indigenous lands undertaking the spiritual conquest for their king and God have inspired countless biographies and histories. The reports of clerics and friars that came to the New World would indicate a mighty movement toward Latin Catholicism unprecedented in history. Juan Zumárraga, writing just seven years after the first missionaries arrived in Mexico, declared that the Franciscan friars had baptized more than one and a half million indigenous converts. The warrior and conqueror, Hernán Cortés, himself a Brother of Penance Tertiary, a third Order of Franciscans, can be presented as a Christian with apostolic zeal, insisting upon religious conformity both in his own ranks and among the masses of new converts, long before any religious professionals appeared on the scene of the conquest of Mexico.

Many great stories emerged from the conquest—of valor, of controversy, and at times, of utter confusion. Following the stories came numerous interpretations of what had taken place, or defenses and justifications of policies, all of which have continued to circulate since 1492. The Black Legend contends that the Spanish murdered, maimed, tortured, and in general, made life miserable for the indigenous Americans through cruelty, exploitation, religious intolerance, enslavement, and sexual abuse. This continues to be thought of as fact by many, even among some in higher education, though the legend could be equally applied to many of the other European colonists at some point in their conquests of the American lands.

Most people have some idea of what a Spanish Catholic mission settlement was. They may even understand who the indigenous people of the missions were and probably have some impression of the alleged mistreatment of the mission coverts to Roman Catholicism. There are stereotypes of the friars that would have them appear to us as saintly; some indeed have been canonized by the Roman Catholic Church. Yet there are a number of murals on subway walls and public buildings in Mexico City that present the friars as demonic taskmasters. Neither view does justice to the facts of life common to most of the early Spanish settlements and missions. Today the polarization of perceptions has made it very difficult to discern just what really happened so long ago. The confusion goes all the way back to Cortéz and his letters to the Crown of Spain stating the accomplishments of his armies and defending his courses of action.

The letters and reports coming from explorers and colonists ignited a passion in the hearts of the people on the Iberian Peninsula. The stories of these encounters, as told from a European perspective, raged throughout Europe. They were at once liberating for the archaic, medieval, and decaying European upper crust of society and, at the same time, depressing for many of the European Christians to discover the world was still so populated by pagans and infidels.

Many clerics felt the end of times prophetically predicted in the Scriptures was already upon them. Muslims still held Africa; they had just recently taken Constantinople and were systematically taking central Europe as far north as Hungary. The Holy Roman Empire stood alone, the great Eastern Orthodox Church having already been overrun by Roman Catholic and then later by Muslim armies. In the midst of this corporate, besieged state of mind, Columbus verified rumors that there were indeed heavily populated lands to the west. Populations that needed to have the gospel preached to them. Columbus thought he had found some islands off India and that a new water route to the Spice Islands had been found. After four voyages to the Gulf of Mexico and stumbling on South and Central America, Columbus died still believing he had found India by circumnavigation of the globe.

However, later it was discovered that Columbus had actually stumbled upon a huge obstacle in the Western route to Asia. Not only were there two whole unexplored continents that now belonged to Queen Isabella, but they were full of pagans who were so culturally different from anything the Europeans had seen to date as to raise the question regarding whether they were completely human. Some reports described the indigenous people of the Caribbean as docile children. In another report they were described in the worst imaginable way as savage cannibals preying upon each other. Either way they were seen by the early explorers as pagans in great need of the one true Holy Roman Catholic Church, and obviously someone had to make them into civilized, tax-paying citizens of the Spanish Empire. Only mendicant friars could do that.

