Pastoral Visitations, Catholic Reform, and the Missions

As various students of the Catholic Reformation have noted, the pastoral visit was a foundation of the policies prompted by the Council of Trent. Its objectives were to oversee the correct teaching and practice of doctrine, reform customs, inspire or renew religious fervor, reaffirm the authority of the Church's ministers, and restore balance to the relationship between parish priest and parishioners.Footnote ³ These objectives are described clearly in the decrees of the Council of Trent in its Twenty-Fourth Session.Footnote ⁴ As a disciplinary method and vehicle by which the bishops exercised their authority, pastoral visitations did not represent an entirely new practice, even if before Trent one does not detect a similar concern on the part of the Church to carry them out in such a methodical and extensive way.Footnote ⁵ Indeed, the Tridentine pastoral visitation encouraged uniformity within the Church as possibly never before in its history. The objectives of regularizing mechanisms of government, individual conduct, and doctrinal knowledge, and of overseeing the conduct and training of the clergy, were attempted at the same time in Europe and in the Americas. The intensity and reach of the visitations varied from diocese to diocese and depended on the will and means of the bishops, whose authority was considerably reinforced by them.

A crucial aspect of pastoral visitations, of which we historians of colonial Latin America have not taken sufficient note, is that this intervention by the Church represented an innovation not only in the Andes or in Mexico, but also in many European dioceses.Footnote ⁶ The decrees issued by the bishops who met at Trent sought to clarify doctrinal matters that had arisen in the controversy with the Protestants, to create ways of encouraging the religious education of parishioners, and to promote the appropriate training of clergy.Footnote ⁷ Without question, the Church had before it a task of massive proportions. And to identify places where in the Church's eyes it was urgent that visitations be held, there was no need to seek out remote locations. For example, in her study of pastoral visitations to the Diocese of Trent in the years after the council, Cecilia Nubola notes that within this very jurisdiction, there existed no tradition of regularly conducted pastoral visitations for which the diocesan ordinary was responsible.Footnote ⁸ The resistance of the local clergy to the bishops' inspections and the scant preparation and the frank ineptitude for the position that many parish priests displayed were evident even within the diocese that had hosted the sessions of the council.Footnote ⁹

In a recent synthesis of the significance of the Tridentine decrees, Robert Bireley has noted that the expansion of missionary activity in Asia and the Americas did not receive serious attention from the council.Footnote ¹⁰ This omission could be interpreted as a lack of interest in regions and peoples that were so distant, but it is also possible to contend that, given the intention of the council to provide direction to the Catholic world in its entirety, it did not need to concern itself with any region in particular.Footnote ¹¹ It was the task of the provincial and diocesan synods to adapt the decrees of Trent to local situations, and this is exactly what was done in Europe and in Spanish America.Footnote ¹²

The correspondence to the decrees of Trent that was maintained in the decrees of the Lima councils, especially the Third (1581–1583), is not surprising. The work of the bishops and their advisors who met in Lima consisted precisely in adapting the decrees to local conditions, a task that was continued during the following years by the synods, which we will examine below. The implementation of the decrees went well beyond the ecclesiastical ambit—suffice it to recall that Philip II was one of the European monarchs who received them as laws of the state, just shortly after the Trent council sessions concluded.Footnote ¹³ The study and meticulous comparison of the conciliar decrees and, especially, of the doctrinal materials published by the Third Council with those produced by other dioceses can help us to better understand not only the universal dimension of the organization of the Church in the Andes, but also the work of adaptation that was effected.Footnote ¹⁴

