The colegios de propaganda fide represented a transatlantic apostolic network of the Franciscans, the largest religious order in Spain and Hispano-America. In the Hispanic world, the first colegio was founded in Querétaro, Mexico, by the Majorcan missionary Fray Antonio Llinás in 1683. The Franciscans established 29 colegios in Spain and Latin America; the last colegio was installed in Zapopan, Mexico in 1812. They even expanded in the period of Enlightenment and Bourbon Reforms, a period characterized by political centralization, state expansion, and increasing secularization.
This was a period of crisis for the Seraphic order (as for others). Regulars were increasingly criticized for their seemingly outdated lifestyle and their number. Conflicts intensified between different sectors of the order, and between American-born (creole) and the dominating Spanish-born (peninsular) friars. The main function of the colegios was to educate priests and their assistants for their assignments in frontier and popular missions such as the northern borderlands of New Spain, or Galicia in Spain. They also offered a pool of effective religious experts, who could be requested by bishops, for example, to help out in difficult curates. The colegios were independent from the respective Franciscan province where they were situated. The convents taken over with permission of the pope and the Spanish king provided for the housing of priests, lay friars, and novices.
Galindo offers a meticulous archival study of four colegios in Mexico (Querétaro), Bolivia (Tarija), and Spain (Herbón, Galicia, and San Miguel Escornalbóu, Catalonia), supplemented by important documents of the propaganda fide colegios in Zacatecas and Mexico City and other relevant primary and secondary sources. He provides deep insight into several areas: Franciscan organization, economy, and life within the colegios; recruiting practices, motivations and self-discipline of applicants, instruction and curricula, and applicants’ careers; ideology and missionary preaching; and cooperation with state officials, secular priests, and bishops.
He also presents the thoroughly researched legal and historical context for the colleges' educational and missionary activities. In looking to both the Spanish colonies and Iberia, the author raises an important issue often neglected by students of Latin American and Spanish history: the interdependence and exchange of ideas within the Hispanic world. Along the transatlantic network of the Franciscan colegios of propaganda fide, ideas, objects, and people moved back and forth, such as veteran missionaries travelling from New Spain back to their mother country for recruiting, teaching candidates, or continuing their missionary duties in Spanish popular missions.
The missionaries understood conversion not only as a fight against ‘idolatry,’ but also as a means of eradicating the sins and aberrancies within the Christian world. Therefore, no great difference existed between the missionary work among indigenous groups and that in the hitherto neglected Spanish peripheries. Even in cities and towns, conversion efforts were still called for because Christians sinned there, too. While preaching and hearing confessions, missionaries promoted acceptance of the contemporary political order and mediated Franciscan ideas, for example, ideas about God, the devil, women and children, the family, and a decent life. They aimed at both converting non-Christians and preventing Spanish, Indian or casta Catholics from recidivism and sinning.
In contrast to most scholarship on the Franciscans in Latin American history, the author focuses on the missionaries rather than the missionized. He includes perspectives of other regular orders and Franciscans not affiliated with the colegios. This is especially stimulating in cases of explicit comparison. However, at times these perspectives merge, and it is difficult to grasp the specificities and commonalities of the colleges within the Franciscan network in general and colleges and missions not pertaining to the propaganda fide type.
All in all, David Rex Galindo offers a cornucopia of fascinating information and inside views, not only of the colleges, but also of the Seraphic order in general. His thoroughly researched book is highly recommended to historians of the religious sphere interested in the Hispanic world.
