Simon Ditchfield once memorably remarked that “saints are good to think with.” In Pious Imperialism: Spanish Rule and the Cult of Saints in Mexico City, Cornelius Conover reminds us that saints are good to rule with as well. He explains that he “adopted” San Felipe de Jesús “as a case study” because he “provides a particularly insightful entrée into Spanish imperialism and Catholic practice in Mexico City” from the colonial period into the nineteenth century (x, xv).

For one thing, the saint has a gripping life narrative. Born Felipe de las Casas into a Creole merchant family in Mexico City around 1571, he lived a somewhat wayward life as a youth, trying his hand at various professions, including a military career in Manila. There he decided to enter the religious life, taking temporary vows as a Discalced Franciscan. In 1596, Felipe boarded a ship bound for Mexico in order to make his formal vows. Hit by a series of storms, the ship was forced to land in Japan, at a time when its ruler was particularly hostile to Christian missionaries. On February 5, 1597 Felipe, five other friars, and twenty Japanese converts were taken to Nagasaki and executed by being tied to crosses and pierced with spears. Felipe may have met his death “by mistake” (x), but he would be venerated by the Catholic Church as a martyr. The group was beatified in 1627; three years later, Felipe de Jesús was proclaimed patron saint of Mexico City.

This does not mean that devotion to Felipe de Jesús remained constant over time, however. Conover analyzes the waxing and waning of Felipe's cult as a way of assessing both religious commitment and loyalty to the Spanish crown over more than two hundred years. He begins by placing his study within the historiography of religion and empire in colonial Spanish America and by defining terms. Most notably, he defines his own term “pious imperialism” as the “religious dimension of expansion and political cohesion within Catholic worship” (2). He also includes an outline of the book's chapters.

Chapter 2 focuses on the mission of Spanish members of the ascetic Discalced Franciscan order to Japan between 1593 and 1597. Conover highlights the competition between the friars and Portuguese Jesuits already embedded there, introducing the element of national as well as religious rivalry. For him, the Discalced Franciscans, who insisted upon wearing their traditional habits and preaching in Latin (as opposed to the more accommodationist Jesuits) represented “Spanish Catholic practice” and an insistence on “Spanish customs,” an intransigence that contributed to their deadly conflict with Japanese officials. Conover somewhat undermines this claim, however, simultaneously characterizing the friars as following “Old-World precedents” and “European standards.” He concludes that “the martyrdoms of 1597 were the culmination of a particular missionary outlook that interpreted Japanese culture in European terms” (33, emphasis added). Later in the book the author is clearer about articulating a “Hispanic variant of Catholicism” (60).

In any case, Spaniards acclaimed the martyred friars as their own. In chapter 3, Conover examines the “politics of piety” as monarchs and Discalced Franciscans called for the beatification of Felipe and his colleagues. As the action moves to Rome and the papal curia, the author does a good job of documenting the time, finances, bureaucracy, and diplomacy involved, evidence of “the Spanish Empire's heavy investment in saint-making” (53). Actions of this sort, he suggests, “cemented the role of the Spanish monarch as patron of the Spanish Church” and underscored “the Catholic intentions of empire” (57).

Chapter 4 returns to Mexico City, whose ecclesiastical and political leaders embraced its native son. Conover pays special attention to the liturgical calendar. Some saints were assigned one-day feasts with relatively simple programs of prayers, while others were awarded more elaborate eight-day celebrations. Using as a gauge this scale of saintly gravitas, as well as other indicators such as the funds allocated by the city council for processions, Conover shows that Felipe's cult enjoyed a rapid rise in the first half of the seventeenth century. He points out, though, that “his favored status was not guaranteed,” due to a lack of reported miracles and “uninspiring performance as municipal protector” during epidemics and natural disasters (73).

Indeed, by the last decades of the seventeenth century, the cult of Mexico City's patron saint experienced a marked downturn. In chapter 5, Conover attempts to explain these changes in “devotional culture,” examining demographic shifts, economic problems, and increased competition with the Virgin of Guadalupe and other “charismatic saints” whose “ability to perform miracles trumped identity issues” (92–93). He mentions the failure of the Discalced Franciscans to sponsor Felipe's feast in 1704 as an effect of this decline, but not as a causal factor. Vigorous preaching and publication by his own religious order, including intimations of thaumaturgic healing, may well have led to a different outcome.

Chapter 6, “Bourbons and Breviaries,” is, in my view, the book's strongest. Here Conover makes an original contribution by extending the concept of Bourbon Reform to include religious—or, more specifically, liturgical—reform. In the second half of the eighteenth century, Spanish officials—many of them influenced by Enlightenment ideas about good government—came to Mexico to enact policies meant to curb corruption and ameliorate the colony's economic crisis. Along with austerity measures, ecclesiastical officials began to cut back on the public veneration of saints. It is at this point in the book that it becomes clear that Conover's interest in liturgy is not only about prayers per se, but also their economic impact. Reformers were intent upon “cutting the feasts of precept with their obligation to rest from work” (111), changes which may have made the economy more efficient but faced opposition from many believers.

What eventually ended the era of “pious imperialism” in Mexico City were the tumultuous events set off by the Napoleonic invasion of Spain and deposition of Ferdinand VII in 1808, the Mexican War of Independence, and the new nation's difficult transition to republican rule. In chapters 7 and 8, Conover focuses on Mexico City's cathedral chapter to chart momentous changes in public religious practice, as with so many other aspects of life. By the mid-nineteenth century, the Mexican military “increasingly took the church's place to provide magnificence and solemnity in official ceremonies” (167). However, at precisely this time, in 1862, Felipe de Jesús was canonized as a saint—although the reader needs to turn back to the preface to learn about the fascinating confluence of events that brought this to pass (xiv–xv).

In following this saint and his cult over several centuries and political regimes, Conover has made a welcome contribution to the scholarship on the intersection of religion and power in the Spanish empire.