Summary
1 The modern period
2 The discoveries and the expansion of Christendom
3 The evangelization of non-Christian populations
3.1 The Amerindians
3.2 The peoples of Africa
3.3 Colonial slavery and Catholicism
4 The Reforms
4.1 The Protestant reforms
4.2 The Christian Churches
4.3 Catholic Reformation
4.4 New and old orders and congregations
5 Latin American popular religiosity
6 Bibliographical references
1 The modern period
At the dawn of what we call the modern period (from the 15th century onwards), a series of instances in social, economic, and political life changed drastically. Since the schism generated by the papacy in Avignon, the authority of the popes had been undermined by the desire for autonomy of national sovereigns in their developing states. This political transformation, which replaced the decentralization characteristic of the feudal system with centralization, went beyond the sphere of state politics and unfolded in other areas. Examples of state action in other spheres are economic mercantilism, based on the royal prerogative to structure the economy by granting monopolies and preserving royal preserves; and the control that monarchs progressively exercised over Catholicism or the Reformation process in their domains (leading, as in England, administering, as in France, or preventing, as in the Iberian case). It is possible to think that even geography and demography changed abysmally with the integration of the Americas and Africa into the political, economic, and religious system of the modern West.
This period ends with the advent of republican liberalism, a child of the Enlightenment that began in the 17th century with philosophers like John Locke and Thomas Hobbes in England. These thinkers ultimately broke with the divine aura that legitimized the power of absolutist kings. In their texts, monarchical government appears as a necessity of life in society â Hobbes â and noble distinctions are no longer produced by innate differences, but are social constructs â Locke. The work of these philosophers would prepare and help to found the Enlightenment thought of the following century. Although little is said about it, the two groups, the English of the 17th century and the French of the 18th, operated with concepts that were already used by 16th-century theologians, such as the Dominican Francisco de Vitoria, considered the founder of international law, and the Jesuit LuĂs de Molina (ZERON, 2011, p.203 et seq.). Both, like other theologians of their time, largely operated with the idea of natural rights, as rights inherent to all men. The Jesuits were even accused of propagandizing regicide for defending the right to oppose tyranny, which undoubtedly contributed to their suppression. (ANDRĂS-GALLEGO, n.d., p.168 et seq.)
2 The discoveries and the expansion of Christendom
The modern period was undoubtedly marked by a change in the scope of Christendom’s relations with the world external to it. If in the early days of Christianity and in the Middle Ages the stage for such relations was the Mediterranean, now the privileged spaces for these encounters would be the Atlantic and the Indian Ocean. It would be through these routes that mercantile and cultural exchanges would happen with increasing frequency. New peoples would be known, a new geography would be drawn, and new challenges to Christianity would also appear.
The new contacts would, in fact, be the fruit of old acquaintances. The European expansion began with the Portuguese after the expulsion of the Moors who had inhabited their territory on the Iberian Peninsula for about seven centuries. From there to Ceuta, in 1415, already presenting the pattern of a conjunction of military action, the expansion of faith, and mercantile objectives that marked the conquests of Iberian modernity. Ceuta, a commercial center of great importance in the far north of Africa, in the Strait of Gibraltar, was the confluence between the known and the new sea, a kind of corner between the peninsula and the new African possibilities. It was, for this very reason, the spearhead for the search for new regions with potential gains further south. Thus, they moved from the Moors to the animist peoples, also called pagans.
But it was undoubtedly with Prince Henry the Navigator that the Portuguese expansion gained its greatest momentum. This son of King John I, the founder of the Avis dynasty (1385-1581), orchestrated the capture of Ceuta and the subsequent series of conquests that followed. Next came: the Atlantic islands (the Madeira archipelago, the Azores, and other smaller islands) and the passage of Cape Bojador by Gil Eanes in 1434, followed by the mouth of the Senegal River and the Cape Verde archipelago in 1456. His name appears explicitly in the papal bull Romanus Pontifex of 1455, from Pope Nicholas V, which, still imbued with the spirit of the Crusades, authorized him military conquest as a mechanism for the expansion of the faith over the Saracens (Muslims) and other infidels (sub-Saharan animist peoples).
Across the Mediterranean, the trade of goods from Asia had been an Italian monopoly since the Fourth Crusade (1202-1204), when the Latin Kingdom of Constantinople â today Istanbul â was founded. Thus, in the first half of the 15th century, Europe was flooded with products from Africa, via the Iberian Peninsula, and from Asia, via the Italian Peninsula. However, this picture changed drastically after the Ottoman Turks conquered the trading post of Constantinople in 1453, a date long used as a fundamental milestone for the transition from the Middle Ages to the modern era. From that moment on, supply uncertainty and rising prices took over the main consumer markets for Asian products (spices, porcelain, silks, and other fine goods).
