Pious Imperialism: Spanish Rule and the Cult of Saints in Mexico City

By Cornelius Conover

This book analyzes Spanish rule and Catholic practice from the consolidation of Spanish control in the Americas in the sixteenth century to the loss of these colonies in the nineteenth century by following the life and afterlife of an accidental martyr, San Felipe de Jésus. Using Mexico City–native San Felipe as the central figure, Conover tracks the global aspirations of imperial Spain in places such as Japan and Rome without losing sight of the local forces affecting Catholicism. He demonstrates the ways Spanish religious attitudes motivated territorial expansion and transformed Catholic worship. Using Mexico City as an example, Conover also shows that the cult of saints continually refreshed the spiritual authority of the Spanish monarch and the message of loyalty of colonial peoples to a devout king. Such a political message in worship, Conover concludes, proved contentious in independent Mexico, thus setting the stage for the momentous conflicts of the nineteenth century in Latin American religious history.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of New Mexico Press
• Release date: May 1, 2019
• ISBN: 9780826360274

Cornelius Conover

Cornelius Conover is an associate professor of history at Augustana University.

Book preview

Pious Imperialism

PIOUS

IMPERIALISM

SPANISH RULE AND THE CULT OF

SAINTS IN MEXICO CITY

Cornelius Conover

© 2019 by the University of New Mexico Press

All rights reserved. Published 2019

Printed in the United States of America

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Conover, Cornelius Burroughs, 1972– author.

Title: Pious imperialism: Spanish rule and the cult of saints in Mexico City /

Cornelius Conover.

Description: Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2019. |

Includes bibliographical references and index. |

Identifiers: LCCN 2018032365 (print) | LCCN 2018053349 (e-book) |

ISBN 9780826360274 (e-book) | ISBN 9780826360267 (printed case: alk. paper)

Subjects: LCSH: Mexico—History—Spanish colony, 1540–1810. | Christian saints—

Cult—Mexico—Mexico City—History. | Felipe de Jesus, Saint, 1572–1597. |

Spain—Colonies—Mexico—Religious life and customs.

Classification: LCC F1231 (e-book) | LCC F1231. C656 2019 (print) |

DDC 972/.02—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018032365

Cover illustration courtesy of the Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley

Cover designed by April Leidig

Interior designed by Felicia Cedillos

To Mónica, Erich, Claire, Elena, and Anna

CONTENTS

PREFACE

The Life of San Felipe de Jesús

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Chapter 1

Introduction

Chapter 2

Spain’s Discalced Franciscan Mission in Japan, 1593–1597

Chapter 3

Beatification and the Politics of Piety, 1597–1627

Chapter 4

Imperial Saints in Mexico City, 1625–1680s

Chapter 5

The Rise and Fall of Creole Holy Figures, 1680s–1740s

Chapter 6

Bourbons and Breviaries: Devotional Reform in Mexico City, 1740s–1790s

Chapter 7

Mexico City’s Saints at the End of Empire, 1790s–1820

Chapter 8

Decolonizing the Church in the Mexican Republic, 1821–1836

Chapter 9

Conclusion

APPENDIX

Reform of the Liturgy: Feasts of Required Rest and Church Attendance

Notes

BIBLIOGRAPHY

INDEX

PREFACE

The Life of San Felipe de Jesús

By analyzing the religious belief that animated the Spanish Empire through the cult of saints, I tackle one of the most personal and complex choices that parishioners in colonial Mexico City made. Thousands of holy figures and sacred objects vied for the special attention of the faithful and offered in turn solace, inspirational examples, and miraculous assistance.¹ Even God—the focus of true adoration rather than veneration—was divided into many distinct devotional aspects, such as the Holy Host, Blessed Trinity, and Holy Blood. The colonial world knew that while the cult of saints was complicated, it conformed to some order.² The Virgin Mary, the mother of Jesus, occupied the highest rung of sainthood as queen of heaven. She was joined by other types of saints: apostles, the family of Jesus, martyrs, confessors, bishops, royalty, and others. Parishioners learned the characteristics of these holy figures through their vita (vida in Spanish), or saintly biography. The natal home, childhood and adolescence, religious turning points, and miracles provided clues to the faithful as to which saints might be good friends and special helpers.³ When adopting a saintly devotion, a person’s religious faith and spiritual needs were vastly important, but the social context also mattered. Family, neighbors, ecclesiastics, and, as I argue in this book, political authorities also influenced what holy figures parishioners venerated. Over time, individual decisions modified the cult of saints in ways that today provide clues to social realities and political directions of the Spanish Empire.