The examination of pastoral visitations allows the historian to inquire beyond formal texts and to analyze the application of their directives and their entwinement with concrete aspects of the life of the Indian parishes.Footnote ¹⁵ Although the information gathered by the visitors (visitadores) is often uneven, one can nonetheless infer from the inspection reports some aspects of local policy that were affected by this interaction with the activity of the Church's representatives. I have organized and compared the questionnaires from pastoral visitations to Indian parishes belonging to the Diocese of Lima that took place in 1619, 1642, 1648, and 1667.Footnote ¹⁶ To these I have added the documents sent out by the Third Council of Lima in 1583 to guide the pastoral visitations.Footnote ¹⁷ Checking the questions against the objectives proposed in the documents of the Council of Trent confirms the intimate dependency that the texts maintain among themselves. The adaptations to local conditions are slight, but important. These pertain especially to the knowledge of indigenous languages that parish priests were required to demonstrate.Footnote ¹⁸ The questionnaires reflect the concerns of the Catholic Church as a universal institution. One can deduce upon first examination that the Andean parishioners were not treated in any special way. The questions used during the pastoral visitation interviews were the same as those that would have been asked of, for example, a Spanish peasant, and likewise, they implied that Andeans were expected to fulfill the same precepts that were required of parishioners in any rural village of Catholic Europe.Footnote ¹⁹

The topics covered by the questionnaires can be grouped as follows:

Source: Archivo Arzobispal de Lima, Visitas Pastorales, seventeenth century.

The episcopal inspector's objective was to confirm that the priest was administering the sacraments correctly and, as much as possible, to everyone, and that he did not charge the parishioners for doing so. Also, the inspector sought to verify that the priest kept parish registers wherein baptisms, marriages, and burials were properly recorded. These were requirements that weighed as heavily in the context of conversion as did the Christian education of the parishioners and the construction and consolidation of episcopal jurisdiction. Sacraments like baptism or matrimony were indicators not only of the degree to which the people of the parish were incorporated into the bosom of the Church but also of how, in consequence, they conformed to the modifications to the organization of kinship that the Church was attempting to instill. These modifications had significant consequences for society. For example, to create and disseminate the concept of illegitimacy and to prohibit polygamy (thereby limiting the numbers of offspring, especially those of local authorities) was to create obstacles to, or modify, the mechanisms of succession and inheritance.Footnote ²⁰

One of the inspectors' constant demands was that the priests conduct censuses of confesados, or those who had made their confession. The creation of these registers was essential if the bishop or his representative were to accomplish the objective of overseeing the progress of evangelization. Confession was a powerful means not only of revealing errors of conduct and thought that had to be corrected and punished, but also of insuring that the population would submit to the authority of the priest, and through him, to the Church. The census of confesados helped to control the movements of the parishioners of the Indian parishes, albeit within certain limits.Footnote ²¹

The bishop's envoy had to ascertain whether the parish priest preached to his congregation regularly—preferably in the indigenous language—and whether he said Mass and undertook the instruction of his parishioners on the appointed days. After the Council of Trent, the Church asked that parish priests be personally involved in preaching to the faithful, instead of delegating the work to itinerant or invited friars who, because of their superior theological and (often) linguistic training, customarily educated the population by means of the sermon.Footnote ²² This objective was not easy to attain; hence the concern with establishing seminaries for the preparation of the clergy, and in the New World, the demand that the pastors of Indian parishes know the language of their parishioners.

To the concern with compliance of the priest and parishioners was added the inspection of the state of the church building, its decoration, and its cemetery. It was also important to verify that the rituals of the Mass and the sacraments were being conducted correctly and that the priest periodically visited the annexes of the parish. The interest in the material aspect of the Indian parish bore an importance that went further than the increase in or deterioration of Church patrimony. The state of the church and its ornaments was an indication of the correctness, propriety, or “decency” of worship in general, and of the parish's standing in particular, as we shall see further on.

Under the heading of “personal conduct” were grouped the inquiries into whether the priest received guests for extended periods, lived alone or with others, gambled, and (although not in every case) displayed a suitable personal appearance. Under the category of “gobierno” (administration) we note a single but interesting question asking whether the priest received the royal magistrate (corregidor) into the town—or allowed the parishioners to do so—with the ringing of the church bells. The question reflects, on a small scale, a concern that representatives of the Church take pains to demonstrate publicly what might seem like a disproportionate deference toward the representatives of temporal power, the subject of recurrent political debate and a frequent source of tension. Although asking the question was always required, it almost never appeared in the questionnaires, possibly because it dealt with a complicated topic that no one had any intention of resolving.