New Spain was the name that was used for all the Spanish claims on mainland North America until much later when the sheer size of what they had discovered became known. This name will continue to be used for consistency and as a reminder of who owned the Americas for the next several hundred years. As the Spanish continued to expand to fill its claims of territory and to Christianize the tribes and nations, a responsibility bestowed upon them by the Pope Alexander VI in 1501, each geographic area presented physical challenges not experienced before. Each indigenous American group presented a new way of life, a new language, and new ways to scratch out basic survival needs from the often barren, inhospitable land. Too often they were hostile toward the Spanish due to tales of slavery raids that preceded the friar's incursion, or due to the horrible, usually fatal sicknesses that too often appeared just before or after first contact with the Spanish. Most indigenous people wanted nothing to do with the European strangers. The city of Matehuala was so named for the often repeated word used by the natives upon their first encounters with the Spanish. Later it was found that the word meant: Do not come. But the Spanish had come to stay.

Friars were to expunge and replace the indigenous religions with a new faith. The new, Southern European faith was defined by the Council of Trent in a marathon sixteenth century response to the reformation movements within the European Roman Catholic Church. Trent gave Roman Catholic leaders a fixed doctrinal position and required that the Latin Church traditions be locked into a rigid, unchangeable, hierarchal structure centered in Rome. This was a response to those reformation movements that were questioning the Roman church's legitimacy and challenging the Southern Church's spiritual authority and political structure.

A second mandate of the friars during the conquest was to make Spanish citizens out of the indigenous groups by teaching them gainful employment and Spanish cultural mores, and then to incorporate them into the imperial economy. Eventually employment meant agriculture, ranching, and limited cottage industry, all of which the friar was to be proficient in and able to teach his flock. Often the survival of the mission and its converts depended upon their self-sufficiency. An evaluation of the degree of success of this missionary enterprise must take into consideration the degree of success of both of these primary objectives.

The King of Spain was the civil head of government, but he was also the Emperor of the Holy Roman Catholic Empire. The Council of Trent defined in clear, concise terms what being a Roman Catholic meant; the religious police of the Inquisition enforced Roman Catholic doctrinal purity. The civil law that came down from the King, through the Viceroy and his magistrates, and eventually to the priests and friars, was also very clearly defined for each stage of the conquest of New Spain. To fulfill his mission the friar morally and legally had to accomplish both, i.e. make these indigenous Americans Roman Catholic Christians and make them culturally Spanish citizens of the Empire.

The methodologies of the friars and their missiological framework need to be examined, and how those missiological principles evolved as they approached the herculean tasks set before them. Missionary work was always constrained within the greater framework of the colonists, civil government, and a military presence, as well as the mission organization's own assigned purposes. It quickly becomes obvious that New Spain was not a monolithic imperial system applying its imperial policies equally throughout the empire. Local interpersonal and interregional dynamics shaped the course of law application, if indeed the imperial laws were ever implemented at all. Very often, the friars were the civil government as they attempted to contact, subjugate, convert, and disciple the indigenous people. When the indigenous people turned hostile, the friars also became the military presence seeking to defend themselves and their converts from the pagan hordes. When the Spanish presence was sufficiently great to warrant its own civil authorities and/or military presence in strength, then the civil authority was removed from the friars. That was often accomplished with a bit of animosity from both sides, but the missionary was usually seen as a tool to accomplish specific purposes for the Crown and the Church, and then to be sent somewhere else to repeat the process.

It is difficult, though necessary, to limit the scope of this study to something less than the whole existence and ever-changing geography of New Spain. The conquests of the multitude of indigenous nations, and then the colonization to permanently hold the newly conquered territory, took more than 300 years and were still in progress when Mexico threw off the shackles of colonial government, winning their independence from Spain in 1829. It is in many ways precisely these centuries long processes of conquest and colonization that are in and of themselves the causes of much confusion when one attempts historical understanding of the religious foundations of the conquest of New Spain.

This venture will take on the form of a comparative survey of the conquest period, focusing on the ministries of the friars as they attempted to fulfill their purposes as missionaries and cultural change agents in the various indigenous contexts. In the process of survey the evolution or progressive developments in methodology in the fundamental missionary work of the friars will be noted, as well as their strategies in coping with the perceived extremes in the value systems of the indigenous cultures. This study will focus on the entrance of the friars into their particular Epoch of conquest and how their ministries were established, that is the formation of, or application of, their methodologies.

(Continues...)

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