Revivals

Religious fervor has a tendency to abate with time. By 1740, many Puritans in New England had grown so comfortable with their faith they do longer wondered if they were among the elect. It had become the corollary of their financial success.

Then, George Whitefield came from England to preach outdoors without patronage from any particular clergyman or church. While his theology was Calvinist, his style was drawn from theater. The audience didn’t hear about a fearsome God, it experienced salvation. What we now call the First Great Awakening spread through Pennsylvania, New York and New England.

In Nueva España another form of inertia had set in. Even under the constrictions of drought and war, life was comfortable. As David Brading mentioned in the post for 30 March 2016, no one protested when parishes administered by religious orders were turned over to secular clergy in 1749.

Isidro Félix de Espinosa had little interest in chronicling Franciscan activities when asked by the order in Michoacán to write its history. Instead, the Querétaro native suggested, more was happening in the missionary colleges where Franciscans were training men to convert the pagans in Tejas. The challenges of new conquests were invigorating the faith of men.

In 1737, he published a biography of one man he knew from his years in Tejas. Antonio Margil de Jesús never looked anyone in the face lest he be tempted by the devil. He scourged himself daily, wore cilices three times a week, and every night went walking with a heavy cross.

A few years later Espinosa wrote a history of the Querétaro college where he had served as guardian. One of the men he identified as a model for young friars went into the fields barefoot every Friday. Melchoir López de Jesús carried "a heavy cross on his shoulders, a cord at his neck, and a crown of thorns pressed so tight that at times drops of blood drawn from the thorns could be seen on his venerable face."

Later, he wrote his own brother, Juan Antonio Pérez de Espinosa, slept on leather sheets, fasted regularly, wore cilices, scourged himself three times a week, and slept in a coffin. He kept a copy of his family tree decorated with skulls and skeletons.

Espinosa said nothing of his own habits, but did say when Margil and López were in Guatemala, they were so appalled by the prevailing idolatry they made the Indians repent by walking in public processions carrying crosses and wearing cilices.

While the two revivals occurred at roughly the same time, they differed in their consequences. The Great Awakening introduced a new style and new organization to reach a new audience, the artisans and yeomen who lived outside the Puritan, Quaker, and Anglican elites.

The Franciscan activities that attracted David Brading’s interest harkened back to medieval practice, perhaps done in the face of competition from Jesuits. Both were lobbying for rights to evangelize the Moqui when he was writing.

When the Jesuits were given the Moqui commission, Carlos Delgado and Ignacio del Pino went to the Moqui towns in 1743 and induced 144 Tiwa speakers to return. Then they demanded the governor, Gaspar de Mendoza, provide them with a pueblo. He refused to act without the viceroy’s authorization. Most of the returnees were sent to Jémez, the rest to Isleta.

Delgado was one of the men sent from Andalucía to the Querétaro college, but Jim Norris found he "left that group for unspecified reasons." No one I’ve read has said if he followed the self-mortification regimes of his college’s founders, but he did absorb their methods for conducting mass campaigns.

The next year, the head of the Franciscans in México recommended local friars direct their attention to the Navajo, who had been identified by Benito Crespo as potential Christians in 1730. Delgado and José de Irigoyen headed back west, distributed gifts, and claimed 4,000 souls.

The impressed viceroy authorized four missions with a garrison for the latter. The new governor, Joaquín Codallos, agreed to send an escort when Delgado, Irigoyen, and Pino returned west in 1745.

Juan Miguel Menchero followed them in 1746. He convinced 500 or 600 Athabascan speakers to move down to Cebolleta in the Ácoma region. However, when he returned two years later, the drought was so severe the springs had dried. The Navajo had been pushed south by the Utes who lived in an even more arid region. They could see the problems with sedentary agriculture.

In 1750, they told the priest assigned to Cebolleta, "they did not want pueblos now." They said, they were willing "to have water thrown upon" the heads of some of their children but they could not "stay in one place because they had been raised like deer." They thought maybe the ones who were baptized "might perhaps build a pueblo and have a father" someday.

In the meantime, Menchero did succeed in getting permission to resettle the Moqui émigrés at Sandía in 1748, satisfied he had planted "the seed of the Christian Faith among the residents of the pueblos of Ácoma, Laguna and Zía."

Notes: Cilices were what we commonly call hair shirts, although the rough cloths could be worn on the chest or around the loin. I don’t know if self-mortification was a dominant theme in the works of Espinosa, or was of particular interest to Brading. It may have been a matter of etiquette that individuals didn’t mention their own practices.

Brading, D. A. Church and State in Bourbon Mexico, 1994.

Espinosa, Isidro Félix de. Crónica Apostólica, 1746; cited by Brading on López.

_____. Crónica de la Provincia Franciscan, 1749 manuscript; cited by Brading on Franciscans in Michoacán.

_____. El familiar de la América, 1753 manuscript; cited by Brading on Juan Antonio Pérez de Espinosa

_____. El Peregrino, 1737; cited by Brading on Margil.

Menchero, Juan Miguel. Petition to Joaquín Codallos y Rabal, 5 April 1748; translation in Ralph Emerson Twitchell, Spanish Archives of New Mexico, volume 2, 1914.

Norris, Jim. After "The Year Eighty," 2000.

Reeve, Frank D. "The Navaho-Spanish Peace: 1720's-1770's," New Mexico Historical Review 34:9-40:1959.

Ruyamor, Fernando. Testimony as alcalde mayor of Ácoma and Laguna before Bernardo Antonio de Bustamante y Tagle at Ácoma, 18 April 1750, 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; quotation on free as deer.

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.