Febrero, 2008. No. 3ISSN-1870-7289

Derechos Reservados UAEH

Missionary Approaches to Ethnicity

Adriana Gómez Aiza

Doctora en Antropología

Universidad Autónoma del Estado de HidalgoÁrea Académica de Historia y Antropología

Instituto de Ciencias Sociales y Humanidades

When I thought of the heavy rains and looked at the gaping roof I understood how strong and immutable must be the purpose which had kept him in that inhospitable abode. Was he our malignant enemy, or was he our guardian angel?Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, The Hound of the Baskervilles. 1929

Indigenous reality is a central topic when dealing with definitions of Mexican

identity. It allows one to disclose a narrative paradox that arises from historical

interpretations that make indigenous reality an articulating principle and symbol

of national identity by unveiling the logical incoherence and conflicts between

competing discourses. Two discursive trends are here at stake, a nationalist

secular narrative that ratifies a ‘half-caste’ as the very symbol of Mexicanhood,

and a universalist sacred narrative that claims to have rescued Jesus’ fraternal

message of human unity and preference for the poor. While the Mestizo lay

imaginary recognises the cultural traits of indigenous reality but does not admit

its religious expressions, Catholic social doctrine accepts indigenous religiosity

Este es un fragmento de mi tesis doctoral Deconstructing Nationalist Representations of Mexican Identity: a Struggle for the Appropriation of Indigenous Symbols in post-Revolutionary and Catholic Historical Narratives of the Conquest, con modificaciones menores para el presente número temático de la revista Cinteotl.

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but isolates it from its cultural basis. Regardless their different character, these

competing narratives overlap as they assert the constitutive indigenous nature

of the country’s national idiosyncrasy.

In this sense, I argue that the idea of mestizaje acts as a rhetoric promise

of ethno-political unity, very much alike Jesus’ morality and his proposal to build

a kingdom with no ethno-cultural frontiers. The religious aspects that shape the

construction of Mexican identity can be treated as a parallel process to the

recovery of Jesus’ morality, laying bear the fact that a discourse attempting to

separate from a discursive matrix –i.e. a lay narrative from a sacred discourse–

not always achieves its goal and most times some remnants kept repressed

within it. This pinpoints at theological instances that have allowed the Catholic

Social Doctrine to raise as a ‘modern’ sacred discourse through the correction

of religious and pontifical texts modifying Catholic social practice, and by which

the Church asserts its concern in social affairs regardless its far-reaching

gradual exclusion from the public arena.

A key achievement of this correction was the discursive convergence of

religious crusades and the discovery of America that allowed the expansion of

the Christian faith and the consolidation of the Catholic Church in the colonial

period. This involved the royal compromise of preventing the adulteration of

Catholicism through an ideological closure which, in turn, represented Spanish

colonial domain as a materialisation of Christendom. The New World was the

territory in which the project of God could be better expressed as a ‘totality’: an

inexorable force ruling the fate of all beings and giving a chance to humankind

of achieving perfection. Further, the colonial capital New Spain embodied a

ritual atmosphere of indoctrination through which friars thought of Indianhood

and Europeanhood. The reinforcement of Catholicism after the religious schism

of Protestantism would be inconceivable if one underrates this contextualisation

of identity.

Religion is the agency implicated in raising the question of identity and self-

consciousness to the foreground of modern thought, as Farrell’s commentary

on the incipient medieval conception of innerness points out:

The metaphysicians of that period were interested in what God’s thinking and willing could be like, and there were religious pressures toward intensifying the innerness of the self, since God’s presence was somehow more immediate in

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that interior space, and since confession and other practices gave it a depth needing exploration (Farrell, 1996:1).

Bringing about feelings of guilt and regret, Christians elaborate ideas of self-

judgement and introspective subjectivity that allow a transferral of the knowing

subject to the place of the subject to be known. This is why the historisation of

natives is connected with the growing of Christian consciousness and the

unfolding of the modern condition, and explains why missionary labour has

been qualified as ethnographic, receiving both positive and negative judgment.