The hundreds of saints mentioned in this work each with his or her own biography make for complicated storytelling. To provide a unifying thread in this analysis, I adopted San Felipe de Jesús (ca. 1571–1597) as a case study set with the wider context of Catholicism in the Spanish Empire and the cult of saints in Mexico City. Like colonial subjects, the vida of this holy figure first drew me in. Despite the best efforts of his biographers, it was apparent that Felipe was a fine young lad from Mexico City with few outstanding religious credentials before he was crucified by mistake in Japan.⁴ Many residents of colonial Mexico City would have been familiar enough with San Felipe not to need further explanation of his exploits. The same cannot be said about those of us today. To recreate his life in a way that subjects in colonial Mexico City would have known it, the following paragraphs provide a quick orientation to this recurring main character.⁵

San Felipe’s Life, Beatification, and Canonization, ca. 1571–1867

San Felipe, born Felipe de las Casas, left almost no written record of his life. Moreover, no one documented any interview with his surviving mother, brothers, sisters, any other relative, or friend.⁶ In this absence of information, his biography sprung up from tradition and from accounts of his martyrdom.

Establishing the facts of San Felipe’s early life has caused much anxiety among his devotees. He was born to Alonso de las Casas and Antonia Ruiz Martínez around 1571 or 1572—about the time they emigrated from Spain to Mexico City.⁷ Because Felipe’s baptism record has never been found, persistent rumors have alleged that the boy was born in Spain or at sea. Popular tradition held that he was born in Mexico City and baptized at the Sagrario, the parish church alongside the cathedral (see fig. 1).⁸ Without question, Felipe was raised in Mexico City where his family grew and prospered. Six more children were born.⁹ Alonso de las Casas began his career as a merchant and by the late 1580s had set up his own commercial house, which included importing Asian textiles.¹⁰ He eventually served as a secular adjunct to the Holy Office.¹¹

Residents remembered Felipe as a mischievous child, an inconstant adolescent, and a pleasure-seeking young adult.¹² These elements gained much in the retelling. One cleric noted the lively eloquence with which preachers elaborated on the saint’s defects, painting in vivid colors his unchecked youth and a boy prostituted to all disorder.¹³ According to one favorite story, after another day of mischievousness from Felipe, the family’s exasperated slave women exclaimed that an old desiccated fig tree would sooner bloom than the boy become a saint.¹⁴ To the amazement of all, the tree flowered twenty years later. Tradition also held that Felipe attended grammar school at the Jesuit Colegio Máximo de San Pedro y San Pablo with no apparent change in his wayward behavior.¹⁵

Figure 1. Baptism of San Felipe de Jésus, in Montes de Oca, Vida de San Felipe. Image courtesy of Nettie Lee Benson Latin American Collection, the University of Texas at Austin.

Felipe’s saintly biography noted that his transition to adulthood yielded little maturity or constancy. He joined the Santa Bárbara friary of the Discalced Franciscans, a more austere and exacting offshoot of the order, in Puebla around 1589, causing some to hope that he might pluck the needles from the thorns, leaving roses and lilies, and [transform] from bad to good.¹⁶ However, since the young man was little seasoned in the battles of the spiritual encounters with invisible enemies . . . he left an opening to the diabolic suggestions of the Prince of Darkness.¹⁷ Felipe abandoned the friary and turned his back on religion. He returned to Mexico City and worked for a short time as an apprentice silversmith.¹⁸ He left that too and began to assist his father in his commercial ventures. Perhaps sensing a change in the young man, Alonso sent young Felipe to Manila on the Santiago bound for the Philippines in 1590 or 1591 to represent the family business in Asia.¹⁹ Because it was difficult for a merchant to secure a berth on the ship, Felipe went to the Philippines as a soldier.²⁰

