Examine the Role of the Church in Spain’s Conquest and Colonization of Continental America

QuestionExamine the federal agency of the church building in Spains victory and colonization of continental the States. The utilisation of the popish Catholic per cause in Spains conquest and colonization of continental the States was a two-fold process whereby to a lower place the frontlet of diversity and restrainer lay the basal goal of gaining wealth, enforcing laws and the inevitable extension of control while condoning the beginnings of European slavery in the Caribbean. i Alternately, behind the movement for converting Indians lay some important influences in Spain.The Spanish diadem found royal controls over the ecclesiastic benefices and over the immense wealth of the church. ii dickens papal bulls were youngd in the year of 1493 that established the Spanish position in the fresh World. They withal established the role that the church service was going to play in the hot World. The first bull, issued on May 3, 1493, was called the lay to rest Caetera. It declared that lands discovered by Spanish envoys, non under a rescuerian sustainer, could be claimed by Spain.The bull also gave the Spanish monarch power to post men to convert the natives to the Catholic credit and instruct them in Catholic morals. The scrap papal bull issued that year lard on the meaning of the first. The bull doctor a limit for Spanish and Portuguese spheres of influence in the impertinently World. This boundary heavily favored Spain, showing an shackle between Spain and the church building. Under the Spanish big top the hunting was resurrected in the form of the conquistadores to course d own heretics.In repressing the last non-Christian commonwealth in the Iberian Peninsula, Granada, and in forcibly expelling Jews and the Moors, King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella seek to purify Spanish society in a spirit of Christian unity. The acts were warlike expressions of ghostlike statehood on the establishment of the American colonization in the latt er vocalisation of the 1490s. iii The church which arrived in the Caribbean advocated what has been called warrior Catholicismiv, which is the mental picture that armament conquest and evangelization were compatible. v Acting in conjunction with the conquistadores, the Roman Catholic Church played a vital role in the Spanish system of colonization and is argued to be virtuoso of the virtually neat revolutionary devices of the Spanish Government. vi By its fudge factor and methods it assumed, the Church was almost a military and political agency designed to push back forward and def intercept the colonial frontiers, tranquillize the natives and open the way to European occupation. vii The conquering of the native Indians and the extension of the territorial boundaries express the role of the Church.The Church also served to declare colonial borders against foreign encroachment. By its ejection of heretical Protestants and by its strict security review of books, the Churc h made foreign political and philosophical ideas difficult or touch-and-go to obtain and served as a defensive mechanism of the Spanish pudding stone. viii It was mostly by the Roman Catholic Church that Spain succeeded in transmitting its culture and political authorization in the colonization of continental America during the 16th century. ix The Church was not lone(prenominal) an advance post of the Spanish imperium and a political device of colonialism.It had its own religious objectives and interests. The Spanish colonial empire was served exclusively by the clergy of the Roman Catholic Church which received energetic authorities support and encouragement in the form of grants of land to build churches, relieve passages for non-Christian priest, plain wine and oil for the monasteries. A power structure if archbishops, bishops, and lesser clergy were dispatched by the Crown to the New World. Priests were chiefly concerned with superintending the give way of converti ng the natives, whom they ideal of as primitive, to Christianity and protecting them from exploitation.The earliest groups were the friars, of whom the Dominicans were prominent. Later, the Franciscans and Jesuits became to a greater extent(prenominal) active. The Roman Catholic Church reinforce religious superiority over the Indians by dint of the Indians culture, worship and language. Associated with their attention to the uncanny inescapably of conversion, the priests endeavored to eliminate heathen practices among those Indians that they baptized. x The non-Christian batch of the Americas were not simply to be converted they were to be civilized, taught, humanized, purified and reformed.The Indians to be converted were strangers speaking in many unfamiliar tongues. In most founts, when the Friars first encountered them, they had been only recently conquered and subjugated, and regular(a) if not actively hostile they were liable(predicate) to retain covert antagonisms . In their capture all Spaniards were exploitative. The Indian religions were composites of ceremonies and attitudes of the most versatile sort, no single technique of conversion could be employed. Conversion required both the introduction of Catholic Christianity and the extirpation of lively native religions, and of the two tasks the latter was the more than difficult one. xi Modern anthropology demonstrates that the elimination of cultural traits was only partial. In Indian societies of the ordinal century, charge in the areas of most active Christian labour party, residual pagan forms survived. The burster programme resulted in the syncretism of the Indian religion and Roman Catholic Christianity. Indians might ingest responded enthusiastically to the new t individuallying, yet they tended to fork place Christianity as a doctrine compatible with their own tolerant pagan religions, and they allowed Christianity and heathenism to exist simultaneously as completing fa iths.A common Indian view held that one religious form was resorted to when an otherwise failed to fetch a desired result. xii However, in a process of religious syncretism, as priest constructed churches out of the stones of sunk temples, symbolizing and emphasizing the substitution of one religion by the other,xiii religious saints like the Aztecs Tonantzin and the stark(a) Mary became intermingled, creating a new depicted object symbol, the Virgin of Guadalupe. xivIn Mexico, Cortes forces washed-up Indian religious sites, cleaned them with lime and re set images of Quetzalcoatl and other Indian gods with images of Christ and the Virgin Mary. xv Native temples were torn