This opened up the demand for new trade routes to the East, either via the South Atlantic â passing the Cape of Storms â with the Portuguese, or by seeking the circumnavigation of the earth with the Spanish. The latter, having completed the process of expelling the Moors and unifying the houses of Aragon and Castile only in 1492, the year the Mosque of CĂłrdoba fell into Spanish hands, were at a considerable disadvantage compared to the Portuguese. It was certainly for this reason that the Spanish Crown wagered a small sum of money, compared to the vast expenses of the Madrid court, on an expedition of three ships led by Christopher Columbus, which set off westward that same year.
The objective of Columbus’s expedition was to reach the kingdom of the Great Khan, as described by Marco Polo in his chronicles. The plan was simple: reach the parallel of the Canary Islands, the dividing line of the Atlantic Ocean between the Portuguese and Spanish since the Treaty of Alcåçovas of 1479, and then head west to the so-called Indies. The basis of Columbus’s calculations was completely wrong, a fact on which the geographers of the University of Salamanca had warned him. It must be said that, although these Catholic scholars are often presented as mistaken and shortsighted compared to the visionary Columbus, the reality was quite different. Far from believing the earth was flat, the professors of Salamanca relied on the calculations of Eratosthenes from ancient Greece, who calculated the line around the equator to be about 40,000 km (the exact measure is 40,072 km). Meanwhile, Columbus relied on calculations by Ptolemy of Alexandria, who used a method that led him into error and arrived at a value about 20% smaller than that of Eratosthenes. Therefore, the debate that preceded the departure of the ships heading east by going west was about the viability of the voyage in terms of its durationâthe time they would be at the mercy of winds and waves, without fresh water and supply posts. However, it was from this mistake that Europeans first contacted a new range of populations with individuals generically called “Indians,” since, proving the navigator’s error, he believed he had reached the Japanese archipelago (the entire portion of the world east of Jerusalem was designated by the term Indies).
In any case, one fact deserves highlighting: the expansion of the Catholic faith, still in the mold of the Crusades, was always present in the voyages of the Iberian Expansion. From papal authorization to the dozens of mentions of faith and God in Columbus’s diary, there is ample evidence that the enlargement of the Christian world, through the growth of the domains of the Catholic Monarchs, always loomed in the imagination and hearts of those involved in this process.
3 The evangelization of non-Christian populations
3.1 The Amerindians
The colonization process was marked by a series of ambiguities, with the interest in colonization being just one of them. On one hand, many Europeans who landed in America were imbued with the ideal of obtaining material and social gains, such as titles and positions in the governance of the New World, using the expansion of the Catholic faith as a backdrop, as authorized by Pope Nicholas V. On the other hand, the Papal Bull Sublimis Deus[1], from Pope Paul III in 1537âthe same pope who approved the Society of Jesusâpointed to a different general directive for contact with the inhabitants of the new lands. According to this bull, the life, liberty, and property of all peoples contacted by Europeans should be preserved, and the process of conversion could only be done through preaching and good example. Thus, conquerors and missionaries landed in America with distinct perceptions of the land and its inhabitants, and with equally distinct objectives for them.
In the case of Spanish America, although the Jesuits played an important role, the first missionaries to arrive were the friars of the mendicant orders, especially the Franciscans. However, it was the Dominican friarsâparticularly Pedro de CĂłrdoba, Antonio Montesinos, JuliĂĄn GarcĂ©s (bishop of Tlaxcala), and BartolomĂ© de las Casasâwho became most notable for defending the life and liberty of the indigenous people, a matter of concern for Pope Paul III. The first two traveled to Santo Domingo, on the island of La Española, in 1510, founding the order’s first house in the Americas. It was precisely a very harsh sermon in favor of the Indians, delivered by Friar Antonio de Montesinos on behalf of all his companions in 1511, that impacted Las Casas.
Until then, Las Casas had participated in battles against indigenous groups that resulted in the deaths of dozens of Spaniards and thousands of natives, and he had owned Indians as slaves (actually, in encomienda, a form of unpaid labor imposed on the indigenous), although he was already dedicated to the work of evangelization and baptism of the local population. According to Carlos Josaphat, in Las Casas’s own assessment of the results of Montesinos’s sermon, he places them on a kind of gradation: âsome were âastonished,â others âhardened,â and a few âremorseful,â but no one was convertedâ (JOSAPHAT, 2000, p.59). If this indeed occurred, Las Casas was at least among the remorseful, as it was not long before he became a great defender of the native peoples of America.