Regarding the priest's scrutiny of the Indian parishioners, one notes important contrasts. In the first place, the two earliest available questionnaires, both dated 1619, include practically no questions about their conduct.Footnote ²³ This omission corresponds to what we read in the synodal constitutions of 1613 and 1636. In the first of these, the majority of the sections pertaining to pastoral visitations prioritized examining the comportment of the priest; in contrast, the same constitutions, following the recommendations of previous texts, advised in general a friendly, persuasive, and paternal attitude toward parishioners. The use of force was advised only if these efforts had been tried and exhausted.Footnote ²⁴ Only one of the sections addressed cohabitation, drunkenness, and guacas (sacred places or shrines); it called for the application of “great vigilance and punishment,” advising that the procedures drawn up in the Second Council of Lima (1567) be followed.Footnote ²⁵

The questionnaires corresponding to the term of Archbishop Pedro de Villagómez (1642) contained a series of questions that, although not completely unprecedented, left no stone unturned in their scrutiny of parishioners' lives and conduct. In pursuing these questions, the inspector had to ascertain, for example, whether there were any Indians who had shown signs of heresy or had “sown errors”; any who had committed public sins and caused scandal; any who believed in omens including those taken from “libros de suertes” [books of fortune-telling or divination]; or any who had failed to receive the sacraments, neglected to baptize children, or failed to bury the dead in consecrated places.Footnote ²⁶ It would appear from the level of detail that Villagómez with these questionnaires was introducing some new element to the inquiries to which the indigenous parishes would be submitted. However, what we see here is actually a reflection of a common practice of the Church: rather than innovate, return to the original source. Indeed, when we compare the questionnaire of 1642 to the General Edict of the Third Council (1583), we can observe that the questions are virtually the same.Footnote ²⁷

A brief comparison of the investigations conducted during the pastoral visitations in the Diocese of Lima with those of pastoral visitations in Spain and other parts of Catholic Europe during the seventeenth century shows great similarity in both the questions asked and the procedures for administering the questionnaires.Footnote ²⁸ Comparisons of the themes of questions from pastoral visitations in the Lima diocese to the themes investigated during the course of visitations in Seville, the Portuguese Algarve, Trent, and the diocese of Paris, suggests that the scope of the examinations conducted by the bishops or their representatives in the Andean parishes was very similar, if somewhat scaled down in its execution with regard to personnel and institutions. For example, whereas in Seville parishes the examinations included musicians, teachers, and chaplains (capellanes), these figures were not mentioned in the questionnaires administered in the Andean Indian parishes. The inquiries in the Andes revolved mainly around the figure of the parish priest.

Unlike European pastoral visitations, the ordinary visitations in the diocese of Lima make no mention of the presence of health specialists. Whereas the visitations to the dioceses of Seville and Paris included, for example, questions and observations about the performance of doctors and midwives, such concerns are barely discernible in the documents from Lima.Footnote ²⁹ Questions on this subject do appear in the instructions to the bishops' envoys and in the examinations themselves, but questions regarding medical specialists and health, as well as what were considered religious errors, typically came to bear mainly in idolatry visitations, where a significant number of proceedings investigated persons who had been accused and prosecuted as sorcerers and curanderos (healers).Footnote ³⁰

Thus far, we have given a general view of the nature of pastoral visitations. It can be said that both types of visitation—the regular visitations and those investigating idolatry—pursued the same end, though the emphasis varied significantly. An examination of the papers extant in the Archivo Arzobispal de Lima catalogued under the heading of “Visitas Pastorales” suggests that the regular visitations focused on the examination of priests. They give the impression of having been proceedings through which the Church evaluated its own performance. In the idolatry visitations, the documents that most deserve greater attention from researchers place the weight of the investigations completely upon the parishioners.Footnote ³¹ We will see below how the inhabitants of the Indian parishes understood and handled the objectives of pastoral visitations.