The experience of historical otherness, or the negation of the other as an

inherently historical being whose identity evolves with independence of Western

demands, reinforce the Christian platform of action and justify the ‘unconscious’

quality of colonial and imperial systems. The subordination of an objectified

Indian –recognised and negated at once– offers an opportunity of rehistoricising

Catholicism and restoring its value as the only true religion (cf. Villoro, 1979;

Dreyfus and Rabinow, 1982; Visker, 1995). Under the Christendom’s shadow,

the colonial enterprise is more than a military triumph justifying forced religious

indoctrination, the obligation to learn a new language, and the transformation of

indigenous ways of production and extraction of wealth. As it disguises the

Church’s partaking in a violent colonial enterprise, the exegesis of America as

the Christendom also erases the signs of symbolic appropriation of indigenous

knowledge that is axiomatic to both Spanish colonialism and Eurocentric

subjectivity.

The narrative of religious superiority that exonerates the zeal of the

Moorish crusade allows a warlike religious signification of the conquest of the

New World. Similarly, the colonial undertaking that situates a Latinised country

like Spain as a cultural bastion of Christianity vis-à-vis emerging European

nationalisms enables the Roman Apostolic tradition to disguise successfully its

historical coercion over other Christian churches. On that account, I argue that

Spanish colonialism yields a reversal of Catholic discourse against its own

Christian foundations: the transit from Christianity to Catholicism implies a

negation of Judeo-Christian sacrality equivalent to the repression of Greek

philosophy and Roman paganism in Christian thought. Unlike the doctrinal

subversion of Greek and Roman sacred elements enclosed in the construction

of Christianity, the subversive structure that the repression of Judaism infringes

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upon Christianity is rarely acknowledged; therefore, the need of assessing the

impact of such a structure upon Catholicism and discussing the transformation

of Jesus’ morals into an authoritarian model of church order, i.e. the ‘reversal’ of

Christian origins as a process bound to the definition of papal authority.

Christian theology is examined as it affects contemporary debates on

ethnicity, a central topic of Catholic social thought. The main interest is to focus

on the dogmatic construction of ethnic subjects –i.e. Indian– so as to call into

mind the traces of partial indoctrination that provide a reference to deconstruct

the internal logic of Catholic discourse and estimate the discursive possibilities

of missionary contestation of the Vatican’s orthodoxy.

Jesus image: constructing unity out of difference

The rupture Jesus establishes with his own people and religion is the condition

of existence of Christianity. The upshot of such a rupture is unique in that

Christians reclaim Jesus as property and origin of a Christian-self: regardless of

his being a Jew, Jesus is the symbol of Christianity, the Saviour. Christians

cannot subsist outside the common ground that Jesus signifies. By fixing its

own origin in a Jewish, the Christian tradition gets entangled in a doctrinal

antinomy: Christians themselves transform the Jew-self into the counterpart that

grounds the very ethos of a Christian-self, a ‘reversion’ of Christian origins,

which, so reverted are constituted as an antagonistic pole. Such an antinomy is

embedded in the messianic character of Judeo-Christianity, of which the aporia

is the oblivion of Jesus’ original-Jewish message.

Related to this oblivion, there is a question of a ‘betrayal’ of the Christian

message considering that after the 4th century, theological contentions show a

discordance between the moral message of the Sermon on the Mount in the

New Testament, and the metaphysical missive of the Nicene Creed resembling

Greek philosophy (Hatch and Harnack in Hall, 1995:240). Such discordance

implies various things. First, the Sermon morality is supposed to be the very

‘essence’ of Christianity, and so, any other diverging interpretation is deluding.

As a consequence, theological debates of the first seven ecumenical councils

are but a corruption of the Christian truth. That such a claim is philosophically

questionable does not prevent Christians from basing theological and historical

grounding in Jesus. Second, Jesus represents assumptions that have little to do

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with a transliteration of his preaching, but that most Catholics take for granted.

The resurrection of the death and the immortality of the soul, for example, imply

a conceptualisation of the human body and its divine status –i.e. the notion of

Incarnation– that requires erudition hardly available to a carpenter’s son who

made himself a prophet.

The idea of ‘betrayal’ seems more convincing considering that Jesus’

teachings do not oppose Jewish beliefs but, on the contrary, are based on the

prophetic work of Judaism. Due to the corruption of the original Christian

message, the Catholic Church can restore an archetypal insight of such a

message and confine the orientation of its truth (i.e. the Gospels) so as to purify

Catholicism from Judaic inflections that may remain in the symbolism of Jesus.