The belief that persisted from the 19th century until very recentlyâthat peoples could be classified as advanced and primitiveâwas widely used to explain the phenomenon of the conquest. It was only from the 1980s onwards that researchers (historians, sociologists, and anthropologists) shed the old Eurocentric myth that measured the degree of evolution of each culture by its similarity to contemporary Western culture. The great historiographical question to be answered was how such a small group of colonizers could decimate such a large population of natives (ROMANO, 1972, p.97-106). In fact, this has little to do with whether some cultures had a state with coercive power and others did not. It is much more due to the American characteristic of its population not forming a single entity, but rather organizing into groups with specific interests that, to achieve them, establish their own strategies, such as alliances with the colonizers. This happened with the tributary peoples of the Aztecs and was repeated similarly throughout the Americas, including in the alliances between the French and the Tamoios in Guanabara Bay. It was in this scenario of diversity and conflictâpotentiated by the presence of Europeans interested in taking advantage of disputes between native peoplesâthat the missionaries operated; sometimes peacefully, sometimes siding with one of the belligerent parties, in the name of what they believed to be the implantation of the faith in a land at the mercy of the devil. It was a simple equation: to lose bodies (including their own) and save souls (including their own).
When the Jesuits arrived in Spanish America, they found a whole body of work on the catechesis and conversion of the indigenous people that had already been undertaken by the mendicants. In the case of the Portuguese dominions, the missionaries of the Society of Jesus were the protagonists in this process of Christianization. In Brazil, the members of the mendicant orders operated on a smaller scale. It is only known that the celebrant of the first mass in Brazil, and therefore the chaplain in Cabral’s fleet, was the Franciscan bishop Dom Frei Henrique de Coimbra, who was going to Calicut as a missionary.
The Jesuit priests arrived with the first governor-general, Tomé de Souza, in 1549. It was a small group led by Father Manuel da Nóbrega, who immediately began to travel through the villages, catechizing and baptizing the Indigenous people. Responding to a request from Nóbrega, who was by then aware of the scale of the evangelizing task, a new group arrived with José de Anchieta a few years later when the second governor-general, Duarte da Costa, landed. This new group moved south toward the captaincy of São Vicente, founding the São Paulo de Piratininga college there.
As can be seen in the letters sent by the missionaries, the evangelization of these peoples was short-lived, consisting of an effusive initial acceptance followed by complete abandonment as soon as the priests left the tribe (CASTELNAU-LâESTOILE, 2006, p.109). The solution to this dilemma of the âsterile vineyardâ was the creation of the aldeamento (village settlement). Through so-called descimentos (forced relocations) and adhesions that were voluntary or pressured by the risk of enslavement by the bandeirantes, the Indigenous people integrated into communities controlled by Jesuit priests. These settlements constituted a space of civilization and order, which guaranteed a more durable Christianization. In the aldeamentos, the natives organized themselves around the leadership of the priests of the Company of Jesus, adopting Christian habits, learning trades, and becoming sedentary. This set of elements represented, from the priests’ perspective, the foundation for a more lasting conversion.
The Jesuit missions became famous as places of shelter for the Indigenous population in Brazil, but they frequently supplied military force and labor that the priests rented out to municipal councils, private individuals, or other religious orders in need. In the expulsion of the French, which resulted in the founding of the city of Rio de Janeiro in 1555, the settled Indigenous people were of utmost military importance. Similarly, the Indigenous people settled by the Jesuits in the Amazon region from the first half of the 17th century constituted the predominant workforce in the collection of the so-called “drogas do sertĂŁo” (spices and drugs from the backlands). In the 17th and 18th centuries, the artistic production of the settled Indigenous people in various parts of Americaâsculpture, painting, music, and the making of musical instrumentsâwhich was initially just one of the mechanisms of catechesis, acquired its own characteristics, becoming known as missionary art or missionary baroque. One of the features of this art is the influence of Indigenous aesthetic elements in the productions. With the expulsion of the Jesuits from the Portuguese Empire in 1759 and the Spanish Empire in 1767, the missions were handed over to other ordersâgenerally mendicantâor to civil administrators.
3.2 The peoples of Africa
Both the mendicant missionaries and the priests of the Society of Jesus were active in repeated attempts to Christianize Africa. The results of this process varied greatly from region to region, always with advances and setbacks. To even minimally address this history, one must understand that Africa is an extremely vast continent and that its inhabitants differ from region to region and from people to people. There are at least two major religious matrices in Africa, but an immense number of possible combinations and interactions between them: the Islamic and the animist. The Islamic one was established with the expansion of Islam across the north of the continent and later with waves of intra-continental expansion across the Sahara. The animist one, more characteristic of sub-Saharan peoples, is deeply linked to nature and its phenomena, attributing spirits to them. In addition, it incorporates deified social elements, such as leaders, warriors, or very striking personalities, which, along with creation myths and world-building narratives, make up the pantheon of orixĂĄs. With this, one can understand the immense task of Christianizing an area that is almost four times the size of modern-day Brazil. We will present, merely as an example, the cases of Angola, Congo, and Guinea, regions that most suffered the effects of contact with Europeans, among which the slave trade stands out deplorably.
