Examine the Role of the Church in Spain’s Conquest and Colonization of Continental America

Question:Examine the role of the Church in Spain’s conquest and colonization of continental America. The role of the Roman Catholic Church in Spain’s conquest and colonization of continental America was a two-fold process whereby under the facade of conversion and control lay the primary goal of gaining wealth, enforcing laws and the inevitable extension of control while condoning the beginnings of European slavery in the Caribbean. [i] Alternately, behind the movement for converting Indians lay some important influences in Spain.The Spanish Crown established royal controls over the ecclesiastical benefices and over the immense wealth of the church. [ii] Two papal bulls were issued in the year of 1493 that established the Spanish position in the New World. They also established the role that the Church was going to play in the New World. The first bull, issued on May 3, 1493, was called the Inter Caetera. It declared that lands discovered by Spanish envoys, not under a Christian owner, could be claimed by Spain.The bull also gave the Spanish monarch power to send men to convert the natives to the Catholic faith and instruct them in Catholic morals. The second papal bull issued that year expanded on the meaning of the first. The bull fixed a boundary for Spanish and Portuguese spheres of influence in the New World. This boundary heavily favored Spain, showing an alliance between Spain and the Church. Under the Spanish Crown the Inquisition was resurrected in the form of the conquistadores to hunt down heretics.In repressing the last non-Christian state in the Iberian Peninsula, Granada, and in forcibly expelling Jews and the Moors, King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella sought to purify Spanish society in a spirit of Christian unity. The acts were militant expressions of religious statehood on the establishment of the American colonization in the latter part of the 1490s. [iii] The church which arrived in the Caribbean advocated what has been called â⠂¬Ëœwarrior Catholicism’[iv], which is the belief that military conquest and evangelization were compatible. v] Acting in conjunction with the conquistadores, the Roman Catholic Church played a vital role in the Spanish system of colonization and is argued to be one of the most outstanding revolutionary devices of the Spanish Government. [vi] By its discipline and methods it assumed, the Church was almost a military and political agency designed to push forward and defend the colonial frontiers, pacify the natives and open the way to European occupation. [vii] The subjugation of the native Indians and the extension of the territorial boundaries emphasized the role of the Church.The Church also served to maintain colonial borders against foreign encroachment. By its exclusion of heretical Protestants and by its strict censorship of books, the Church made foreign political and philosophical ideas difficult or dangerous to obtain and served as a defensive mechanism of the Spanis h Empire. [viii] It was largely through the Roman Catholic Church that Spain succeeded in transmitting its culture and political dominance in the colonization of continental America during the 16th century. [ix] The Church was not only an advance post of the Spanish Empire and a political device of colonialism.It had its own religious objectives and interests. The Spanish colonial empire was served exclusively by the clergy of the Roman Catholic Church which received active government support and encouragement in the form of grants of land to build churches, free passages for priest, free wine and oil for the monasteries. A hierarchy if archbishops, bishops, and lesser clergy were dispatched by the Crown to the New World. Priests were chiefly concerned with superintending the work of converting the natives, whom they thought of as primitive, to Christianity and â€Å"protecting† them from exploitation.The earliest groups were the friars, of whom the Dominicans were prominent. Later, the Franciscans and Jesuits became more active. The Roman Catholic Church reinforced religious superiority over the Indians through the Indians culture, religion and language. Associated with their attention to the spiritual needs of conversion, the priests endeavored to eliminate ‘heathen’ practices among those Indians that they baptized. [x] The non-Christian people of the Americas were not simply to be converted; they were to be civilized, taught, humanized, purified and reformed.The Indians to be converted were strangers speaking in many unfamiliar tongues. In most cases, when the Friars first encountered them, they had been only recently conquered and subjugated, and even if not actively hostile they were likely to retain covert antagonisms. In their experience all Spaniards were exploitative. The Indian religions were composites of ceremonies and attitudes of the most diverse sort, no single technique of conversion could be employed. Conversion required bo th the introduction of Catholic Christianity and the extirpation of existing native religions, and of the two tasks the latter was the more difficult one. xi] Modern anthropology demonstrates that the elimination of pagan traits was only partial. In Indian societies of the twentieth century, even in the areas of most active Christian labour, residual pagan forms survived. The mission programme resulted in the syncretism of the Indian religion and Roman Catholic Christianity. Indians might have responded enthusiastically to the new teaching, but they tended to interpret Christianity as a doctrine compatible with their own tolerant pagan religions, and they allowed Christianity and paganism to exist simultaneously as complementary faiths.A common Indian view held that one religious form was resorted to when another failed to bring a desired result. [xii] However, in a process of religious syncretism, as priest constructed churches out of the stones of destroyed temples, symbolizing an d emphasizing the substitution of one religion by the other,[xiii] religious saints like the Aztec’s Tonantzin and the Virgin Mary became intermingled, creating a new national symbol, the Virgin of Guadalupe. [xiv]In Mexico, Cortes’ forces destroyed Indian religious sites, cleaned them with lime and replaced images of Quetzalcoatl and other Indian gods with images of Christ and the Virgin Mary. [xv] Native temples were torn down, idols destroyed and burnt, sacrificial wells were filled-in, writings were destroyed