The relevance of Judaism is, in this respect, its paradigmatic value for the

analysis of religious debates. Religious contests against Catholic dogmas may

be seen as progressive to the initial confrontation of Christianity vis-à-vis

Judaism. Christianity was born as a quasi-schismatic move, except that those

who believed Jesus was Christ were not Jews but Romans. Jesus’ presumed

split with the Jewish tradition offers a possibility to rearticulate Judaism as a

Christian metaphor of evilness, i.e. Jews as the murderers of the Messiah. As a

biblical reference of necessary and permanent enemy, Christian discourse blots

out the unsafe Jew-self contained in the ‘Judeo-Christian’ ontological equation,

obliterating the contents of Jesus’ teachings that are in accord with Judaism.

Jesus’ interpretation of Hebraic Law appears as a quite down-to-earth

social message reflecting a politically-conscious disagreement with the ethno-

religious territorialism of the people of Israel. The Sermon on the Mount

conceives no political frontier in God’s lands, making the Jewish God available

to all regardless of regionalism or socio-economic status. Jesus’ mercy to the

poor and the exploited, qualify him as the Messiah. Remarkably, the liberating

potential of Jesus’ social project resides in questioning the social system that

supports Judaic chauvinism: whereas Christians regard Jesus as he who

invalidates Jews’ orthodoxy, Romans convict him for facilitating Christians’

emancipation. Jesus’ crucifixion not only makes Jewish and Roman intolerance

visible, but also the messianic twist on the Christian part. The latter is evident in

most church documents, particularly after the Nicene Creed, which makes of

Jesus’ faith (i.e. his wisdom) and Jesus’ history (i.e. his actions) one and the

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same thing.1 Jesus’ words are praised without submitting ecclesiastic agency to

scrutiny, and thus ground ministerial legitimacy and Romanist superiority –i.e.

Jesus’ calling Peter the rock to build his church (Matt, 16:18). The nodal point in

this formulation of apostolic legacy is the definition of church as a supra-

territorial jurisdiction that admits no limit –racial, linguistic, geo-political– and

which, as a temporal institution, is depository of an effectively world-wide

political empire.

The ratification of Latin canon and liturgy is the most illustrative: “in so far

as the empire was Roman as well as Catholic it came, ultimately, to be

concerned only with the ‘Latin’ West” (Noel, 1994:10-11). Christianity is in turn

Latinised.2 As far as the Christian notion of communion of faith incorporates the

particular features of Latin culture, ethno-religious unification is auxiliary to the

leading goal of the imperial Western churches: to consolidate the structure of

authority and the system of discipline. Both are related with military training and

the procedures of the Roman Senate, as well as transmitted into the internal

organisation of the Catholic Church when it becomes central to the imperial

network. This logic is too close to the ethnocentric signification that the word

‘patria’ acquires in a non-religious milieu (cf. Noel, 1994:4; Romano, 1994:22).

A Latin doctrine preached in Latin language justifies apostolic monolithic spirit

and its despotic assistance in keeping both religious unity and civic order (cf.

Hall, 1995).

However, the more the authority of Rome grows vital for the functioning

of a uniform all-embracing Christendom, the more the notions of sovereignty

and nationhood develop at the expense of Jesus’ missive against religious

territorialism. This is the core action of the Catholic betrayal of Jesus’ message

through which, I argue, his anti-ethnocentric proposal is displaced and Christian

origins are reversed. To understand why the moral message that is the very

foundation of Christianity leads to a direct confrontation between ecclesiastic

groups, one has to ponder the Church’s insistence on unity at all costs as

indicative of an intrinsic inertia to self-division. The formulation of an apostolic

1 My interpretation of Jesus as a symbol of Christianity owns to the studies of Vermes, 1994; Hall, 1991; Davis, 1990; Noel, 1994; Berryman, 1987; and Derrida, 1995. On the political context surrounding Jesus’ life see compilation by Bammel and Moule, 1984. Claims are mine unless otherwise stated.2 See Romano, 1994 on the implications of employing the term ‘Latin’ as a historical or cultural reference of identity, and the association of Catholicism and Latinism within the context of religious confrontation with Protestant countries.

