John Frederick Schwaller has produced a book that has long been needed in Latin American studies: a history of the Catholic Church over 500 years. While the Catholic Church was the dominant religious institution in Latin America for 400 years, since the early twentieth century it has shared the field with other religions, especially Pentecostalism. This has led to a generalised religious revival in the region. Schwaller explains well both the monumental changes in the Catholic Church and the attraction of Pentecostals.
He has done so with years of preparation and a thoroughness unmatched among those writing for an English-language audience, and with a religious sensibility that is unusual among Latin American historians trained to leave Church history to ecclesiastics. Schwaller undertook doctoral studies at Indiana University during the period after the Second World War when universities were preparing students for the Cold War era. Fortunately this push for international understanding was a general impetus toward greater cultural understanding, and not narrowly focused on containing communism. Schwaller chose to study the secular clergy in sixteenth-century Mexico for his dissertation, later published. For some years he investigated the broader context of indigenous culture. He studied Nahuatl and made a long-standing hobby of publishing works in Spanish about Nahuatl manuscript collections in the United States.
The pattern of his scholarly life – finely focused investigations within a broad context – was set. He continued to expand methodically his understanding of the Church in the Spanish colonial era. In Spanish he published Partidos y párrocos bajo la real corona (INAH, 1981). Moreover, he investigated the all-important economic support of the colonial Church in Origins of Church Wealth in Mexico: Ecclesiastical Revenues and Church Finances, 1523–1600 (University of New Mexico Press, 1985).
His next step was to network with other colonial scholars to publish an anthology on the Church in colonial Latin America in 2000, affording him the opportunity to enlarge his understanding of Portuguese and Spanish South America. During the same period in his life, he assumed high-level administrative posts, culminating in his present position as president of the State University of New York at Potsdam. The responsibilities of these posts slowed him down, so that the volume under consideration, his magnum opus, took seven years to complete.
The result is a magnificent accomplishment. Schwaller's familiarity with indigenous Latin American religion and with religion on the Iberian peninsula before Columbus' and Cabral's voyages to the New World allowed him to produce a portrait of the predecessors to the hybrid Catholic religion that would follow conquest. His depth of study of clergy (he has a sure hand in dealing with religious orders as well) and his history of initial evangelisation prepared him for an excellent account of encounters of civilisations.
The key tests of Schwaller's handling of Latin America in this volume, beyond his grounding in New Spain (Mexico) and the ancillary Mayan regions, would be his accounts of South America, primarily viceregal Peru and Portuguese Brazil. He has done well in both histories, in large part because he understood well the Iberian condition from which both explorers and missionaries came. Perhaps more importantly, he has a good grasp of the history of the Holy See in the pre-colonial and colonial periods and the relation of the papacy to the early Latin American Church.
Whereas many historians have merely described the royal patronage that Spain and Portugal enjoyed, Schwaller is able to pass confident judgment about the strengths and weaknesses of such an arrangement. Significantly, he notes, the economic resources needed for the evangelisation of a continent were never fully forthcoming from Iberia or Rome. He has a careful reading of what took place (or failed to take place) between the Iberian monarchs and the Holy See regarding the Church in the first centuries of Iberian rule. As a result of his evidence one may see more clearly that neither the Holy See nor the Iberian peoples were able to provide adequate pastoral care for many new Christians.
Schwaller's historical recounting has three special merits. First, he tells his story on two levels – elite (king, conquerors, bishops, colonial administrators) and non-elite (missionaries and ordinary folk) – bringing both sectors into play. Second, he pays strong attention to language and symbolic gesture throughout. He supplies various examples of miscommunication between indigenous people and missionaries, a central fact of Latin America for centuries. Lastly, his expository style is pointillist: he makes many small, well-chosen points to build a clear picture. While this may slow speed-readers, the overall effect is precious. One leaves reading Schwaller enriched with vivid details rather than pre-digested summaries.
The competing major history of the Latin American Catholic Church was written by Enrique Dussel, an Argentine scholar, largely trained in Europe and working for most of his professional life in Mexico. While serving as head of the Comisión de Estudios de Historia de la Iglesia en América Latina (Commission for the Study of the History of the Church in Latin America), Dussel published a one-volume history of the Christian Church in Latin America. For some historical scholars, especially in the British and North American traditions, Dussel's work was too ideological, in the sense that it was deliberately pitched to provide a view of ecclesiastical history, Catholic and Protestant, written on the side of the poor and marginal. Nothing wrong with that, perhaps, but readers and scholars will do better by perusing Schwaller, whose small-scaled and accurate details about the poor and marginal peoples as well as the elite end up being more satisfying than Dussel's summative and pre-judged statements. Just as final judgments ought to be left to judges in a court of law, in the matter of books, final judgments should be left to readers, at least adult and mature ones.
Schwaller's history is not the final word. A great lacuna among Church historians has been the portrayal of the Latin American Catholic Church in the nineteenth century. Not nearly enough attention has been given to the great weakness that overtook the Church in the events that followed Independence from Spain (1810–25), as the Spanish clergy left the region in exile and remained incommunicado from the Holy See for a prolonged period. Bishoprics remained unoccupied, seminaries emptied out, and some national churches became moribund. Schwaller presents some of the elements of this great decline, without fully developing them. His attention is too tightly focused on the Church–liberal conflicts of the period, with a consequent neglect of the details of the institutional devastation taking place in cathedral chapters, parishes, and missions.
Other themes also await future authors to develop them more fully. One of these is the contemporary dialogue among indigenous religions, such as Mayan Catholics, Mayan Protestants and what are called Maya-Maya (or non-Christians) in Mesoamerica, including the Yucatán, as well as the Andean region. Similarly the dialogue between black Catholics and Afro-Brazilians will need further academic historical accounts beyond the ethnography of John Burdick and others.
By many measures, such as the increased numbers of priests, seminarians and lay catechists, Latin American Catholicism is enjoying a significant religious revival in the twenty-first century. John Frederick Schwaller provides essential background for understanding the long journey that has led to that revival.