down, idols destroyed and burnt, sacrificial wells were filled-in, writings were destroyed and other material evidence, anything the Roman Catholic Church considered as paganism were destroyed. xvi The Church was also concerned with the material and tangible welfare of the natives.Hospitals were particularly needed because of the epidemics which from age to time swept the land. A hospital not only provided treatment for the sick, entirely was lots a kind of poor-house as well, where the venerable and infirmed could be attended to, and where poor-relief could be dispensed. nearly all the social services in the Spanish colonies were provided by the clergy. However, despite the advances in saving the Indians from exploitation, the work of the Church lots caused distress and was sometimes harmful.In successful conversions, Indians supplied kink labour on the churches, hospitals, monasteries and schools without recompense, voluntarily, or at the command of their newly Christianized chiefs. The friars then proceeded to expand the Christianized area, by moving out into skirt townsfolks, where subordinate chapels were built. Co run Indians were brought into the conversion process to tending the friars. Indians who refused to accept Christianity were punished, sometimes by remnant.Th e labour of Christianization was further hindered by conflicts between friars and other branches of the society. The terms of the encomienda demanded that the masters should see to the Indians protection, with the responsibleness of seeing that they were cared for and taught to become more civilized. suitable more civilized really meant nobody more than giving signs that they accepted the Spanish as their masters, covering their bodies as European did, speaking Spanish and accepting the Christian faith.In return for Spanish protection the Indians were to micturate their service in the fields or mines of the encomenderos. The encomienda system was nothing more than a means of obtaining forced labour for the encomendero, Spanish conquistadors. No wages were paid for the work done and very often the Indians farms were finished by herds of cattle or swine be to their encomendero. They rarely had time to grow their own food for the forced labour left wing them neither time nor str ength.The Indians were not free to leave the encomienda and those who fled were hunted down by men on horseback with dogs. The death rate among the Indians shot up as a result of hunger, weakness and desperation among people whose traditional village and family spiritedness was completely destroyed. The Church and the encomienda became rival institution, each in its own way want control over the native populations. This issue between them erupted openly in 1511, when the Dominican friar Antonio de Montesinos first condemned the colonists treatment of the Indian in Hispaniola.Thereafter, under the leadership of Bartolome de Las Casas, another(prenominal) Dominican friar and others, ecclesiastical unfavorable judgment of encomienda became frequent and outspoken. The Spaniards saw the friars as meddlesome nuisances whose object was to pry into the livelihood of encomienda Indians, pink the encomenderos use of Indian labour and discover encomienda in letters to the king. Although the rights and wrongs of the encomienda system were discussed by the Crown it was decided that this system was demand if the colonies were to survive.There was no other way of successor the labour that the Indians provided. It was agreed, though, that the system would be improve organized and the rights of the Indians more properly protected. To this end the Thirty Two Laws of Burgos were published in 1512, whereby Spaniards were confirmed in their rights to coerce the Indians, but their obligations to convert them and treat them humanely were coiffe out in great detail, even to what food, clothes and beds they were to be supplied with. Two inspectors were to be appointed in each town to ensure that the rules were kept.Those laws could have corrected the abuses, but the practical difficulties of putting them into full picture on the far side of the Atlantic and the Andes, and against powerful vested interests, were difficult to prevail over. xvii The heyday added to the powers of the Church by giving it powers of censorship over all books entering the Empire. This was mean at first to keep out heretical Protestant works, but it was also used against political books. Education and the confessional enabled the Church and assisted the chase in retention a close watch on the movement of thought.The transatlantic movements of books were regulated in Seville. Popular and fictional literature came under the purview of the secular authorities (in Spain), which placed a ban in 1531 on the export of romances of chivalry to the Indies as world likely to corrupt the minds of the Indians. xviii To make these powers more effective, a branch of the Inquisition, a additional church court, was established from Spain. Its official powers were to enlist those who broke the laws such as blasphemy, bigamy, heresy, witchery, heterodoxy, and sins against God.The Inquisition punishment included penance, prison sentences, quality confiscation and burning at the stake. In formers could live anonymous and the crimes of so called heresy and witchcraft could have many interpretations. This tribunal was operating out of Lima, Mexico City and Cartagena by 1570. Protestant smugglers and raiders of all nationalities captured by the Spanish were brought in the beginning the Inquisition and charged as heretics. notwithstanding most importantly for the government of the Empire, the Inquisition could be used against influential people who showed too great a movement to criticize.In this way the Church played a part in keeping the colonies fasten to Spain The Roman Catholic Church operated without challenger in the circum-Caribbean colonial society during the ordinal century, where it performed both religious and political functions. In religion, it taught and converted the native Indians to Christianity and catered to the religious take of the Spanish community. Politically, it helped to extend the boundaries of the Spanish Empire by removing opposition to it in the case of the Indians by its teachings and in the case of Europeans, largely through the operation of the Inquisition.The Church did much good, but its efforts resulted in a name of drawbacks. For example the genuineness of the conversion of the Indians is doubtful. In generally, in all the colonies, the Church catered to the spiritual needs and at the same time contributed to the preservation of the society in which they operated.