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model of church order is a process bound to the definition of papal authority, the

hardening of institutional confrontation and the emergence of ethnocentric

thought, within which the church favours the ends over the means to avoid a

greater evil of false spiritual teaching. Bishops’ coercion exposes a symbolic

space against which the insurrectionary potential of Jesus’ message can be

remitted. Christianity inherits this faculty via the figure of the Messiah, which

captures within itself the possibility to denounce social injustice and challenge

religious despotism. The bearing of the Christian programme of social justice is,

in due course, better grasped if one admits the messianic promise that is

“present already inchoatively in Jesus” (Berryman, 1987:59-61).

It is my contention that the expression of such a latent force is confluent

to the monastic attempts to restore Jesus’ original message through missionary

activity. The idea of a religious mission implies various issues. First, the monks’

renouncing of a secluded search for self-transcendence and seeking fraternal

fulfilment through communitarianism. Second, missionary attempt to rescue and

implement the moral message of Jesus in a context in which ecclesiastical

authority is challenged and non-monastic orders are harshly criticised. Third,

vows of poverty and celibacy transform mendicant orders into authoritative and

exemplary figures of moral response. Fourth, moral virtue adjusts doctrine to

stricter discipline, emphasising divine goodness in all spheres of social life. The

claim is categorical: man’s salvation is the church’s ultimate objective for it

possesses the means of salvation, hence it is also its exclusive duty to account

for aberrant spiritual matters.

In due course, a firm civil-ecclesiastical ruling over Christian and non-

Christian people not only grounds ethnocentric narratives of religious superiority

that situate ‘Latin’ Spain as a main voice of Catholicism, but it also increases

the Gregorian Reform’s potential of rescuing the original Rule of Faith launched

in monasteries. In this operation, Catholic discourse reverses its own Christian

basis. This becomes evident as corporate monasticism transfers the European

dominant type of church in Mesoamerica and as the monastic involvement in

secular life concretises their demands for reformation. The New World provides

a field to implement Jesus’ morality away from the risk of heresy and schism,

while colonial territories transform into a fertile terrain to develop mechanisms of

authoritarian religious government no longer attainable in Europe. By the same

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token, the new Christendom offers a symbolic array of sacred disciplinary forms

that reinforce Latin Catholicism vis-à-vis the Protestant schism. The doctrine of

social justice that Jesus preached spreads among Indians, accomplishing a

more efficient recovery of the Christian origins.

Nonetheless, this success raises doubts about missionary duty and the

methods of indoctrination: liberating religious discourses of emblematic figures

like Dominican friar Bartolomé de las Casas –who includes Indians in the

fraternity of humankind– challenge a Catholic understanding of religiosity that

justifies cultural subordination. Missionaries impel natives to conversion via the

replacement of their destroyed religious system with Catholic creeds. Taking

part in such an enterprise, yet determined to remedy its negative side effects,

de las Casas engages himself in the defence of Indians against colonial

exploitation. His fight expresses more than a concern for indigenous well being.

It is, in addition, the sign of a missionary sense of duty correlated with the

recovery of an ‘original’ Christian morality. His duty correlates with that of

Dominican friar Julian Garcés’ opposing Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda’s thesis on

the irrationality of Indians, and rounds out Franciscan friar Bernardino de

Sahagún’s rescuing of indigenous cultural heritage and oral history.3

Exactly this makes evinces the reversal of Catholic discourse against its

own foundations: reformulating Christianity as a religious opposition to Judaism

made it possible to reinstate Jesus’ morality in defence of Catholic dogmatism.

The antinomy of constructing Jesus as the symbol of Christianity by reversing

his original message put into question Catholicism, for a re-appropriation of this

reversed message is always feasible. A confrontation of that risk, I claim, is

complementary to the stratagem by which Catholicism becomes a discursive

core of colonialism. Missionaries reconstitute a transcendental symbolic Indian

identity from a liberating standpoint that allows the Catholic Church to articulate

a social narrative with the pretence of mending Jesus’ moral doctrine –a due

requisite for the colonial era to be conceivable, but that subverts ecclesiastic

authority at the very same time.

