Marvels and Miracles in Late Colonial Mexico by William B. Taylor

Author:William B. Taylor [Taylor, William B.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, Latin America, Mexico
ISBN: 9780826349750
Google: EpEfkgAACAAJ
Publisher: University of New Mexico Press
Published: 2011-01-15T00:45:37+00:00

CONCLUSION

At one level, Father de la Rosa’s ambitions and career retrace the sixteenth-century history of Franciscans in Mexico—from an expansive, evangelizing zeal and some freedom to act upon it; to intervention by superiors; to conflict, withdrawal, and disappointment over the interference and incomplete results; to a longing for renewal. But these were not neat, sequential stages in de la Rosa’s life, and there are other differences that have much to do with this friar and his time.

Like the founding generation, he was a doer more than a thinker, a self-described man of “ardent zeal” focused on the idea of spiritual revival and conquest. But he was a less independent, less imposing figure than such famous predecessors as Pedro de Gante, Motolinía, and Martín de Valencia. He was a weaker character ensnared in the institutional life of the order and the politics of a different time, a city man much attached to his role as an occasional notary and inspector of books for the Inquisition.29 He could care more about his personal dignity and reputation than was fitting for a mendicant (memorably here when he abandoned a “ridiculous mule” at the entrance to the city rather than be seen collecting alms in such an “indecent” manner30). Above all, his idea of evangelizing mission was clouded by his Mexico City preoccupations and his low opinion of Indians as fellow Christians. He seems to have been happiest and most effective amid stacks of documents, conducting the business of the archive and library. There his punctiliousness, energy, and talent for managing records and ordering facts made him invaluable to the Franciscans in the years of litigation for the order that followed his removal from Nativitas.31

The years spanned by de la Rosa’s association with the image of Nuestra Señora del Patrocinio (1739–1775) were momentous for the institutional church and local religion in the viceroyalty, and it was an especially trying period for the Franciscans. Royal officials and regalist bishops were moving to curb “excessive” popular devotions and the influence of friar-pastors. They decreed fewer and less elaborate feast day celebrations, challenged the use of Indian languages in the liturgy, virtually removed the mendicant orders from their traditional pastoral responsibilities in central and southern Mexico, and limited the authority of parish priests in other ways.32 Between 1749 and the time he composed his account of Nuestra Señora del Patrocinio, the Franciscans lost nearly all of their doctrinas (including Nativitas), and other reforms to further professionalize and subordinate the clergy were well under way.

De la Rosa was alert to these changes, especially during his years in charge of the archive and library,33 and he was an avid student of early Franciscan history in Mexico. But he was blind to patterns of a less remote past and how his own troubles folded into the higher politics of church and state that swirled around him. He was convinced that his troubles at Nativitas and elsewhere—including his failure to win a place among the Fernandines, the string of reassignments, and

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