The ease or difficulty of evangelizing the continent’s southwestern coast, which is now Angola, stemmed from the alliances between the Portuguese and the local chiefs, or sobas, who were subordinate to the great sovereign Ngola, ruler of the Ndongo kingdom. These alliances were based on political and commercial gains as well as religious interests. Depending on the convenience of the moment, the sobas would convert to Catholicism, return to animism, or even align with the Reformed faiths. A major reason for the close relationship with the sobas was that, due to the great autonomy with which they governed their territories, they controlled a large part of the slave trade from Angola to the Americas. Their conversion was always viewed with some suspicion by the Jesuits, as it was very often not lasting.
The Portuguese arrived on the coast of the Congo in the early 16th century, beginning the process of evangelization in the region. In the Cronica dâel Rei D. JoĂŁo II (Chronicle of King John II), from approximately 1502, its author Rui de Pina reports that both the local chief, mani Soyo, with some of his ministers, and the regional chief, the mani Congo, with many followers, readily accepted baptism and the Catholic faith. This gave rise to a whole syncretic process involving not only religion but also politics and commercial alliances. To begin with, many authors, such as Marina Melo de Souza, believe that the cross was already a mystical and divinatory symbol in Congolese culture, which would have facilitated the absorption of the Catholic crucifix as a religious symbol, as well as the association of images of saints and rosaries with minkisi, the generic term for magical objects or religious cult items in that region (SOUZA, 2005). Another sign of this symbiosis is that, from 1509 onwards, Congolese sovereigns began to use Portuguese names associated with their own.
In the case of Guinea, even further north, the Jesuit Baltazar Barreira, who was responsible for the Angola mission and founded the college in Cape Verde, took on the mission of evangelizing the people of those lands at the beginning of the 17th century. Barreira and his companions faced competition from the bexerins, as the Islamic priests were called, and the jambacouse, the term for local priests responsible for identifying sorcerers and soul-eaters who, according to local belief, caused disease and death. As was inevitable, with so many religious matrices competing for space in the hearts and minds of the inhabitants, the syncretism was such that, in a short time, the Jesuits came to be called the “bexerins of the Christians” (SANTOS, 2011, p.187-213). There too, Barreira reported, the Christian people, due to little doctrine and much contact with animists, easily returned to their old cults. In addition to this competition, there were problems with the slave trade. Animist priests and bexerins also acted as agents and intermediaries in the trans-Saharan slave trade, which took slavesâmainly women as future wivesâto Islamic regions (LOVEJOY, 2011, p.32). All this was compounded by the slave trade to the Americas, which generated much criticism from the Jesuits towards other Catholic religious figures, accusing them of not preaching or catechizing, but only trafficking. However, the Jesuit priests also owned slaves. Although little is known quantitatively about their participation in the trade of Africans, it certainly occurred. In general, the high mortality rate of priests, competition with other better-structured religious groups backed by local society, and meager investment from the Portuguese Crown can explain the relative failure of the mission to convert Africans on the Atlantic coast.
In general, the European presence in Africa was coastal, as it was at the beginning of colonization in the Americas. Christianity, entwined in the same process, was as well. The difference is that, in the Americas, colonization progressively moved inland. Occupying, albeit sparsely, areas further and further inland, it brought with it catechesis and the Cross, a phenomenon that did not occur in Africa, where the main interest was the administration of coastal areas to control trade, especially the slave trade.
3.3 Colonial slavery and Catholicism
It must be clarified, before addressing such a delicate subject, that for much of its existence, slavery was not only legal but also morally licit. This does not imply that, from today’s perspective, it, or any analogous working condition, can be considered minimally acceptable. This statement is restricted to the period ending in the mid-19th century, if not earlier. This clarification is necessary to understand how it was possible for freed slaves to also buy slaves to work in their place, and how a small group of overseers could control a number of slaves often ten times larger.
Before thinking of passivity, one must consider the autonomy these enslaved people had to devise their own daily strategies, which did not necessarily involve open revolt and violence, although numerous slave rebellions attest that this was a viable option not only for the masters but also for the slaves. However, the number of times slaves resorted to the violence of rebellion was far lower than the number of times a calculation of losses and gains led them to take another, certainly less risky, path. It should be considered that historians and other authors often attribute to historical figures discourses that only emerged much later. In the case of slavery, the Enlightenment concept of liberty only reached the literate in the Americas between the late 18th and early 19th centuries, and it meant economic autonomy and the right to political participation. The meaning of liberty changes over time. Thus, when we speak of colonial slavery, we are dealing with a custom or tacit rule of society that pervaded it from top to bottom. Many rebellions were appeased when certain working conditions were established (REIS e SILVA, 1989, p.103).