Methods and rituals of Conversion

3 For a lengthy discussion of this topic see chapters 3 and 4 of my doctoral thesis.

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Hadrian VI’s bull Exponi nobis fecisti sanctions the establishment of the Catholic

Church as an institutional force in New Spain. As it operates in the new lands,

Hadrian’s bull lays stress on the obligation of mendicant orders to indoctrinate

and baptise natives, and to ratify conversion in the absence of bishops. The

missionaries’ duty is to spread Christian thought among indigenous people,

regardless whether this is done under a military regime. Friars do not fail to

appreciate the difficulties of conversion for people with a deeply embedded and

earnest religiousness. On the contrary, they rate highly both the relevance of

native religious expressions and the convenience of making the most of native

fervour. However, the determination of converting Indians into Catholicism, and

the obstinacy of natives to hold their own sacrality, leads missionaries to seek

the eradication of indigenous habits. Both the violence of forced evangelisation

and the syncretic outcome of cultural tolerance are today considered as either a

‘technical’ or ‘human’ error.

As to the responsibility for this failure, the blame tends to falls into the

extensive political method: a rapid and massive conversion that produces both

a negligent loosening of the quality of information transmitted during missionary

labour and cultural destruction. In contrast, the intensive political mission was a

seemingly more effective method of conversion, for it emphasised the quality

and precision of instruction. The first method was used among Mesoamerican

civilisations, whereas the second method was applied to Aridoamerican nomads

(Chauvet, 1984; Martín, 1984). At the back of the method chosen, there was a

missionary order and its particular way of recovering of Jesus’ moral message

that partly explains why the Society of Jesus was expelled from Spain and its

colonial territories,4 and why the office of inquisitor in New Spain was entrusted

to the principal indoctrinators of Mesoamerica: Franciscans and Dominicans.

An inquisitorial commitment in Aragon and Germany to counteract the

Islamic presence and the spread of Protestantism, and the methods of inquiry

and judgement refined for assessing the degrees of transgression and

penalisation, make both orders the most apt for establishing the Holy Inquisition

in New Spain. Their goal is both to foster Christian values among Indians and to

foment Catholic discipline among the faithful. The former task is largely

concerned with the evangelisation of Indians, and thus, with the methods of

4 See chapters 6 of my doctoral thesis for a larger argument in this respect.

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conversion used by missionaries to keep Christendom safe from religious

adulteration. Franciscans are highly reputed in this respect. The latter task

implies the constant control of the instruction of believers and the punishment of

their misdeeds so as to prevent the risk of heresy and schism in the colonies.

Dominicans play a more active role in this regard.

Presumably, the question of religious adulteration ought to be tackled as

a matter of doctrinal competence, while the treatment of dogmatic divergence

and religious schism should respond to an inquisitorial line of action. However,

such a division is not categorical, for both tasks equally need the expertise of

friars and inquisitors. The widespread influence of native religion is a great

obstacle to conversion and missionary success, and has a fickle impact upon

the inquisitorial field of interest. For as far as religious tradition conditions

Indians’ resistance to accept Catholicism, it affects neophytes’ conviction. The

prevalence of indigenous religious values among converts in turn increases the

chance of adulterating Christian beliefs. A failure of this sort may strike the

faithful, expressly those who might find the prospect of opposing Catholic norms

appealing. A link is then established between imperfect conversion and religious

dissidence that transforms the subtle boundary dividing missionary and

inquisitorial duties. In practice, this makes of missionaries the Crown’s most

illustrious agency in subjugating natives.

Neither Franciscans nor Dominicans ignore that indigenous religiousness

may call attention to the repressed pagan past of Catholicism, especially its pre-

Christian Greco-Latin philosophic heritage, which, by the same token, may

disclose the coercion of the Roman Apostolic tradition over other Christian

churches. It is upon this particular danger that the politics of evangelisation and

ethnographic chronicles function as a mechanism of foreclosure first, by

exaggerating the affinities of Nahuatl and Christian sacred values and second,

by distorting the sacrilegious parities between the Roman and Aztec empires.

That is, for missionaries and inquisitors it is a more controllable situation to deal

with religious adulteration if this indicates a morally reproachable religion vis-à-

vis Catholicism. Significantly, Spanish religiousness –repressed for its syncretic

traits when the apostolic credo becomes the Roman Empire’s official religion–

appears among the ‘purest’ Catholic expressions in the colonial context.

Thereupon, indigenous religion represents an antithesis of Western Christianity,

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and the refusal to accept the Christian faith implicates the natives’ perverting

evil agency.