Pastoral Visitations and the Affirmation of Church Authority

The bishop, or in his place his inspector (visitador), was charged with ensuring that the visitation was conducted “with love and much virtue and if not, by fear and the exemplary punishment of transgressors.”Footnote ³² This meant that the inspector had to make use of a variety of means to execute his task. The instructions were an invitation to steer clear of extremes, and in general the bishops' envoys avoided any measures that could have destabilized the Indian parishes. More than a few visitors were genuinely interested in gaining an understanding of local circumstances but although they lent an ear to the complaints and denunciations brought by the indigenous parishioners, they affirmed the priests' authority in the end, even when they detected slight irregularities or grave failings.

The pastoral visitations made ample and astute use of ritual. The occasion required an atmosphere that reaffirmed the legitimacy of the Christian faith and the authority of its symbols and ministers, thus encouraging in the participants an emotional response to the message conveyed by the bishop or his representative. For this reason, the arrival of the ecclesiastical envoy could not be unexpected. The envoy was well aware of what equipment he had to bring, and the attire suitable for the different phases of the visitation. He understood that procedural details had to be observed meticulously.Footnote ³³ His instructions specified the hour at which he must make his entrance into the town, and the prayers, masses, songs, and gestures that he, along with his entourage, the priest, and the faithful, had to perform.

The inspector had to know that masterful timing was crucial throughout the visitation, and adjust his actions accordingly. The visitation included the inspection of the church building and its ornament and ritual equipment; the visit to the cemetery accompanied by prayers for the dead; the inspection of the baptismal font, the holy oils, and the tabernacle; and the review of the parish registers. In addition, there would be an examination of the priest regarding his preparation, credentials, readings, and sermons, and his command of his parishioners' language. During the visitation, the bishop's emissary and his retinue gathered information about everything that went on in the parish district, and, as various documents that have come down to us suggest, they adapted their questioning of the local authorities and other members of the parish in accordance with the findings of the assembled facts and testimonies.

It was in this climate that the Church affirmed its authority. Through their leaders and other persons called to testify, the parishioners presented their grievances and accusations and responded to the standard questionnaire. Thus appeared complaints along the lines of which we are already familiar, such as the violent behavior of parish priests, the business interests in which some of them were involved, the fees charged for the administration of the sacraments, and the arbitrary and excessive collection of alms.Footnote ³⁴ It was no small thing for such matters to be aired, even if the responses to them were inconsistent. Through these exchanges, conflicts in the indigenous parish could be eased, or perhaps made more complicated; we at least have enough evidence to assume that the pastoral visitation opened a space in which a number of situations occurring during the process of evangelization could be contested. And in the course of these discussions, procedures and ideas about what was and was not just and correct were learned and disseminated. Did the parish priest preach on the days he was obligated to do so? Did he personally baptize children, or did he send others to perform this duty? Was he capable of confessing his parishioners in their own language? Where, in what form, and under what pretexts did he collect alms and offerings?

To a greater or lesser extent, the pastoral visitation played a significant part in the formation of Indian parishes as sociopolitical units. In other words, what the Church required from Indian parishes and Indian parishioners had a crucial effect in shaping their political culture. A theme little-studied in Andean historiography but more explored in the history of colonial Mexico is that of conflict among rural villages over the head towns (cabeceras) and annexes of the indigenous parishes.Footnote ³⁵ The inhabitants of the parochial jurisdictions participated actively in this issue, in which the sphere of the sacred played a fundamental role. Contrary to the frequently suggested interpretation, this type of intervention on the part of the indigenous population was in no way a simple tool used to manage secondary interests. The inquiry into the correct administration of the sacraments opened a door through which the matter was debated in some indigenous parishes and through which those involved could form their arguments and have them heard. To analyze this subject I will make use of documents from the pastoral visitation of a parish in the highlands of the Diocese of Lima from the mid-seventeenth century.