Felipe returned to clerical life in Manila, but not before another spell of high living. Manila in the early 1590s was Spain’s great hub for Asian trade. Silver mining in the viceroyalty of New Spain was booming, and no restrictions yet limited the purchase of Chinese or Indian goods. Felipe would have dealt primarily in the fabrics that made the Manila Galleon famous: Cantonese crepes, velvets, and fine damasks.²¹ The port city attracted young men out to make quick fortunes and catered to their baser instincts, as chroniclers distastefully noted.²² Felipe, apparently, was no different: Letting the good taste carry him away, he lived with liberty releasing the reins [of restraint] to his exuberant age, with frivolities and vanities.²³ Although the Discalced Franciscans proudly labeled the virgins among their own, Felipe was not among those so identified.²⁴ He gambled and cut sharp deals as a merchant.²⁵ On May 21, 1593, though, Felipe had a change of heart and joined the Discalced friary of Santa María de los Angeles in Manila.²⁶ His devotion impressed the friars, who described him as very obedient and poor, doing the penitence that was commanded of him.²⁷ He distinguished himself with his work at the Manila Royal Hospital, showing much humility in service to the patients.²⁸ In 1594, the young friar took temporary vows as Felipe de Jesús.²⁹ Upon hearing of this profession, his gratified father arranged to have his son return to New Spain.³⁰ In Mexico City, Felipe planned to take his three solemn vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience, which was impossible in Manila since there was no bishop. The friar secured his passage on the Manila Galleon. On July 12, 1596, he boarded the ship and saw that its name was the San Felipe.³¹

Misfortune befell the ship and its passengers. A series of storms hobbled its navigation and forced an emergency landing in a provincial port in Japan. Japanese authorities accused the passengers of pirating and confiscated the ship’s rich cargo, much to the dismay of the merchants on board. Felipe was part of a small group that traveled to Osaka to ask for diplomatic assistance from Friar Pedro Bautista, the Spanish ambassador and fellow Discalced Franciscan. Bautista could not persuade the ruler of Japan, Toyotomi Hideyoshi, that the San Felipe was an innocent merchant vessel. Even worse, the Franciscans themselves came under official suspicion as a fifth column cooperating with the supposed Spanish pirates. The ruler ordered the men taken prisoner in December 1596. On February 5, 1597, Japanese officials executed San Felipe, five other Discalced friars, and twenty Japanese converts in Nagasaki.

Very little information addresses San Felipe’s specific role in the martyrdom, but what exists portrays the young friar in an unfavorable light. In one episode, Felipe was forced to hand over his interior tunic to an innkeeper to pay for what he thought was a free meal.³² One friar related how Felipe refused to accompany him back to the San Felipe because the young man was too frightened.³³ Another mentioned that the Franciscan prior tried to have Felipe released from the sentence of death on three separate occasions.³⁴ According to one eyewitness, San Felipe died gloriously. Seeing his cross, he cried, enraptured, "The San Felipe was lost for the gain of Fr. Felipe!³⁵ He received the honor of dying first and passed away shouting Jesús, Jesús, Jesús." According to another account, however, Felipe’s cross was too big and so all his weight came to rest on the metal hoop around his neck.³⁶ Guards noticed Felipe choking and humanely executed him first. Two men on either side of him used long lances to stab him from the waist up through the opposite armpit.³⁷ Another jab to the chest made sure he was dead.³⁸ While witnesses reported seeing other martyrs, like the charismatic leader Bautista, saying mass in another location while his body was still on the cross, San Felipe had no miracles similarly attributable to only him.

San Felipe was beatified thanks to the missionary martyrs of the Nagasaki group. Surviving Discalced Franciscans who wished to preserve their Japanese mission initiated the beatification process for all the martyrs. In 1627, after a generation of promotion, the Congregation of Rites approved a miracle for the Nagasaki martyrs (that of Bautista’s mass), declared them true martyrs, and recommended their beatification. On September 14, 1627, Pope Urban VIII made the designation official. San Felipe became the first American to reach the first stage of sainthood. While Mexico City greeted the news with jubilation, San Felipe’s beatification touched off misfortune rather than celestial blessings. Dutch privateer Piet Heyn captured the 1628 Atlantic fleet with its eight million pesos, and torrential rains lasting five years threatened Mexico City with ruin.