In this antithetical relation, the axiom of conversion and the monotheist

intolerance are all the more relevant. For conversion to take place, an existing

symbolic religiousness must be compared with Christianity so as to represent a

blameworthy doctrine. Nahuatl theology is the binding point to which Christian

explanations of the world refer back in order to interpose a new system of belief

to the indigenous mentality. Missionaries and inquisitors must neither destroy

nor utterly nullify Nahuatl cosmovision, but depose the polytheist faith by

admonishing against its wicked traits and so enhance Christian virtues more

effectively. If different, Nahuatl values could not be displaced, nor could they be

incorporated into and repressed by the Christian mysterium tremendum, i.e. the

secret that is the gift of death (cf. Derrida, 1995). In other words, the impact and

success of conversion not only depend on the capacity to obliterate a religion,

but also require the transformation and reorientation of a given sacred

philosophy into a Christian framework of sacrality.

The resistance of indigenous populations to submitting to those changes

acquires due significance. So does deficient proselytising labour, for friars are

expected to cancel native religion and preclude its potential for adulterating

Catholicism, in spite of the natives’ unwillingness to freely accept conversion.

For instance, a firm will in preserving their cultural specificity would explain why

extensive and intensive missions both fail. But this could also indicate a

missionary insufficiency that results in too much liberty for Indians and thus, the

inability of friars to persuade natives. Though feasible, I contend that any of

these events are entirely imputable to the insubordination of natives or to the

incorrect performance of missionaries, as clerical authorities hastily denounce

when justifying violent conversion or as historians explain regarding religious

syncretism. Instead, I argue that conversion itself is what puts into question the

superiority and compelling capacity of Catholicism in a ‘spiritual conquest’

whose success is conditioned by the necessity of making natives accept an

unquestionably universal God. Conversion is not a clear-cut process, but a

partial reconciliation, the outcome of which is equally partial. A failure of full

indoctrination is, by the same token, a foreseeable result.

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Conversion conditions its very partiality, allowing both the risk of religious

adulteration and the potential of subverting Christian precepts. Whether or not

the ‘subversive’ is an Indian, and whether subversion takes place right away or

might happen in posterity, such a threat is, in any case, proper to the nature of

conversion. Inquisitorial attempts of counteracting subversion overshadow the

fact that the corruption of religious beliefs is neither missionaries’ nor Indians’

fault, regardless if the doctrinaire method employed places faith in a secondary

or minor rank. Accordingly, suspicious attitudes of ecclesiastical representatives

about indoctrination and missionary duty should be best explained within the

discursive limits of conversion.

In thinking of partial conversion as a deficient result of indoctrination

rather than as a problem related to an indigenous understanding of sacrality,

ecclesiastical authorities and historians declare themselves dubious about

indigenous faculties. This accounts sufficiently for the somewhat relaxed

inquisitorial bearing toward Indians who, punished for idolatrous and pagan

practices, are seldom put to death if reluctant to accept the Catholic faith.

Heresy and schism, as these challenge the pope’s authority, are unquestionably

far more serious a charge than indigenous sorcery. Still, to the extent that the

inquisitorial process targets Spaniards and Creoles instead of Indians, counter-

Reformation mechanisms such as impeding the entry of the Forbidden Books –

the Index of 1559– in New Spain do very little to inhibit native transgressions.

Civil courts are in this sense stricter than ecclesiastic tribunals –as the Spanish

Inquisition trials show (cf. Pérez, 1992).

Likewise, a permanent surveillance of immigrants’ religious instruction

may retard, and perhaps stop religious schism and doctrinal divergence, but it

cannot remove the questions that the corruption of Christian beliefs posits –and

for which Indians would have to respond before religious tribunals in the first

place. If, on the contrary, some friars have had to answer for partial conversion

on account of their precarious competence, the Church could have regained its

power over mendicant orders that set out to accomplish a fair and serviceable

implementation of Jesus’ doctrine of justice in the ideal Christendom. For

behind missionaries’ intention arises the prospect of denouncing social injustice

and objecting the religious despotism of Catholic elite. The accusation against

conventual orders for allowing highly explosive religious attitudes among

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indigenous people and native’s comprehension of Catholic ceremony, regarded

as the expression of disorder, reflect the tension between official and popular

Christian responses to liturgy. The apostolic ministry saves itself as being

directly accountable for colonial and counter-Reformation abuses by accusing

missionaries for not anticipating the likelihood of religious adulteration and not

wholly refrain its subverting potential.