It is to this form of slavery that the texts of the colonial Catholic clergy refer. In fact, they are not libertarian texts, nor could they have been. They would be better classified as utopian, dealing with a form of slavery in which the master performs paternal functions: teaching, tutoring, feeding, and correcting. Consider what the Jesuit Jorge Benci says in his book titled Christian Economy of Masters in the Government of Slaves, written around 1700: âThe master owes the servant bread so that he does not faintâ (BENCI, 1977, p.53). In the first of the book’s four discourses, the author places a series of the master’s obligations toward his slave under the heading of bread: food, clothing, and care in sickness. In the second discourse, the argument begins with the statement: âas servants are rational creatures, consisting of body and soul, the master must not only give them bodily sustenance so that their body does not perish, but also spiritual sustenance so that their souls do not faintâ (BENCI, 1977, p.83). This allows us to see that the myth claiming the Catholic clergy defended the theory that slaves had no soul is completely unfounded. The effort of the Catholic clergy to catechize, baptize, sacramentally marry, and bury slaves according to the Christian riteâconsistent with their beliefsâis more than enough evidence to show that the general stance among the Catholic clergy was quite the opposite. Furthermore, Benci also vehemently calls the masters’ attention to their religious obligation towards their slaves.
Colonial Catholic thought on slavery seems to have originated with Alonso de Sandoval, rector of the Jesuit college of Cartagena de Indias (1605-1617). In his book A Treatise on Slavery, he presents a lengthy study aimed at understanding and teaching the peoples newly arrived from Africa at the port of Cartagena. In fact, more than a catechetical program, Sandoval develops a true âsoteriologyâ for the enslaved. The first step of this âsoteriologyâ was to classify all African blacks and those from the Indian Ocean islands as Ethiopians, who were already associated with the descendants of Ham, cursed for his sin against his father, Noah. From there, Sandoval’s thought develops, pointing out that, according to Isidore of Seville, in the division of the world, Africa corresponded to the descendants of Ham. Therefore, slavery in the Christian model, where masters assume paternal functions toward their slaves, would represent redemption from Ham’s curse. This was because it represented the inclusion of the âEthiopiansâ into the new chosen people: the Church.
Also in Cartagena de Indias, Saint Peter Claver was active, living and evangelizing there for almost the entire first half of the 17th century. In the city’s port area, he welcomed, fed, and comforted the enslaved Africans who disembarked, sparing no expense (SPLENDIANI and ARISTIZABAL, 2002, p.86). He would assess their doctrinal knowledge to check if they had been baptized in Africa and if that baptism was valid[2], catechized everyone, and baptized the enslaved, occasionally âconditionally,â placing a small lead medal around their necks, which had the face of Jesus on one side and Mary on the other, so he could recognize his baptized followers in the city. His beatification process records that he had constant disagreements with the ladies of the city for gathering Black people from the streets and squares for the celebration of Mass, despite the bad odor they exuded due to their wounds and the precarious hygienic conditions imposed on them (SPLENDIANI and ARISTIZABAL, 2002, p.90 et seq.).
4 The Reforms
The term “reformation,” although its semantic content is not well-defined, was used throughout the Middle Ages as a call for change and correction, both for the faithful in the sense of conversion and holiness, and for addressing problems of discipline and ethics within the Catholic clergy. In various medieval contexts, the use of the term “reformation” was linked to the pursuit of purification and sanctification within the Church. Only after the emergence and political affirmation of the Lutheran movement did the term acquire the connotation of a rupture.
Traditionally, the phenomenon of the Protestant Reformation’s emergence has been explained by its internal causes. The oldest historiographical approaches focus on Luther and the 95 theses published in the Wittenberg cathedral as the explanatory core of the Reformation. Subsequently, Marxist historiography incorporated the sale of indulgences by the German clergy, extrapolating the phenomenon as a generalized practice of Catholicism, and transformed Luther into a kind of revolutionary figure rising against the oppressive structures of ecclesiastical financial power. In both perspectives, the weight of the rupture fell entirely on the behavioral deviations and âabusesâ of the Catholic clergy.
However, for a better understanding of the phenomenon, the reasons for the emergence and consolidation of the Reformation should be considered more broadly. Firstly, the âabusesâ of the clergy are not a sufficient cause for the Reformation; after all, a reform movement already existed within the Church since the Middle Ages, and groups proposing ruptures on the scale seen from voices like Luther and the Anabaptists had never been witnessed before. Furthermore, the main references to abuses in the reformers’ texts relate to liturgical practices and Catholic customs, such as communion in one kind only, and not to the occasional private practices of the clergy. Many critics, like Erasmus of Rotterdam, were not separatists. Lastly, one might consider that, some years later, when the Catholic Reformation corrected many of the widespread misconducts among clerics, the reformers did not propose a return (DELUMEAU, 1989, p.59 et seq.).
Certainly, the deeper causes of the Reformation are linked to the collective anxieties of the late Middle Ages. The main one was death and the consequent journey to hell. It is no coincidence that the councils of the late Middle AgesâLyon (1274) and Florence (1438-1445)âand the early modern eraâTrent (1545-1563)âdealt with this doctrinal point. Phenomena such as the Black Death, the Hundred Years’ War, the Great Schism in the West, which produced three men claiming to be the true pope, and the threat of the Ottoman Turks were, in short, a series of problems that shook and disoriented the consciousness of Europeans in general. The horror of sin and the fear of death were some of the consequences of this process, for which the solution presented by the reformist currents was more accessible compared to the Catholic concept of purgatory.
