Behind the politics and personalities that drove the conflict between Miguel de Quintana and the Franciscans in the 1730s in Santa Cruz lay demographic changes. As was implied in the post for 3 April 2016, the number of Franciscans wasn’t increasing as quickly as the population in Nueva España. That led to what today would be called leveraging resources. The order needed to find techniques that provided equivalent religious experiences to more people with less manpower.
The one notable innovation in Santa Cruz in these years was the use of the rosary. The beads and prayer cycle themselves weren’t new. They date back farther than the Dominicans who are associated with them. Herbert Thurston and Andrew Shipman said the order of the prayers and the accompanying meditations was standardized in the late 1400s.
What was new in Nuevo México was that the regimen for prayer was mentioned. Neither Roque de Madrid nor Leonor Domínguez nor Antonio Velarde talked about it. They all mentioned masses. Madrid noted the one of the eve of battle, Domínguez the ones before Easter, and Velarde ones celebrated every morning by Juan George del Pino.
The communal experience of the mass was more important to Benito Crespo than the solitude of the confession or the rosary. The Puebla diocese, where he served after his years in Durango, remembered he was "jealous of the dignity and splendor of divine worship" and that, in 1735, "recommended the faithful observance of sacred rites in the celebration of Masses."
When the bishop visited Santa Fé in 1730, he noted the poorest Jesuit church had "its church better adorned than in the one of the villa of Santa Fe, which surpasses all those of this district" and that it did "not even have vestments for high mass."
Masses required clergymen. When no friar was assigned to a mission, or when a priest was away, commending parishioners recite the rosary was a way the church could demand the same daily attention from them.
Today, the rosary assumes the presence of beads to make it easier to keep track of the prayers. It also often is accompanied by individual pictures of the 15 mysteries to stimulate contemplation on their meanings.
Not many wills from the area have survived. Ralph Twitchell listed a dozen, and Henrietta Martinez Christmas has translated nine of those. None described any kind of beads that could be construed as rosaries. A few mentioned coral, but as I suggested in the post for 29 May 2016, they may have been amulets against the evil eye.
Three women mentioned pictures or statues, but only the crucifixes could have been used for the mysteries. Quintana’s daughter, Lugarda, left a "a holy Christ, of bronze" in 1749, along with fourteen images of saints, all small." The next year, Rosa Martín Serrano, the wife of Nicolás López, left "a statue of St. Jose."
At the end of the decade, in 1759, Teresa Herrera left "seven holy pictures on wool." She also owned a small and a large crucifix, and a "statue of the Immaculate Conception." She had been married to Diego Martín Serrano and Bartolomé Trujillo.
These images were little different from those willed earlier by Cristóbal Torres and his wife, Angela Leyba. In addition to the picture of Our Lady of Los Remedios, mentioned in the post for 29 May 2016, he owned a picture of Our Lady of the Rosary, a crucifix, and a "statue of Saint Joseph" in 1726. She had "nine pictures of different kinds," the statue of Los Remedios mentioned before, and a "bronze crucifix" the next year.
Quintana may not have been unique in saying the rosary, but no one left the material evidence to know.
Notes: Madrid was mentioned in the post for 2 June 2015, Domínguez in the one for 2 April 2015, Velarde the one for 23 August 2015.
Archdiocese of Puebla. "Excmo. Sr. Don Benito Crespo (1734-1737)," their website; translation by Google.
Christmas, Henrietta Martinez. 1598 New Mexico, blog.
Crespo y Monroy, Benito. Letter to the viceroy, Juan Vásquez de Acuña, 8 September 1730; translation in Eleanor B. Adams, Bishop Tamarón’s Visitation of New Mexico, 1760, 1954. Adams noted this particular paragraph was hard to translate because some of the words were lost when it was bound.
Herrera, Teresa. Will, 1759, translated by Christmas as "Teresa Herrera - Will 1759," 20 May 2013.
Leyba, Angela. Will, 1727, translated by Christmas as "Angela Leyba - Will 1727," 30 July 2014.
Martín Serrano, Rosa. Will, 1750, translated by Christmas as "Rosa Martín Serrano - Will 1750," 15 November 2013.
Quintana, Gertrudis Lugarda de. Will, 12 May 1749; translated in Francisco A. Lomelí and Clark A. Colahan, Defying the Inquisition in Colonial New Mexico, 2006.
Thurston, Herbert, and Andrew Shipman. "The Rosary." The Catholic Encyclopedia. Vol. 13. New York: Robert Appleton Company, 1912
Torres, Cristóbal. Will, 1726, translated by Christmas as "Cristóbal Torrez - Will 1726," 28 July 2014.
Twitchell, Ralph Emerson. Spanish Archives of New Mexico: Compiled and Chronologically Arranged, volume 1, 1914.
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