Secularization

Philip V’s attempts to modernize lands remaining under Spanish control often met with hostility from members of the upper classes whose parents were born in the New World. His problems were greater in Perú, but there was a burgeoning criollo elite in Nuevo España as well.

The conflict was nearly as old as the second generation. The usual solution was a system of quotas imported from Spain where alternativa had been used to resolve problems uniting formally independent states like Castilla, Aragón, and Andalucía.

In the viceroyalties, the group in the minority, the Spanish appointees and migrants, argued it was needed to maintain Iberian standards. The majority criollos believed qualifications, as they defined them, were appropriate criteria for the highest offices in religious orders. Since many of the changes in routine came from serving Indian parishes, the Spaniards also recommended such missions be turned over to bishops.

In 1614, Augustinians in Nueva España were forced to institute a formal policy that alternated the two groups in their highest offices. Only 50 of the 630 Franciscans friars at the time were from Spain. In 1627, they demanded equal access to office.

The policy moved to Perú, where Franciscans resisted its imposition. Their appeals to Pope Innocent XI were overridden by Philip IV who saw them as a threat to his power. Alternativa was imposed by force in 1679.

In 1683, Franciscans established a college in Querétaro to direct preaching missions in settled towns and to pagans. The original group had come mainly from Catalonia and Majorca. Within a decade, there was some attempt to introduce alternativa to balance power between the immigrant founders and the local recruits.

Smoldering resentments flared again when Philip’s appointments constrained ambitions of local men. Benito Crespo was promoted from Durango to the see of Puebla in 1734. His replacement, Martín de Elizacoechea, was from Navarre and educated at Universidad de Alcalá. He moved to México in 1716 where he managed incomes and collected tithes for the university.

The new bishop reasserted his authority over the Franciscans of Nuevo México when he entered the kingdom in 1737. Local priests then were fighting with Juan Bustamante for supremacy. He yielded to their complaints, and returned Santiago de Roybal as his vicar.

Pedro Anselmo Sánchez de Tagle was named obispo de Durango in 1745 when Elizacoechea moved to the bishopric in Michoacán. He was from Cantabria, perhaps the same area as Bustamante’s ancestors, and had moved to México in 1726.

Again, the Franciscan overseer, Juan Miguel Menchero, demanded Roybal be removed. Angélico Chávez noted, when they were refused, there was "no evidence of further demands."

Franciscans soon had larger problems. Philip died in 1746 and his son was crowned. In 1749, Ferdinand VI ordered all parishes administered by religious orders within the jurisdictions of Ciudad de México and Lima be turned over to secular clergy and supervised by archbishops.

When his command met with no resistence, except from the orders themselves, he extended the receipt to all parishes in the New World. Theoretically, that would have included Santa Cruz, Santa Fé, and Albuquerque.

His policy primarily affected Franciscans, Dominicans and Augustinians. Only a few Jesuits administered parishes. Other religious orders, like Los Hermanos de San Juan de Dios who provided medical care, weren’t impacted.

Serious disruptions followed, as secular clergymen who didn’t speak native languages were sent to Indian villages, and displaced friars crowded into urban areas with no support. Augustinians prepared legal cases.

In 1749 the Franciscan missionary college in Zacatecas was reprimanded for not requesting more recruits from Spain. The colleges had strict membership limits, and only accepted one or two novices a year. While the communities in Querétaro and Mexico City did still request new men from Iberia, Zacatecas had become the "exclusive preserve of creoles" and was intent on remaining so.

In Nuevo México a messenger sent by the viceroy in 1749 reviewed the status of the missions. Juan Antonio de Ornedal repeated Crespo’s recommendation that the missions of San Ildefonso, Santa Clara and San Juan de Caballeros could be combined because "of the short distances that he believes to exist between" them.

Carlos Delgado was assigned the Franciscan rebuttal. He wrote, Ornedal must have traveled along "the camino real in a carriage or on horseback" and that he must have passed "over them by day, at his convenience" with "an escort to guard him." In fact, he said, friars were "exposed to great danger and peril at all times, having to cross rivers in canoes and often at night, and at time when their waters are in flood and very rapid."

With a new king, the Jesuits renewed their efforts to evade paying tithes with another proposal after the end of the War of Austrian Succession. This time they won a reduction in the rate in 1750. Then, they apparently based their payments on net revenues not gross that the state assumed.

