Franciscan Narratives

Franciscans produced two narrative genres. Both derived from their founding in 1209 as a monastic order dedicated to emulating Christ’s life of poverty and his last days of pain. As mentioned in the post for 10 April 2016, Isidro Félix de Espinosa wrote biographies of men associated with the missionary college in Querétaro that described their self-mortification rituals.

The second group of narratives arose from changing attitudes toward poverty. During the Black Death plague that arrived in Spain in 1348, Franciscan monasteries grew wealthy from "endowments for prayers for the dead, which were then usually founded with real estate."

In the stagnation that followed, the friars discipline was relaxed, and dissenters reformed into competing groups. In 1517, partly as a consequence of Bernardino Albizeschi’s sermons in Italy, Leo X selected one group as the true Franciscans, the Observant Friars Minors, and declared preaching their primary mission.

The Council of Trent reaffirmed their vows of poverty. However, by then many no longer understood that to mean they actually should live in poverty. Instead, they’d come to see their status as an opportunity for those with wealth, including monarchs, to insure their afterlives by supporting them with alms. Indeed, when Franciscans located their college at Querétaro, they selected that site over one closer to the missionary frontier "because of the hope that local alms would aid in supporting the college and its work, a hope which could not be realized in the sparse settlements of the north."

Unlike their contemporaries in New England, Franciscans had problems explaining why their expectations often were unfulfilled. Jonathan Edwards could point to "the meer Pleasure of God, I mean his sovereign Pleasure, his arbitrary Will, restrained by no Obligation" in Massachusetts in 1741, but Franciscans only had the kindly God who had sent them Christ.

Edwards could point to the "very Nature of carnal Men" where lay "corrupt Principles" that were "active and powerful, and exceeding violent in their Nature, and if it were not for the restraining Hand of God upon them, they would soon break out, they would flame out after the

same Manner as the same Corruptions, the same Enmity does in the Hearts of damned Souls, and would beget the same Torments in ‘em as they do in them." Administering the sacraments precluded accusing the wealthy and powerful of witchcraft or sin.

When others didn’t honor obligations they believed were due them, Franciscan writers could only resort to legal arguments that represented themselves as martyrs. The theme had been voiced in Perú in 1677 by Miguel Serrano de Alvarracín when he complained criollos were keeping Iberians from their rightful places in provinces that had been established generations before by Spaniards. "Is it just" he asked, "that we should be deprived of what we have planted and cultivated without even a mouthful being given to us?"

In Nuevo México, Observant Friars merged legends of martyrdom and sacrifice learned from oral tradition with legalities when they described their experiences. In 1760, Juan Sanz began his "account of lamentable happenings" in contemporary New Mexico with the Pueblo revolt. In his first paragraph, he wrote: "twenty-one religious perished at the hands of the Indians, some of them burned, others shot with arrows, while some were clubbed to death."

This had occurred almost sixty years before Sanz arrived at Zía in 1748. He could only have known some of those details from listening to others.

He arrived just after an El Niño, but experienced several dry stretches during his term. In 1760, he could still intone "this kingdom is as fertile in grain production as Old Castile. The wheat is unequaled; corn and all kinds of vegetables do well; fruits are few on account of the great amount of snow and ice; the meats, both of cattle and sheep, are most excellent. Besides the silver-bearing ores, which are well known, there is much copper, lead, antimony, and everything necessary for mining."

The consequences of drought and Comanche depredations could be seen everywhere in 1760, but the friar couldn’t credit them as the reason "all this lies waste, a kingdom with such great resources void of human energy." Instead, he argued it was all sacrificed "by the governors, for these gentlemen attend only to filling their own pockets."

His underlying assumptions of potential wealth were based on tales he’d heard from "many old men both in New Mexico and in the vicinity of Chihuahua." Their anecdotes probably reinforced stories he heard as a boy in the port of Cádiz that may have inspired him to migrate. It was probably only when such wealth didn’t come his way that he joined the Franciscans in Mexico City when he was 28.

One source for his effigy of New Mexico surely was Carlos Delgado, who’d been part of a council called in 1722 to explain to a representative of the viceroy why the area wasn’t more densely settled. In making a plea for increased funding, the group said "the country was rich in metals and well adapted to agriculture and the raising of stock, and that any expenditure of money by the government would be a good investment."

Sanz wasn’t with Delgado when the latter went to induce Moquis to abandon their pueblo for the Río Grande in 1745. But, he’d been told that, "because the said government had not assisted them with the necessary food, men and animals, they could not bring out more than two thousand souls." Most didn’t go beyond Zuñi.

He wasn’t with Delgado when the older friar first evangelized the Navajo, but in 1748 Sanz had been sent to continue Christianizing the ones at Cebolleta. When their efforts were supported by the governor, Sanz complained Joaquín Codallos ordered the pueblo of Ácoma to build a church at Cebolleta. He believed the demonstration of conscripted labor was what "created such a schism among the Apaches that the latter desisted from the intended conversion, and revolted."

The Franciscan concluded, "We were left disconsolate at such a fatal misfortune, which we were without power to remedy. This proves the hopelessness, unless God provides, of there being any more conversions."

They didn’t share the Puritan attitude that a failure to overcome adversity was a sign one lacked God’s grace, a sign to be disguised by renewed efforts. The Franciscan attitude that poverty was a condition that entitled them to support by the monarchy was absorbed by others. At that meeting in 1722 when Antonio Cobián Busto asked why there was so little to show from the viceroy’s earlier expenditures on the kingdom, men blamed their poverty, and their fear of Indian raids. As mentioned in the post for 21 February 2016, officials in 1746 again were invoking poverty as an entitlement, this time to evade paying taxes.

Notes: Black death was bubonic plague. Cobián’s visit was described in the post for 28 June 2015.

Alvarracín, Miguel Serrano de. Memorial, Madrid, 22 June 1677, quoted by Antonine Tibesar, "The Alternativa: A Study in Spanish-Creole Relations in Seventeenth-Century Peru," The Americas 11:229-283:1955.

Bancroft, Hubert Howe. History of Arizona and New Mexico, 1530-1888, 1889; quotations on council of 1722.

Bihl, Michael. "Order of Friars Minor," Charles George Herbermann, The Catholic Encyclopedia, volume 6, 1909; quotation on effects of Black Death.

Edwards, Jonathan. "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God," sermon preached at Enfield, Connecticut, 8 July 1741; edited by Reiner Smolinski.

McCloskey, Michael B. The Formative Years of the Missionary College of Santa Cruz de Querétaro 1683-1733, 1955; quotation on alms and Querétaro

Norris, Jim. After "The Year Eighty," 2000; on Sanz’s background.

Sanz de Lezaún, Juan. An account of lamentable happenings in New Mexico and of losses experienced daily in affairs spiritual and temporal, 4 November1760; translation in Adolph F. A. Bandelier 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.