While San Felipe’s beatification took only thirty years, he was not canonized until 1862. Proponents in Mexico City ran campaigns on his behalf every generation. Only one collected much money, and none coordinated with other natal cities of the Nagasaki martyrs. The process stalled until the mid-nineteenth century, when several trends aligned to give new momentum to the cause. In Mexico, liberal reformers promulgated their new constitution on San Felipe’s feast day in 1857.³⁹ The anti-church laws, affecting such sensitive areas as ecclesiastical property, immediately touched off a bloody rebellion, the War of the Reform (1858–1861). Depending on which side held Mexico City, February 5 was either San Felipe’s feast day or the Day of the Constitution. In 1858, conservatives marked San Felipe’s feast with a sumptuousness not seen in many years. [Those] that disdained to solemnize this great national festivity only inflamed the religious sentiments of the Mexican people.⁴⁰ When liberals regained Mexico City in 1861, the newspaper La Reforma reminded "all of our fellow citizens that today is a national holiday for those who love the constitution. There is to be nothing of Te Deums, cannon shots, or farces [of the religious sort]."⁴¹

European politics gave the canonization of the Nagasaki martyrs its final push. Exiled Mexican prelates in Rome pressed Pope Pius IX to distinguish San Felipe as a sign of hope for the Catholic faithful suffering in Mexico.⁴² At that moment, the discovery of crypto-Christian sects in Japan, after two hundred years of official government suppression, mesmerized Catholics. To Pope Pius IX, these long-enduring Christians symbolized eventual Catholic triumph over hostile governments then in power in Europe.⁴³ The canonization of the Nagasaki martyrs on June 8, 1862, provided an ideal occasion to celebrate the resiliency of the faith and the unity of Catholics.⁴⁴ San Felipe, after two and a half centuries, was a full saint.

Both San Felipe’s hagiographic and archival stories pointed to an uncertain saint in terms of virtue and miracles. His journey to sainthood was marked by circumstance and favorable politics. As later chapters will show, interpreting his life in an edifying manner proved challenging even to the gifted exegetical writers of colonial Mexico City. No miraculous power distinguished his cult. The devotion to him remained confined to Mexico City and was kept alive by a sense of municipal pride and religious guilt. Precisely because of these characteristics, however, San Felipe provides a particularly insightful entrée into Spanish imperialism and Catholic practice in Mexico City.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

In 1794, historian and cleric José Antonio Pichardo began a ten-year odyssey to research and collect information about San Felipe de Jesús. In his notes, he reported his triumphs and frustrations with the vagaries of archival research, including this lament, Oh Time, devourer of news. . . . Oh carelessness of men, which causes memories to be lost.¹ While these concerns have not disappeared for contemporary historians, I have had the good fortune to work with many individuals and institutions dedicated to preserving, understanding, and disseminating these hidden aspects of history. Without their assistance, this book would not have seen the light of day.

My gratitude goes to the professionals in archives and libraries that I have consulted in Mexico, Spain, Italy, and the United States. I would like to single out Roberto Beristáin and the staff of Galería 4 of the Archivo General de la Nación de México, Salvador Valdés Ortíz at the Archivo Histórico de la Catedral de México, Carlos Ruíz Abreu at the Archivo Histórico de la Ciudad de México, Father Hipólito at the Archivo Franciscano Ibero-Oriental in Madrid, and Michael Hieronymus at the Nettie Lee Benson Latin America Collection of the University of Texas at Austin for their expertise and assistance. The University of Texas at Austin and Augustana University provided much needed financial backing at critical points in this project. Thanks to El Colegio de México and Dirección de Estudios Históricos of the Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia for sponsoring me as a visiting scholar. Thanks, too, to the staff at the University of New Mexico Press, particularly Clark Whitehorn, who guided this project to its successful conclusion. I appreciate the considerable skill Kate Davis applied in copyediting the manuscript.