Visitations, Political Accommodation, and the Place of the Sacred

In May 1648, during a pastoral visitation to the indigenous parish of San José del Chorrillo, the licentiate Francisco Calvo de la Cámara inspected the church's tabernacle and found it open and unlocked. He noted that there was inside it a silver monstrance, but that it was empty.Footnote ³⁶ The licentiate Martín de Mena Godoy, pastor of the parish, gave as the immediate explanation that the tabernacle key had been lost. The disturbance this fact produced in the visitor, his retinue, and all those present must have been profound, given that a focal point of the ritual of the church visitation was the moment in which the envoy, having examined the tabernacle, would display the Blessed Sacrament to be adored by those assembled.Footnote ³⁷ In the days that followed, Calvo de la Cámara investigated, among other things, whether the Eucharist was present in the churches of the ecclesiastical district. Eighteen people, all adult males, were called to testify. As was customary, the group was predominantly made up of authorities, including caciques, governors, headmen, camachicos, and mayors.Footnote ³⁸ The questionnaire drawn up by the inspector included an inquiry into the conduct of the Blessed Sacrament:

Mena Godoy must have known that questions about his performance as parish priest would be among the first asked, and that these questions would concern his administration of the sacraments. Thus it is imperative to ask why the licentiate had not, apparently, addressed a matter so critical to the fulfillment of his parochial responsibilities. The statements of the caciques, headmen, and other authorities of the parish make it evident that they were very well informed about the purpose and importance of the question. The issue of the absence of the Host was closely entwined with other aspects of life in their communities; the priest's explanation of such an alarming lack pointed to the complicated weave of the very fabric that united them.Footnote ⁴⁰

The town of San José del Chorrillo belonged to the district of Huarochirí, a rich province in the highlands of Lima that provided workers and foodstuffs to the capital of the viceroyalty and its surrounding areas. Because of its proximity to Lima, Huarochirí was often visited by civil and ecclesiastical authorities. Several Jesuit missions were periodically charged with the indoctrination of the population and, especially in the seventeenth century, more than a few of the inhabitants were reprimanded and even punished for their apparently scant adherence to orthodoxy.Footnote ⁴¹ In the years that followed the arrival of the Spanish, the population of the province underwent profound changes that affected the size of its population and the location of several of its principal settlements. In 1586, the corregidor of Huarochirí, Diego Dávila Briceño, asserted in the Relación he wrote about the province that he had, in the 13 years he had held the post, reduced a population previously dispersed across more than 200 hundred towns into just 39.Footnote ⁴² Even if the magistrate exaggerated the number of towns that existed before he was charged with creating the reductions, several indicators suggest that in Huarochirí they produced displacements significant enough to result in the relocation of coastal and highland populations that had not previously shared the same territory.Footnote ⁴³

Some of these changes were effected to facilitate the trade between Lima, the central highlands, and Cuzco. In San José, as in the neighboring town of Sisicaya, there had been tambos or places for the rest and provisioning of travelers.Footnote ⁴⁴ The reorganization of territory that the magistrate carried out also had as its objective the separation of the local population from its traditional sacred places and the destruction of the resources that had been allocated for their cult.Footnote ⁴⁵ We do not know if San José del Chorrillo had been founded upon an old pre-Hispanic settlement, as was the case for its neighbor Sisicaya, or whether its population was composed of groups from other places.Footnote ⁴⁶ One possible indication that the changes Dávila Briceño claimed to have introduced would have been drastic is that this town, although it was assigned the rank of head town of the indigenous parish, did not have an indigenous name, unlike the majority of towns in Peru.Footnote ⁴⁷ The ecclesiastical visitation of 1648 reveals that 60 years after Dávila Briceño wrote his Relación, the order that he had resolved to impose had changed. The changes and their consequences were manifested in divergent perceptions of the place of the sacred and of the state of the religious indoctrination of the population, as well as in the hierarchy of the towns of the Indian parish.