The order was in trouble again in 1754 when it opposed a treaty between Ferdinand and his father-in-law, João V of Portugal. The territorial exchange along the Rio de la Plata involved ceding land where Jesuits had missions. Ferdinand fired his primary advisor. Zenón de Somodevilla had supported both the Jesuits and the reorganization of missions in the New World.

Ferdinand modified his secularization policy in 1757. He allowed those friars who, in fact, had been appointed by bishops to continue until they died. Each order in each province was allowed to operate two parishes for income. All priories with at least eight members could remain open, but all the smaller ones that had been opened without licenses in Indian villages remained closed.

To handle the sudden surplus of clergymen, Ferdinand told the orders in 1754 to limit the number of new novices, and to prepare them for work in frontier missions. The Franciscans already had their colleges that trained men for work in Tejas. They concentrated their new efforts in the Bajio region around Querétaro.

That same year, Tagle was moved to Michoacán, and Pedro Tamarón was sent as his replacement in Durango. He was from Toledo and, like Elizacoechea, had been educated at Alcalá.

Roybal was still in Santa Fé when Tamarón made his formal inspection in 1760. Franciscan Juan Sanz de Lezaún wrote his own "account of lamentable happenings in New Mexico," but took a more conciliatory tone than had Delgado. "I am persuaded, in view of the report of the most illustrious señor, the Bishop of Durango, who has obtained information of all this from his experience during his visitation, that he will remedy all that I have described."

As Chávez noted on Roybal, "perhaps with the passing of the old friars who had known greater episcopal immunity in days gone by, or on receipt of more definite decrees from the Crown and Council of the Indies, the old animosities died away."

Notes: The post for 27 March 2016 discusses the beginning of this dispute over diezmo. Bancroft and Twitchell identified Ornedal as Ordenal. The viceroy in 1749 was Francisco de Güemes.

Bishop Tagle’s grandparents were Andres Sanchez Tagle, and Maria Pérez de Bustamante. The former governor, Juan de Bustamante, was the son-in-law and likely nephew of the earlier governor, Antonio Valverde y Cosío, whose Cantabrian background was discussed in the post for 23 August 2015. The vicar’s grandparents were Juan Antonio de Bustamante y Tagle and María Antonia Bracho Bustamante. Chávez didn’t know the relationship between the governor and the vicar’s father.

Bancroft, Hubert Howe. History of Arizona and New Mexico, 1530-1888, 1889.

Bandelier, Adolph F. A. and Fanny R. Bandelier, Historical Documents Relating to New Mexico, Nueva Vizcaya, and Approaches Thereto, to 1773, volume 3, 1937, translated and edited by Charles Wilson Hackett.

Brading, D. A. Church and State in Bourbon Mexico, 1994; quotation on creole composition of college in Zacatecas.

Chávez, Angélico. "El Vicario Don Santiago Roybal," El Palacio 65:231-252:1948.

ChihuahuaMexico.com. "Pedro Tamarón y Romeral" section on "Historia" on its website.

Delgado, Carlos. Report to our Reverend Father Ximeno concerning the abominable hostilities and tyrannies of the governors and alcaldes mayores toward the Indians, to the consternation of the custodia, 1750; translation in Bandelier. The quotation on floods previously appeared in the post for 24 February 2016.

Gutiérrez Torrecilla, Luis Miguel. "Martín de Elizacoechea, Un Navarro Obispo en América (1679-1756)," Príncipe de Viana 55:391-406:1994.

Konrad, Herman W. A Jesuit Hacienda in Colonial Mexico, 1980.

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Ornedal y Maza, Juan Antonio de. Informe sobre el lastimoso estado y decadencia en que se encuentran las misiones de Nuevo México, to Francisco de Güemes, 26 July 1749, El Paso.

Rojas y Contreras, José. Historia del Colegio Viejo de S. Bartholomé (Salamanca), volume 1, 1768; on Tagle and Bustamante.

Sanz de Lezaún, Juan. An account of lamentable happenings in New Mexico and of losses experienced daily in affairs spiritual and temporal, 4 Novwmber1760; translation in Bandelier.

Tibesar, Antonine. "The Alternativa: A Study in Spanish-Creole Relations in Seventeenth-Century Peru," The Americas 11:229-283:1955.

Twitchell, Ralph Emerson. Spanish Archives of New Mexico: Compiled and Chronologically Arranged, volume 1, 1914.