and other material evidence, anything the Roman Catholic Church considered as paganism were destroyed. [xvi] The Church was also concerned with the material and physical welfare of the natives.Hospitals were particularly needed because of the epidemics which occasionally swept the land. A hospital not only provided treatment for the sick, but was frequently a kind of poor-house as well, where the aged and infirmed could be attended to, and where poor-relief co uld be dispensed. Virtually all the social services in the Spanish colonies were provided by the clergy. However, despite the advances in saving the Indians from exploitation, the work of the Church often caused distress and was sometimes harmful.In successful conversions, Indians supplied construction labour on the churches, hospitals, monasteries and schools without recompense, voluntarily, or at the command of their newly Christianized chiefs. The friars then proceeded to expand the Christianized area, by moving out into surrounding towns, where subordinate chapels were built. Cooperating Indians were brought into the conversion process to assist the friars. Indians who refused to accept Christianity were punished, sometimes by death.The labour of Christianization was further hindered by conflicts between friars and other branches of the society. The terms of the encomienda demanded that the masters should see to the Indians protection, with the duty of seeing that they were care d for and taught to become more civilized. Becoming more civilized really meant nothing more than giving signs that they accepted the Spanish as their masters, covering their bodies as European did, speaking Spanish and accepting the Christian faith.In return for Spanish protection the Indians were to give their service in the fields or mines of the encomenderos. The encomienda system was nothing more than a means of obtaining forced labour for the encomendero, Spanish conquistadors. No wages were paid for the work done and very often the Indians’ farms were ruined by herds of cattle or swine belonging to their encomendero. They rarely had time to grow their own food for the forced labour left them neither time nor strength.The Indians were not free to leave the encomienda and those who fled were hunted down by men on horseback with dogs. The death rate among the Indians shot up as a result of hunger, weakness and despair among people whose traditional village and family life was completely destroyed. The Church and the encomienda became rival institution, each in its own way seeking control over the native populations. This issue between them erupted openly in 1511, when the Dominican friar Antonio de Montesinos first condemned the colonists’ treatment of the Indian in Hispaniola.Thereafter, under the leadership of Bartolome de Las Casas, another Dominican friar and others, ecclesiastical criticism of encomienda became frequent and outspoken. The Spaniards saw the friars as officious nuisances whose object was to pry into the livelihood of encomienda Indians, criticize the encomenderos’ use of Indian labour and denounce encomienda in letters to the king. Although the rights and wrongs of the encomienda system were discussed by the Crown it was decided that this system was necessary if the colonies were to survive.There was no other way of replacing the labour that the Indians provided. It was agreed, though, that the system would be bette r organized and the rights of the Indians more properly protected. To this end the Thirty Two Laws of Burgos were published in 1512, whereby Spaniards were confirmed in their rights to coerce the Indians, but their obligations to convert them and treat them humanely were set out in great detail, even to what food, clothes and beds they were to be supplied with. Two inspectors were to be appointed in each town to ensure that the rules were kept.Those laws could have corrected the abuses, but the practical difficulties of putting them into full effect on the far side of the Atlantic and the Andes, and against powerful vested interests, were difficult to prevail over. [xvii] The crown added to the powers of the Church by giving it powers of censorship over all books entering the Empire. This was intended at first to keep out heretical Protestant works, but it was also used against political books. Education and the confessional enabled the Church and assisted the Inquisition in keeping a close watch on the movement of thought.The transatlantic movements of books were regulated in Seville. â€Å"Popular and fictional literature came under the purview of the secular authorities (in Spain), which placed a ban in 1531 on the export of romances of chivalry to the Indies as being likely to corrupt the minds of the Indians. †[xviii] To make these powers more effective, a branch of the Inquisition, a special church court, was established from Spain. Its official powers were to prosecute those who broke the laws such as blasphemy, bigamy, heresy, witchcraft, heterodoxy, and sins against God.The Inquisition punishment included penance, prison sentences, property confiscation and burning at the stake. Informers could remain anonymous and the crimes of so called heresy and witchcraft could have many interpretations. This tribunal was operating out of Lima, Mexico City and Cartagena by 1570. Protestant smugglers and raiders of all nationalities captured by the Spanish were brought before the Inquisition and charged as heretics. But most importantly for the government of the Empire, the Inquisition could be used against influential people who showed too great a tendency to criticize.In this way the Church played a part in keeping the colonies tied to Spain The Roman Catholic Church operated without competition in the circum-Caribbean colonial society during the sixteenth century, where it performed both religious and political functions. In religion, it taught and converted the native Indians to Christianity and catered to the religious needs of the Spanish community. Politically, it helped to extend the boundaries of the Spanish Empire by removing opposition to it: in the case of the Indians by its teachings; and in the case of Europeans, largely through the operation of the Inquisition.The Church did much good, but its efforts resulted in a number of drawbacks. For example the genuineness of the conversion of the Indians is doubtful. In generall y, in all the colonies, the Church catered to the spiritual needs and at the same time contributed to the preservation of the society in which they operated.