ABSTRACT
In 1524 a band of twelve barefooted Franciscan friars walked from Veracruz to Mexico City, there to be welcomed by the Conqueror, Hernán Cortés, kneeling in the dust before the assembled nobility, both Spanish and Indian. The mendicants summoned the children of the native elite to their priories for instruction both in Spanish and in the Christian faith, thereafter employing these boys as their interpreters and chief lieutenants in their campaign to extirpate idolatry and preach the gospel. All pagan images were destroyed, temples razed to the ground, and any obdurate native priest or chief who resisted the imposition of the new religion was whipped, imprisoned or, on occasion, even executed. Within a generation, the Indian population, by then suffering grievously from the onslaught of epidemic diseases introduced from Europe, was resettled in new villages, all laid out on a grid system, invariably dominated by a handsome parish church. Evangelisation was thus accompanied by acculturation, with the native elite serving as both collaborators and intermediaries. If the mendicants acted as the instruments of Spanish dominion, with the conquest justified by its harvest of souls won for the Church, nevertheless they also dedicated their lives to the service of their flock with remarkable austerity and devotion. In particular, Bartolomé de las Casas, a Dominican, denounced the cruelties and oppression of the conquerors and settlers and obtained from the Spanish Crown some measure of redress. The spiritual foundation of the Catholic Church in Spanish America rested on the apostolic zeal of the Franciscans and the prophetic thirst for justice of Las Casas. The Papacy had entrusted the governance of the New World to the Kings of Spain and Portugal on condition that they ensured the conversion of its inhabitants to the Christian faith, a task which they in turn entrusted to the mendicant orders. Throughout the three centuries of colonial rule, the Crown maintained the right to appoint to all ecclesiastical benefices, so that the Church, then supported by its own taxes and courts, constituted a parallel arm of government. Indeed, only the common practice of Catholic liturgy united the diverse races and classes that inhabited Latin America, otherwise separated by language and culture.
