The Bishop's Utopia. Emily Berquist Soule

These archbishops, bishops, and cathedral canons were secular clergy who were ideologically and politically tied to the Spanish Crown, often having been handpicked by Charles III himself. As the king’s representatives in America, they were responsible for implementing his vision of reform for the Catholic Church. They oversaw the campaign to “secularize” Indian parishes by replacing the friars who administered them with secular parish priests. To avoid past abuses, they monitored these priests closely, scrutinizing their physical residences in their parishes, cataloging the sacraments they performed, and limiting their involvement with local judicial matters. The Bourbon prelates also managed a broad campaign of parish finance reform, closely examining religious brotherhood dues and arancel income from the collection of fees charged for sacraments. They targeted convents where nuns enjoyed lavish dowries, personal servants, and opulent costumes that flouted the Bourbon calls for austerity in religious devotion. In worship, they championed a return to private piety by discouraging the baroque tradition of overwhelming the senses with lavish architecture, self-flagellation, and opulent church décor.⁹

      Many Bourbon prelates were involved in political economy projects that meant to improve the social and economic lives of their constituents. In Ecuador, Bishop José Pérez Calama opened a road connecting the jungles of Esmeraldas with their rich production of fruit and cloth to the commercial center of Quito. In New Granada, Archbishop Antonio Caballero y Góngora collaborated with scientist José Mutis to improve public health by promoting the newly invented smallpox vaccine. Many prelates worked to improve education: Bishop Francisco Fabián y Fuero, for instance, supported a literature academy and endowed university professorships in Puebla. Some even gathered natural history data about the Americas, with Pérez Calama contributing articles to the Mercurio Peruano journal, Caballero y Góngora supporting the Royal Botanical Expedition in New Granada, and Archbishop Francisco Lorenzana publishing a new edition of Hernán Cortés’s letters from Mexico, elaborated with his own reports on local nature and society, as well as newly commissioned illustrations and maps.

      Though Lorenzana’s Historia de Nueva España is well known, scholars are less familiar with his 1768 manuscript, “Instructions for Making Indians Content in Spiritual and Material Things.” In keeping with what Spanish reformer José Campillo had called for twenty-five years earlier, Lorenzana mandated renewed efforts toward the spiritual and “material” education of Indians. Properly educated, he believed, the Indians would become more closely integrated into Spanish society. Therefore, priests and ecclesiastics should help them to engage in commerce, learn new agricultural techniques, and practice Spanish-style social norms, such as maintaining separate bedrooms for parents and male and female children. Despite such good intentions, Lorenzana was careful not to threaten the strict social hierarchy of the colonies, never suggesting that the Indians deserved to enjoy the social, racial, and economic advantages carefully guarded by Spaniards and Creoles. Other reforming prelates constructed similarly paradoxical campaigns that purported to benefit the Indians while ensuring their social inferiority. For instance, Archbishop Manuel José Rubio y Salinas sought to help the natives of Mexico by creating 237 primary schools for them; but he planned to use the schools to extinguish indigenous languages by forcing students to speak only Castilian. He also spent twenty-five years actively blocking an attempt to create a seminary for Indian boys just north of Mexico City.¹⁰

      In Trujillo, Martínez Compañón did not display such paternalistic disdain for America’s native population. Instead, he referred to the Indians as “my beloved children” and placed them at the center of the utopia he envisioned. In addition to promoting their welfare and improvement in spiritual and temporal matters, he thought to afford them ideological advantages that would enhance their positions in colonial society. As we shall see, he suggested to King Charles III that deserving Indians be allowed to dress in the silken finery that was officially reserved for Spaniards. He believed that those Indians who most excelled in school should be honored with burial plots within their churches, just like Spanish elites. He even ventured that they be allowed to use the noble titles don or doña in their public lives, and be addressed with the supplicatory second-person title of vos in municipal government and at church. Although he, too, promoted the use of Castilian in primary schools, his careful cataloging of Quechua names for plants and animals, as well as the 344-word “Chart of 43 Castilian Words Translated to the Eight Languages That the Indians of the Coast, Sierra, and Mountains of the Bishopric of Trujillo Speak,” demonstrates that he sought to value and preserve the native languages of the Andes, rather than simply erasing them from existence. Instead of blocking a seminary for Indian students, as Rubio y Salinas had, in Trujillo the Bishop created his own body of itinerant priests’ assistants drawn from native communities. Such daringly egalitarian rhetoric not only reinforced his position in the debate over the inferiority of the New World; it also made him radically different from many of his peers. He was fully ensconced in the highest echelons of the Church hierarchy in America, yet he was wholeheartedly involved in secular reform, deeply engaged in scientific research, and, to a much greater degree than his compatriots, completely dedicated to the cause that mattered most to him: improving the Indians.¹¹

      Martínez Compañón’s plans to assist the Indians must have been swirling in his head ever since he had learned of his promotion; but before he could focus on these matters, he had to attend to his duties as an ecclesiastical administrator in the capital. Rebuilding the demolished tabernacle, sacristy, and towers of Trujillo’s cathedral was paramount. He imagined a new neoclassical façade for the building—the same one that still adorns it today. He ordered a crypt constructed on the south patio to alleviate the foul odors resulting from the old practice of burying the city’s dead within the church itself. His drafting plans feature a window that allowed breezes to circulate, individual tombs one yard wide and two and a quarter yards long, and brick overlay on the limestone walls. In the new cabildo room that he commissioned for the cathedral, the Bishop gathered portraits of his thirty predecessors, compiling along with them a historical document detailing the major deeds of each.¹²

      In addition to these matters of fábrica—church structure, materials, and decoration—the Bishop made changes to ecclesiastical education in Trujillo. He knew that seminaries were of special importance to Charles III and his ministers, who wished to submit ecclesiastical education to empire-wide regulations. They were particularly interested in secular conciliar seminaries that would teach aspirants to the priesthood standardized courses of doctrine, grammar, rhetoric, geometry, and art. The Lima Provincial Church Council of 1772 also stressed the importance of seminaries, arguing that reforming the manners and behavior of priests was the best way to ensure proper behavior among the populace. Martínez Compañón must have had these decrees in mind when, upon his arrival in Trujillo, he found that the city’s San Carlos Conciliar Seminary was no longer operational. He set to work almost immediately, and, under his watch, the first repairs were complete as early as November 1781. He planned for the seminary to educate forty-eight students, half of whom would pay full price and half of whom would be Indian scholarship students.¹³

      But the Bishop’s vision for seminaries in Trujillo involved more than the traditional elite aspirants to the priesthood studying in the provincial capital. As Vasco de Quiroga had done with his own utopia in New Spain centuries earlier, Martínez Compañón was already imagining how seminary students in rural areas of Trujillo would become foot soldiers for his agenda of reform. Following the precedent of groups such as the Operarios del Salvador del Mundo and the Sacred Congregation of Propaganda (Propaganda Fide), first created in seventeenth-century Rome to recapture the faithful from Protestants, he planned four such missionary schools in the cities of Trujillo, Lambayeque, Piura, and Cajamarca. Priests, community members, and day students would study there, as well as young Indians who would learn Spanish, Christian doctrine, and basic literacy. The students, known as operarios eclesiásticos, or ecclesiastical workers, would make annual excursions into the countryside, where they would busy themselves “confessing the parishioners, visiting and consoling the sick, fixing disagreements and private discord … and leaving … rules of healthy governance.”¹⁴ They were to become, in essence, a native clergy of Creoles, mestizos, and Indians that could better reach people in sparsely populated areas distant from Spanish centers of control. The operarios would help to ensure that the people of rural Trujillo would behave as obedient