Even so, by eluding the verdict of secular and sacred history, the Roman

Church conditions its internal weakness considerably. Apostolic leaders’

ambiguous questioning of missionaries’ aptitude amounts to appearing vague

and diffident about prelatic gifts as such. A case in point is the monarchic

expatriation and later pontifical dissolution of the Society of Jesus: by revoking

the most conservative and papist order, the Holy See exhausts its own

authority. Not surprisingly, some authors correlate this with the war of

Independence in Mexico (cf. Martín, 1984, Medina, 1984, Brading, 1991): as the

missionary programme no longer inspires confidence, the clergy is unable to

keep cultural control of the nation.

The parallelism missionaries found between Mesoamerican ritual life and

Spanish religiousness –the practice of baptism, the semblance of the Calmecac

and the Tepochcalli with monasteries and convents, the key role of theocracy–

had facilitated the institutionalisation of Catholic religion. The same goes for

porous and absorbing Mesoamerican religious traits, which allowed a high

degree of syncretism with Catholic values. Ritualism was perhaps the most

relevant sphere of Nahuatl religious-civic life upon which Spaniards came to

depend so as to urge Christian meanings during evangelisation, using those

rituals or launching new ones through ceremony and language (cf. Nebel, 1992;

Köhler, 1988; Florescano, 1997). Ceremony played a key role in the civil sphere

as well. When considering the rightful Christian claim to reducing people to

slavery, for instance, Spaniards claim a legitimate right to rule over lands,

properties, trade, and, above all, over people, with the observance of the

ceremonial requerimiento, a document read aloud in the act of taking

possession of the new continent.

Palacios Rubio’s requerimiento (1513) and Ginés de Sepúlveda’s

Democrates alter (1547) exonerate the conquest through a juridical restoration

of Aristotle’s and Seneca’s arguments on natural servitude, but also trigger a

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revision of divine and natural law.5 In this context, de las Casas’ Christian

defence of the liberty of Indians nourishes the idea of conversion as the “true

title for the expansion of European legalism” (cf. Zavala, 1993:17, 23), whilst his

Short Account is “written in protest at a moment when it still seemed possible...

that [an] ‘early paradise’ might be transformed into the image of the primitive

Apostolic Church” (Pagden, 1992:xli). An image embodied in the ‘human’ status

of a Christian-oriented Indian identity that shapes –I claim– a new Christendom:

that “crucial part” of the social self-reconstruction of “the kind of settlers who

wished to set themselves up in imitation of a society to which they had had no

access in Europe” (Pagden, 1992:xxvi).

To the extent that religious liturgy clears the path for Spanish political

supremacy, it also provides a ground for projecting religious motifs other than

those allowed by the “visual and aural drama” of a desired new Christian society

(cf. Beezley; et al., 1994). Some friars may have failed to convert natives

adequately, as most natives embraced Catholic values retaining their own

cultural and religious beliefs after conversion. But one should not ignore that

partial conversion is not entirely imputable to a failed missionary labour, nor that

religious syncretism is not exclusive to the encounter. Both are part of the

phenomena called ‘popular religiousness’, which cannot be grasped if one

ignores the process by which the Roman Apostolic Church became a dominant

religious institution of Christianity and through which sacred expressions

diverging from Latin ecclesiastical orthodoxy were regarded as paganism or

heresy. Popular indigenous religiosity, often judged as fanaticism, was not an

exception. Its ‘imperfect’ practices evince the danger of extensive indoctrination

for it puts into question the Church’s evangelical responsibility. Today, however,

the validity of indigenous religiosity and the syncretic character of Catholicism

prior to the conquest are acknowledged.

In this sense, the specific interpretations Indians made of Catholicism

ought to be examined by considering first, that Indians learnt Catholic religion

from a tradition ready to absorb divine symbols from other sacred doctrines –as

most religions prior to the Judeo-Christian culture actually did. Second, theirs

was a partial understanding of a liturgy that was already ‘impure’: heir of pre-

5 For details see “Defensa de los derechos del hombre en America Latina” in Zavala, 1993; and Pagden, 1992. Also see Rabasa, 1993:164-179. On the correlation of this debate with Enlightened thought see Beuchot, 1993.