It is a pleasure of academic life to forge friendships in the communities where we work. Without the intellectual conversations and companionship of professors and fellow students, this book would never have taken the form it did. Thanks to my colleagues at Augustana University who demonstrate that pursing both teaching and scholarship is more than an ideal: Pilar Cabrera, Geoff Dipple, Stephen Minister, Mike Mullin, Reynold Nesiba, David O’Hara, Matt Pehl, Peg Preston, Lindsay Twa, and Bill Swart. Marta Terán facilitated my academic pursuits in Mexico City and mulled over early versions of the project. At critical stages of my academic career, Carlos Marichal and Sandra Kuntz-Ficker provided both intellectual guidance and personal support. I am indebted to Ann Twinam, who read many drafts of the work and who deserves credit for improvements too numerous to elaborate. Special thanks go to Jorge Cañizares as a welcome source of energy, inspiration, and bold ideas. I am grateful to Alison Frazier for her insistence on precision and for her elegant scholarship. For generations of Latin Americanists at Texas, me included, Virginia Burnett has offered excellent advice on all fronts. This work, like its author, benefited from the intellectual community of fellow graduate students at the University of Texas: Chris Albi, José Barragán, Emily Berquist, Adrian Howkins, Pablo Mijangos, and Heather Peterson, among others. Thanks, too, go to the crew of NFC in Arnolds Park who offered me summer office space and good cheer.

For my family, these short lines cannot fully express my appreciation. My parents, Neal and Kitty Conover, merit special thanks for years of steadfast encouragement. I am grateful to my children, Erich, Claire, Elena, and Anna, who kept my life in balance by forcing me to put work into its proper perspective. More than anyone else, my wife, Mónica, deserves heartfelt thanks for her help, patience, and constant cheerfulness through the rigors and uncertainties of the academic life. Without her, this project would have never come to fruition.

Finally, a sincere appreciation for the historical subjects who appear in the book. These figures, like José Antonio Pichardo, San Felipe de Jesús, and Joaquín José Ladrón de Guevara have been my constant companions for many years. I have tried to approach their lives with sensitivity and understanding. One even left advice to those who would later consult his work. Upon completing his admirable compilation of the minutes of the Mexico City cathedral chapter in 1697, the secretary, Tomás de la Fuente Salazar, penned a lighthearted sonnet to his successors. After humorously enumerating the work’s supposed defects, he wrote, Asking your forgiveness for my many faults. I beg you to view my work with compassion and that you be sympathetic to me [as well] so that others might treat you similarly.² I hope that I have lived up to the admonition.

Chapter 1

Introduction

IN DECEMBER 1596, Japanese ruler Toyotomi Hideyoshi ordered the arrest of a group of Japanese Christians and missionaries from the Spanish Empire. Their proselyting on the island, he alleged, was part of a foreign plot to conquer his realms. Determined to make examples of these prisoners, officials cut off their ears, exposed them to freezing cold, and paraded them through the streets for public mockery. On February 5, 1597, these six Discalced Franciscans and twenty Japanese Christians were crucified on a hill overlooking Nagasaki. Felipe de Jesús, a young Mexican friar only recently arrived in Japan, was the first to die. The executions signaled a growing suspicion among Japanese officials that Catholicism carried with it unwelcome political values. Eventually, shoguns would expel all foreigners and completely seal off the country for more than two hundred years.

As the Japanese authorities discerned, Catholicism lay at the heart of the Spanish imperial project. The friars exemplified the religious values that motivated Spanish global ambitions. King Philip II funded their mission to Asia and charged them with converting the people there to Christianity. The friars dreamed of subjugating all of Japan to their authority, and some even drew up plans for a Spanish military invasion of the islands. Their martyrdoms seemed to confirm Spain’s self-image as the world’s leading Catholic nation; their countrymen praised the friars as innocent victims and religious heroes. Philip II and his royal successors agreed. Thanks to their support in Rome, Pope Urban VIII beatified the Nagasaki martyrs in 1627. It was a great honor, but the real reward of beatification was that it granted ecclesiastics permission to integrate the blessed into the official liturgy of church worship. Thus, the martyrs took a place in the sacred rituals of prayer, sacraments, and scripture for the adoration God and veneration of other illustrious holy figures.¹ Every February 5, parishioners across the Spanish Empire gloried in their fellow subjects’ sacrifice in the service of God and king. Mexico City celebrated the date with special zeal because one of its native sons, San Felipe de Jesús, figured among the blessed. Thus, Catholicism inspired Spanish imperialism, but also bound friars, royal officials, and colonial subjects to the Crown in church services to the millions of subjects in this global empire. The term that I will apply to this religious dimension of expansion and political cohesion within Catholic worship is pious imperialism.