In fact, according to Reformed theology, the prevailing pessimism generated a simplified solution for the sin/hell dichotomy: Grace, stemming from faith, which was sufficient and enough to make man, who is inherently sinful, righteous. The novelty of the reformers was to propose an individual faith that would individually redeem from sin. A consequence of this postulate was that each individual was their own priest, minimizing ecclesiology and practically extinguishing ordained ministries. As many priests led condemnable lives, and since the spread of the Devotio Moderna many laypeople sought a sanctified life, the reformed idea of a universal priesthood was not difficult to propagate. Similarly, the reading of the biblical text, which in this period was no longer rare outside the liturgical environment, also became individually directed. As Jean Delumeau points out (1989, p.78), âthe reformers did not âgiveâ Christians the holy books translated into the vernacular language that the Church had previously refused them.â What happened is that the profusion of copies in languages other than Latin generated familiarity and the desire to read and interpret the Holy Scriptures.
4.1 The Protestant reforms
The phenomenon of the reforms later called Protestant did not begin with Luther, but he was undoubtedly its first great protagonist. The Augustinian friar Martin Luther, who entered the order in fulfillment of a promise made when in danger of death, became a diligent and scrupulous monk. His conscience was probably already tormented by the great question that would lead him to break with Catholicism: the justification of man. In addition to a myriad of behavioral criticisms, such as the charging for indulgences practiced by part of the clergy in his own land, Luther’s great issue was always that of the salvation or damnation of souls, which was a common question at the time. Deep down, the often overvalued ninety-five theses published in the Wittenberg cathedral and the trip to Rome are not at the center of the Lutheran Reformation. Contrary to what many authors claim, Jean Delumeau, based on Luther’s own texts, says that âthis trip to Rome does not seem to have been decisive in the inner evolutionâ of the future reformer (DELUMEAU, 1989, p.86). As for the theses that were copied and printed throughout Europe, it should be noted that when questioned about them at the chapter of the Augustinians gathered in Heidelberg (April 1518), Luther gave less importance to the issue of indulgences than to his doctrine of justification (DELUMEAU, 1989, p.90). The German Augustinian’s view was strongly marked by a pessimistic reading of the work of Saint Augustine, imprinting on the human being a total ineffectiveness against sin, leaving him, then, at the mercy of divine Grace and nothing more. Thus, irremediably sinful, man, as an individual, had only one solution: individual faith. In Luther’s own words: âFree will after the fall is nothing more than an empty word; in doing what is possible man sins mortallyâ (DELUMEAU, 1989, p.106).
Thus, by persisting in his doctrine of justification through faith alone, Luther opened the door for other thinkers to propose their own autonomous doctrines and establish their own confessions. This is exactly what the French humanist John Calvin did. At his father’s insistence, he initially trained in law. After his father’s death, he became a theologian in Paris, though he was never ordained a priest. He joined the Reformation and was consequently expelled from Paris along with other Huguenots. He went to Basel and then to Geneva, where he settled. The starting point of Calvinist doctrine was the publication of his work Institutio Religionis Christianae (Institutes of the Christian Religion) in 1536, while still in Basel, where he effectively began to present himself as a reformer. In it, Calvin follows Lutheran ecclesiology, teaching that the Church is the assembly of the elect, whose names only God knows, thus being essentially invisible. But in a later edition (1541), he presented the visible Church as an object of great esteem and obligatory communion. Given his perception of an immeasurable distance between God and man, he promoted iconoclasm, reaffirming that only the Scriptures can offer a path to knowing God. Sharing the pessimism of the Wittenberg reformer, Calvin expanded his reflection when he published a treatise on predestination in 1552, exploring the premise that God grants His grace to whomever He wishes. The groups that adhere to Calvinism embrace predestination, because God chooses to whom He gives His Grace and who, consequently, will be saved. For those not elected for salvation, only hell remained. As this doctrine held that one of the ways for the group of the elect to be made perceptible to the world was through the fruition of diligent work and austere behavior into wealth, this belief was very attractive to the bourgeoisieâespecially financiersâwho were considered sinners by Catholicism.
The last of the three great strands of reformers is the Anglican one. King Henry VIII was a fervent Catholic, having even written a manifesto against Luther’s errors. It seems this devotion only held as long as the king believed the pope would always be favorable to him. When Pope Clement VII denied the request for an annulment of the marriage for which Henry had requested a license from Pope Julius II, the king realized he did not have the unconditional ally he needed in Clement. For him, a second marriage was necessary in the search for a male heir, which would prevent the return of wars and conflicts over the English throne. This led to England’s rupture, through a lawâthe Act of Supremacy (1534)âwithout any theological or disciplinary issue to propose to Catholicism. This reform was merely a matter of obedience and jurisdiction. From then on, the king held the dual jurisdiction that had caused so many conflicts in the Middle Ages: the temporal and the religious, the miter and the crown resting on the same head.