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Christian Iberian and Lusitanian pasts, the exclusivism of the Jewish God and

the early Christian tradition, and marked by two centuries of Visigothic invasion

and eight of Muslim colonialism, as well as repressed by Roman orthodoxy.

This syncretic horizon edified conquerors in terms of a supposed ethno-religious

superiority, which involved a perception of race-cultural otherness that justified

both the persecution of Judaism and Islam, and the Christian conviction of their

right to war and to enslave people who resisted the new religion.6 Significantly,

the Hispanocentric narrative that evolved after the conquest allowed a religious

accommodation by which theological deliberation on indigenous reality became

a channel to propagate the Roman Apostolic reading of Christian faith. In due

course, the clergy capitalised disciplinary forms attesting papal authority away

from ethno-religious frictions defying Catholic supremacy in Europe.

This opened a way to repress more effectively the philosophical pagan

past of Catholicism, particularly the Greco-Latin heritage, as well as to blot out

the historical soaring of Rome over other Christian churches. Ritualism was a

crucial mechanism to reiterate apostolic authority and diffuse disruptions of

fanatic converts or of those questioning religion from enlightened perspectives.

For the uniform and all-embracing model of Christendom in New Spain was,

paradoxically, an image befitting the context in which humanist philosophy

consolidated (cf. Beuchot, 1993). The ritualistic reconfiguration of missionary

‘humanism’ and its duty to convert allowed Catholicism to function as an

agglomerating agent of ethno-religious variety in New Spain. And yet, from the

Tridentine definition of liturgy to the Bourbon efforts to regularise religious

festivities, the subversive tone of indigenous religiousness is irremediably raised

once and again. Recurrently too, amendments to rule out explosive religiosity of

the masses proved insufficient;7 leading in some cases to vast popular moves,

such as that of a Creole priest who, using the Virgin Guadalupe as a banner,

encouraged the dismantling of the colonial system. Conventual orders could be

blamed for failing to control the faithful, but a lack of cohesion among church 6 On the persecution of Jews and Muslims by the Christian Empire see Hall, 1995 and Davis, 1990. On the influence of Arabs and Jews in Spanish and Mexican cultures see Antaki, 1993, and Martínez and Reynoso, 1993. On the right of a just war see Gutiérrez, 1974:26.7 Attempts to control indigenous people extend from periods prior to the Independence (cf. Staples, 1994; García, 1994), as well as to periods after the Reform (cf. Tenenbaum, 1994; Bantjes, 1994). These include removing carnivalesque features of public celebrations, prohibition of piety demonstrations regulation of street life in urban areas as to avoid disturbances (cf. Beezley; et.al., 1994), and legislation on activities rarely associated with religious codes: carrying large objects on the back of a pedestrian (to restrict access to Indians on pavement).

15

members proved no better solution to the problem of maintaining a sense of

collectivity.

Post-independence legal reforms regarding ecclesiastical matters and

post-revolutionary questioning of Catholicism as constitutive of Mexican identity

respond to such a deficiency. After independence, ritualism develops into a

desacralised cohesive force testifying civility: Catholic priests Hidalgo, Morelos,

and Matamoros, key protagonists of the Independence war, pass from religious

traitors to historical martyrs, and then to national heroes. This move is related to

the fact that ‘winners write history’, but also to a civic-ceremonial approach that

legitimates a new social order. The same protagonists, who represent both the

antagonism between Creoles and Peninsulars and the disagreement of the low

clergy with the Catholic hierarchy, are identified –together with missionaries de

las Casas, Sahagún, Quiroga– as the basis of liberating theological proposals in

Latin America.

Ironically, as a sacred liberating experience separate from conventional

religion, the ‘faith of the poor’ is a reading of religion that changes the role of

ethnic resistance regarding Catholic social discourse and post-revolutionary

indigenist discourse. Regardless of Indian obstinacy or past missionary errors,

evangelical labour had provided a sacred signification of Indianhood that made

irrelevant whether this identity was eventually internalised or whether natives

simply pretended to have become Christians. Liturgy, festivity and worship are

all channels of conversion in which one still witnesses “a return of the sacred in

the form of an enthusiasm or fervour” (Derrida, 1995:21). The incorporation of

the Indian image at the core of Mexican identity furnished nationalist claims,

Creole or Mestizo, with a disguised Christian morality that is a syncretic creation

of the Spanish conquest and colonial politics.

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