The statements gathered by the ecclesiastical inspector suggest that the Host was absent from the churches of at least seven of the eight towns of the parish. Some witnesses, like don García Llacsayauri, governor of Sisicaya, claimed that it was not present in any of the churches in the parish district.Footnote ⁴⁸ Juan Bautista, from the town of Santiago de Conchauayca de Guamansica, and don Juan Chauca Guaman, headman and mayor of San Cristóbal de Chatacancha, said that in the churches of their respective towns there was not even a tabernacle.Footnote ⁴⁹ Other witnesses, like Sebastián Fabián from the town of San Francisco de Callaguaya, asserted not only that they knew that the Sacrament was not in their town's church but that no one had ever seen it.Footnote ⁵⁰ Don Juan Bautista Vilca Caxa, from the town of San José del Chorrillo, said that he had seen the Sacrament only during Corpus Christi and Easter processions.Footnote ⁵¹ Don Lorenzo Canchu Manco, mayor of San José del Chorrillo, affirmed that in spite of having collected donations for the wax and oil needed to light the sanctuary lamp, there was no Host.Footnote ⁵² Juan Quispi Yalli, camachico of the town of Sisicaya, said that he had gone into the church in the town of San José del Chorrillo to pray and was sure that he had been in its presence, but he was not able to confirm that he had seen it.Footnote ⁵³ Everyone concurred in saying that there would be “great consolation and happiness” if the Blessed Sacrament were present in every church of the towns belonging to the parish district.

As he was questioned by the bishop's envoy, Mena Godoy revealed an important aspect of the then-current political conditions in the Indian parish under his care. He explained that in his parish district there were only two towns; one was the head town that had resulted from the reducción (San José del Chorrillo), but the origin of the other, Santo Domingo de los Olleros, he did not explain. The rest of the population groups were ayllos (kinship groups) that had formed towns from ranches (estancias) or from settlements created by people who had fled the mitas (forced labor) and other unfortunate or oppressive circumstances. They were small, poor villages whose residents had built makeshift churches where Mass could not comfortably be said. The two principal towns were in conflict with these newcomers, whose existence they tried not recognize. In Mena Godoy's words, the principal towns wanted the parvenu towns to be reduced into themselves. The most powerful, it seems, had obtained government provisions in their favor, but the pastoral visitation's findings made it clear that they had not achieved their objective.Footnote ⁵⁴

The situation that the priest of San José del Chorrillo described shows the degree to which the reducciones, to which Dávila Briceño had proudly pointed at the end of the sixteenth century, had changed. This alteration was due to the actions of the local population, a portion of whom had returned to their old settlements or had formed others that would allow them to obtaining their livelihoods more easily or at least to manage their resources more conveniently.Footnote ⁵⁵ But it must be noted that these changes took place with the knowledge and consent of the Church, which, on the occasion of the pastoral visitation, endorsed them with its ritual activity. Santo Domingo de los Olleros, which Mena Godoy represented as one of the two head towns of his Indian parish, had figured neither in the Relación nor in Dávila Briceño's map. As other researchers have observed, this town could possibly have been founded at the beginning of the seventeenth century.Footnote ⁵⁶ According to the statements that the ecclesiastical visitor gathered, the feast of Corpus Christi was celebrated in the two towns by turns, one year in San José del Chorrillo and the other in Santo Domingo de los Olleros.Footnote ⁵⁷ The witnesses who said they had seen the Blessed Sacrament were sure they had done so in the churches of those towns.Footnote ⁵⁸

Clearly, the presence of the Sacrament in its church could give legitimacy to a village's aspiration to have its own authorities, retain a significant margin of independence, and possess a church that would enjoy ritual privileges similar to those of its neighbors. Over the course of 60 years the inhabitants of one town in the province of Huarochirí had attained these successes by various means, not all of which are known to us; however, we can affirm that one of them was achieved by negotiating with parish priests and episcopal envoys whose intervention and recognition they sought, and succeeded in obtaining.