ABSTRACT
The evangelization of New Spain was largely complete, and the friar's work had shifted predominantly toward pastoral care and administration of indigenous parishes by the start of this period. This is not to say that the friars had fully Christianized the indigenous peoples or that there were no pockets of rural territory that still lay outside the control of the church. It does mean that any friar who felt called to undertake missionary work in this period-that intensive linguistic, cultural, and religious code breaking that characterized the first period-would find himself at the distant frontier of the colony, far from the central areas where the majority of his confreres lived and worked. The secular clergy and bishops, for their part, recognized that they had very little control over the church in New Spain, for the friars still labored under papal exemption from episcopal authority.