This study of Spanish rule and Catholic practice will show that the feast of the Nagasaki martyrs was only one of many such celebrations that introduced Spanish social values and political considerations into Catholic worship. The broad research parameters allow for an unusually inclusive examination of imperial history without losing sight of the local context. The analysis begins with the Discalced Franciscan mission in Japan of the 1590s, examines the politics of canonization in Rome, and dissects the cult of saints in Mexico City from the 1620s to the 1830s. Within Mexico City, the wealthy and populous capital of New Spain, the study focuses especially on the city council and cathedral chapter, two influential colonial institutions whose decisions set an example for other municipalities in the viceroyalty.

The work identifies Catholicism in general and the cult of saints in particular as linchpins of empire. Religion provided moral heft to Spanish expansionism, but it also sanctified political relations within the monarch’s vast realms. The challenges of ruling the Spanish Empire were clear to Jesuit scholar Baltasar Gracián in 1640: The provinces are many, the nations different, the languages varied, the interests in conflict, [and] the climates divergent.² For most of the colonial period, the Spanish established a flexible administrative system that offset central rule with significant local power. The Mexico City council and the cathedral chapter, for instance, controlled large budgets and managed significant administrative responsibilities. Kings maintained the loyalty of subjects in this decentralized, universal monarchy by imitating and even integrating key elements of an even longer lasting institution—the Catholic Church. Spanish kings exerted an outsized influence on the religion—building churches, enforcing moral laws, and promoting the cults of favorite holy figures. Such influence had useful political benefits: Catholicism forged a common purpose among subjects and preached loyalty to a devout king. Monarchs reign for God and depend on Him for their greatness and sound judgment, wrote Diego de Saavedra Fajardo in the late seventeenth century; They can never err if they have their eyes on Him.³ God rewarded this devotion by blessing the king and safekeeping the entire Spanish polity. Over time, this attitude infiltrated Catholic worship—particularly through the feasts of favorite holy figures—and provided a nearly constant reminder of the divine compact of Spanish imperial rule. The cult of saints, too, provided colonial subjects—including the clergy—an opportunity to fulfill their pious obligations and to demonstrate their loyalty to their king. Guided by these principles, the Spanish Crown ruled subjects of many cultures and languages over great geographic distances.

Bourbon reforms and external shocks of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries disrupted this system. Policy changes diverted time and money away from Catholicism and toward the productive economy. Municipal officials in Mexico City lamented the decline of the king’s traditional support of Catholicism. War and momentous political change at the turn of the nineteenth century further shook colonial faith in the Crown’s religious mandate to rule. Mexican insurgents even issued a rival claim for sovereignty couched in terms of Catholic ritual and divine providence. After independence, Mexico’s federal leaders tried to adopt principles of pious imperialism in order to project authority, unify citizens, and comply with Catholic obligation. Yet the government’s failure to reach an agreement with the Holy See and opposition from liberal politicians prevented national administrations from assuming all the powers of the Spanish monarch over the Mexican Church, which contributed to the mistrust characterizing the country’s politics of the nineteenth century.

San Felipe de Jesús of the Nagasaki martyrs provides an unlikely but insightful entrée into the social and political dimensions of Catholic belief in the Spanish Empire. Even though he took the cloth as a Discalced Franciscan in Manila, his life showed little evidence of extraordinary faith. After his unfortunate shipwreck in Japan, he was mistaken for a missionary and crucified along with his fellow friars. They, not he, provided the requisite miracle and inspired a successful beatification campaign. An overjoyed Mexico City council elected San Felipe as patron saint of the viceregal capital, but soon preachers struggled to find virtues to praise, and he never developed a reputation for working wonders. Without the confounding factor of miracles, however, his cult more accurately portrays the vicissitudes of political loyalty, municipal identity, and shifting religious values than did the more common barometer, the Virgin of Guadalupe.

