THE DEVELOPMENT of the CHURCH AFTER TRENT 6.1. The
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CHAPTER SIX THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE CHURCH AFTER TRENT 6.1. The Reception of the Council of Trent and the Junta Magna Parallel to the conclusion of the Council of Trent and the implementation of its decrees in the colonies, a new church model – the “colonial church” – began to prevail against the one originally favored by the mendicant orders especially in Spanish America; their model had been a church “in the image of the Early Church,” a “church of the people” (iglesia popular) of sorts. No such popular church model was attempted in the Portuguese area of influence. “This model aimed to achieve the greatest possible degree of autonomy and self-determination for Indian Christian communities within the nar- row limits imposed by colonial society as well as the institutions and the milieu of the Roman-Catholic Church of the Counterreformation.” At its center stood “the kingdom of justice and fraternal cooperation between communities,” without neglecting the place of worship and liturgy. “The exploitation of labor (and thus economic domination by the conquerors) was ruled out as a matter of principle. Work was to be a source of livelihood, creativity, and communal interdependence.” According to Landerreche, this model found its most complete implementation in the constitution of Vasco de Quiroga’s “hospital villages.”1 Research to date on the Council of Trent has concentrated mostly on ascertaining the forms in which, and the degree to which the Council’s decrees were adopted in the Americas, focusing essentially on the provin- cial councils of Lima and Mexico. These councils have also been studied in order to determine whether or not they involved new approaches to the evangelization of indigenous peoples. Most recently, a further factor has come into view: the impact of the Spanish Crown’s patronage policy – which was tightened in the wake of the 1568 Junta Magna – on the recep- tion of the Trent decrees. Initially, one could almost have the impression that the Council of Trent and the New World were two realities entirely disconnected one from 1 See Landerreche, Conquista y Evangelización (1993), 61 (“Reglas y Ordenanzas”). 172 chapter six another. The bishops of the New World were not represented at the Council of Trent. Emperor Charles V prevented their participation since he was not keen on allowing first-hand accounts from his – to use a mod- ern term – “colonial backyard” to find their way to the Roman Curia. It is thus not surprising that the Council hardly took notice of the most signifi- cant missionary challenge facing the church since the evangelization of Germanic and Slavic peoples. Trapped by its Eurocentrism, the Council was obsessed with resisting the challenge posed by the Reformation. This was not the challenge presented by the New World, in which there were not any Christian “dissidents,” but rather a plethora of indigenous peoples with their own religions, with which no dialogue was attempted since they were presumed to be of satanically inspiration. Philip II’s ratification of the decrees of the Council of Trent in 15642 led to their adoption by the second and third provincial councils of Mexico and Lima, respectively. On the one hand, this meant the “recognition of the Catholic confession and its hierarchy,”3 i.e., ushering in the age of con- fessionalism, heralded by the rejection of the Reformation. On the other hand, the dogmatic decrees – which in the New World lacked the Protestant backdrop that had given rise to them in the first place – had the long-term effect of creating a sharper expression of the spirit of Trent in the Americas than in the Old World. In other words, in the Americas a society came to be that was more religiously uniform than any other one previously known in Europe. Since heresies were absent, a cultural Catholicism entirely satisfied with complying with outward expressions of piety ensued. The official church became permeated with ever stiffer for- malism in its dogma, its liturgical forms, its laws and its administrative structure; at the same time, in the Americas, medieval piety survived unchanged in the form of popular Catholicism, blending with Indian and African elements. Furthermore, post-Tridentine neo-scholastic thought had conspicuous effects upon the church in the New World, leading the masses to fall in line with the status quo.4 2 Pragmatic Sanction of July 12, 1564. 3 Villegas, S.J., Die Durchführung, 10. On the provincial councils of Mexico and Lima see, among others, Burrus, “The Third Mexican Council” (1967); W. Henkel, Die Konzilien (1984); Henkel/Saranyana, Die Konzilien in Lateinamerika (2010); Ugarte, Concilios Limenses; Prien, “Das Trienter Konzil (1545–1553) und der Rückgang lokalkirchlicher Experimente in Spanisch-Amerika,” (2002). 4 Luna, El positivismo (1971), 29, makes the following observation concerning the spirit of Scholasticism, which in the form of neo-Thomism became normative for post-Tridentine Catholicism: “Scholasticism was the philosophical instrument that .