4.2 The Christian Churches
As a consequence of the reformist movement initiated in the 16th century, the religious landscape saw a deepening of the ruptures between the various strands of Christianity. To the old division between East and Westâwhere, despite attempts made at the close of the Middle Ages, little concrete progress was made toward reunionâwas added the fracture of the Reformation and the multiple collateral divisions stemming from the doctrine of free interpretation of the scriptures. This specific point, common to the vast majority of doctrinal strands, associated with the emergence of the individual as a relevant reference and agent, led to the proliferation and fragmentation of the reformist currents into a myriad of creeds. Thus, over the hundred years following the founding reformist processes, confessional communities multiplied throughout Europe (JEDIN, 1972, p. 577).
Furthermore, nascent national identities became associated with religious identities, which led to religious disputes and wars, especially in France with the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre, when Catholics massacred Protestants in Paris, and the Thirty Years’ War, which had, among its causes, disputes between Catholics and Protestants.
The multiplication of denominations was inevitable and, to some extent, predictable. The free interpretation of the Scriptures and an ecclesiology that assigns an almost null role to the visible church would inevitably lead to dissensions and dissensions of dissensions. In addition to the classical Protestantism of Luther, Calvin, and Zwingli, Anglicanism was added. And within it, the faithful of Calvinist influence, critical of the Catholic remnants in Anglicanism, initiated the Puritan movement, which would unfold among the colonizers of North America and those who, in France, would form the Huguenots. Also derived from the Calvinist group, the Presbyterians emerged, distinguished by the government of elders (presbyters). Still derived from the Anglicans, the Baptists arose from the English living in Holland in 1608, characterized by the defense of immersion for the baptismal ritual. In the following centuries, Pietists, Methodists, Adventists, and Pentecostals would emerge, in addition to new separations from Catholicism in the 19th century: the Old Catholic churches.
4.3 Catholic Reformation
On the Catholic side, a reformist movement had already begun in the Middle Ages, known as the Gregorian Reform, alluding to Pope Gregory VII (1073-1085), which had its advances and setbacks over the centuries. However, it was urgent that the reformers receive a response. This was a demand from the Catholic clergy and a requirement from Emperor Charles V. The latter, concerned about his Empire being divided between Catholics and Protestants, sought to impose a conciliatory solution that would preserve the unity of his domains. In this tense context, the Council of Trent was held, the heart of the modern Catholic Reformation.
Since the Diet of Worms, convened in 1521, where Luther reaffirmed his doctrine of justification by faith in the presence of Emperor Charles V, Christendom had been demanding a council (ALBERIGO, 1995, p.325). This was not only due to the gravity of the rupture that threatened to spread but also certainly due to the influence of the conciliarist doctrine, which was still in vogue. One of the greatest advocates for a new general council was Luther himself, although likely to buy time in his excommunication process (JEDIN, 1960, p.99). The choice of the city for the assembly was difficult and complex. For the Lutherans, who were major promoters of the idea of a reforming council, the council’s seat should be in Germany, where the conflict originated. However, time passed, popes succeeded one another, and Rome’s opposition to its convocation was evident. This was not only due to an aversion to the conciliarist doctrine with which the proposal was imbued but also because a similar attempt had, at least in part, failed in Augsburg. The council only began to take effective shape after a meeting between Charles V and Pope Paul III in Rome in the spring of 1536.
A first convocation was then made for the following year in the city of Mantua, but it was not possible due to the war between Charles V and Francis I and the demands made by the Duke of Mantua to host the council. In October 1537, the council was transferred to Vicenza, also without success. When the spread of Protestant doctrines had advanced significantly and threatened to penetrate the Italian peninsula, action by the Roman Curia became urgent. This action was the effective convocation of the Council in the city of Trent, strategically located in Tyrol, still part of the Empire but easily accessible to Italian prelates. Even so, the Council was held during a turbulent period, interspersed with wars that caused the work to be suspended and restarted.
From the outset, the divergence between the Curia and the emperor was clear: while the Curia was interested in the immediate condemnation of Lutheranism, the emperor desired the reform of the Curia to then engage in a dialogue with the Protestant branch and preserve the confessional unity of the Empire (ALBERIGO, 1995, p.334). The first of the three stages of the Council (1545-1548) was the most important. During this stage, 10 sessions were held, in which the sources of authority in CatholicismâScripture and Traditionâwere reaffirmed, along with the doctrine of original sin, justification by faith and works, and the validity of the sacraments. In the second stage (1551-1552), which included 6 sessions, canons on the Eucharist, penance, and extreme unction were established. After a long interruption, Pope Pius IV convened a third period (1562-1563), during which another 9 sessions were held. This final period was marked by disciplinary decrees aimed at a reform of the Curia, which was still a target of harsh criticism.