Religion and Imperialism in Spanish America: Scholarly Precedents

In identifying the beliefs and practices of Catholicism as the touchstone of Spanish imperialism, this study incorporates the perspectives of scholarship and advances some enduring questions of colonial history. To Stanley Payne, Spaniards so totally self-identified with Catholicism and in turn imbued the religion with their culture that the religion practiced in Hispanic realms should be more rightly called Spanish Catholicism.⁴ Such a development had a long history, but the period between the late fifteenth to the late sixteenth centuries was especially critical. In the late fifteenth century, Isabel and Ferdinand fashioned themselves as the Reyes Católicos, or Catholic Kings, with their completion of the Reconquest.⁵ Catholicism was a personal belief, source of authority, and ruling strategy to unite their kingdoms. By this point, the Spanish realms had already begun to constitute a true empire as outlined by Frederick Cooper: a large, expansionistic political unit that reproduced differentiation and inequality among the people it incorporated.⁶ The sixteenth-century conquest of the Americas further convinced Spaniards that God had chosen them, the world’s premier Catholics and the church’s most militant defenders, as special instruments to carry out a divine purpose in the world.⁷ Filled with what Geoffrey Parker termed messianic imperialism, Spaniards fought for the church, carried its message overseas in missions, and erected new buildings in the service of God.⁸ Although an extensive historiography on missions has documented evangelization efforts, studies have concentrated on condemning the destructive impact on indigenous peoples rather than understanding the source of this cultural impulse.⁹ This analysis of the Discalced mission in Japan connects the methods and mentality of the friars to a Spanish Catholicism that had become more exacting and less tolerant under the influence of Philip II and the Catholic Reformation.¹⁰ Japan offers a useful counterfactual example because missionaries there neither enjoyed the support of the state nor could use physical coercion in evangelization.

Scholarship has demonstrated the central role of Catholicism and the church in consolidating and maintaining Spanish sovereignty over the Americas. Religion, of course, was not the only important rationale or mechanism for Spanish control.¹¹ Even so, to Adriaan van Oss, Catholicism was nothing less than the principal characteristic of the Spanish Empire, the single, irreducible idea underlying Spanish colonialism in the New World.¹² As intellectual historians have argued, royal sponsorship of religion in the Americas allowed the monarchs to claim their rule was just and legitimate.¹³ Encouraging joyful participation in Catholic worship and building ecclesiastical infrastructure were also central to the idea that Spain improved the Americas by bringing civilization, order, and urbane life to them. Karen Melvin went so far as to characterize Spain as an empire of Catholic towns.¹⁴ As this study will demonstrate, the Mexico City cabildo, or city council, strove to uphold Catholic ideals. Regidores, or councilmembers, considered their sponsorship of patron saints as integral to their duties overseeing the common good as their management of health, infrastructure, and municipal courts of justice.¹⁵

Given the importance of Catholicism in Spanish territories, kings made sure that they could influence key aspects of the church. A series of papal privileges known collectively as the real patronato allowed the Spanish Crown to present candidates for ecclesiastical posts, to claim certain ecclesiastical income, to control the movement of clerics, and to censor communications between Rome and the colonial church.¹⁶ This authorization, as historians such as Nancy M. Farriss have emphasized, ensured a clergy loyal to the monarch.¹⁷ Normal royal prerogatives, such as the love and respect the king expected from all subjects, further tightened the Crown’s control over the colonial church. In principle, the church maintained its autonomy and in practice still contended with the royal administration over honors, financial interests, and political primacy.¹⁸ Both entities also had internal divisions. Despite these differences, as this study’s focus on the Mexico City cathedral chapter, or cabildo eclesiástico, will demonstrate, the Crown generally upheld Catholic values and clerics generally supported the monarchy. The cabildo’s prebendaries, or canons, celebrated the king in the cathedral’s services and accommodated other special worship requests by the secular government in Mexico City in addition to other responsibilities, such as collecting tithes and managing the public cult.¹⁹

Few academic studies have demonstrated how clerical support for the Crown actually translated to influence among parishioners. Some have found that in moments of crisis, like riots and rebellions, clerics urged calm, preached loyalty, or negotiated with aggrieved parties on behalf of the Crown.²⁰ Alejandro Cañeque, Frances Ramos, and Edward W. Osowski, among others, have argued that public ceremonies such as the entrances of viceroys, celebrations