One of the central points of the Council, especially in the first stage, was the question of the justification of man, a central theme in the Lutheran reformation. For Charles V and his allies within the Council, the Catholic definition should admit two alternative forms of justification: faith and works, which could come together, or preferably just faith. In this way, the new branches of Christianity would be guaranteed the belief in faith as a form of justification, while Catholics reserved the right to add works as necessary for salvation. The actions of the Jesuit priests Diego Laynez, who would succeed Ignatius of Loyola in leading the Society of Jesus, and Alfonso Salméron, a great scholar and exegete, contributed decisively to the doctrinal distinction marked in the final text of the council.
Besides this central issue, the council fathers in Trent sought to establish with maximum clarity the knowledge and practices involved in each of the sacraments. This was not only because these were being questioned by the reform movement, but also because it was considered that true holiness is born from them, and if it is lost, it is through them that it is recovered or even increased.
4.4 New and old orders and congregations
The spiritual movement that emerged at the end of the Middle Ages, known in its entirety as Devotio Moderna, is based on the emergence of the individual as a reference point in various spheres of daily life, including religion. Erwin Iserloh, referring to the end of the medieval period, states that
(…) a process of individualization had been set in motion, which discovered the particular in the universal, and enormous spiritual, artistic, and religious forces were unleashed. In connection with this movement is the awakening of a laity conscious of its responsibility, the evolution of cities, and the formation of national states (HUBERT, 1973, p.573)
indicating that the same factor is at the root of different phenomena. This is the progressive emergence of the individual as a reference, which both results in the growing laicism in the European religious scene of the following centuries and underpins the new forms of relationship with the divine that were established within the Church itself. If not due to this new model of piety, at least based on it, the Catholic reform set in motion a reform of the religious orders.
When dealing with the reforms in religious orders, it is necessary to distinguish the one undertaken in Spain by Cardinal Cisneros, at the request of Pope Alexander VI and with the support of the Catholic monarchy. This distinction must be made not only for its internal importance but also for the developments this reform would have in the Americas, with the arrival of missionaries from already reformed orders for catechetical and missionary work. Under Cisneros’s influence, the Spanish Franciscans and Benedictines were reformed, returning to the rigorous observance of their rules, which had been lost. Similarly, under the leadership of Saint Teresa of Ăvila, the Carmelites were reformed. For the Carmelite friars, it was Saint John of the Cross who extended the same reformist spirit. In addition to these mystics are Saint John of Ăvila, the apostle of Andalusia, who preached the reform of the clergy and spiritual deepening, and Saint Ignatius of Loyola, founder of the Society of Jesus and author of the Spiritual Exercises. Curiously, the anti-reformist spirit was also noticeable; suffice it to say that all four saints with a mystical and reforming spirit had to deal, in one way or another, with the Spanish Inquisition.
The Society of Jesus assumed unique characteristics compared to the mendicant orders and others. Of these, the most distinctive was the establishment of the fourth vow: special obedience to the pope regarding missions. In addition, they did not live in monasteries and did not settle in one place, being fundamentally missionaries of Pauline inspiration. It is enough to consider that many of the colleges and missions founded in the early years were dedicated to the memory of Saint Paul: Piratininga, Luanda, Goa, etc. Soon after its founding, the first missions were sent within Europe itself, seeking to win back Catholics who had converted to the reformed doctrines. Shortly thereafter, Jesuit missionaries were sent to Christianize the most distant corners of the planet: from the Americas to Japan. A great example of a Jesuit missionary was Saint Francis Xavier, one of Ignatius of Loyola’s companions in the founding of the Society, who was sent to India and Japan after an agreement between the Jesuits and the Portuguese Crown.
Other orders were founded in this spirit of reforming the regular clergy: Saint Anthony Maria Zaccaria (1502-1537) founded the Clerics Regular of Saint Paul, known as the Barnabites, after their monastery of Saint Barnabas; the Order of the Clerics Regular of Somasca, the Somaschi, was founded by Saint Jerome Emiliani, a consecrated layman who dedicated himself to caring for orphans. Saint Jerome was very close to Saint Cajetan of Thiene, who founded the Theatine order. The saint of joy, Saint Philip Neri, founded a community of secular clerics known as the Congregation of the Oratory, or Oratorians. Some women also created regular orders in this movement, such as Saint Angela Merici (1474-1540), who founded the Compagnia delle dimesse di Santa Orsola (the Ursulines), dedicated to the shelter and education of abandoned girls. It is important to note that the state did not fulfill the functions of care, sustenance, and education for its subjects. It fell to charitable institutions, generally linked to the initiatives of the Catholic clergy, to perform this role.
5Â Latin American popular religiosity
The term “popular religiosity” refers, in itself, to the interpretations of the people and the relationship they establish with the sacred (NASCIMENTO, 2009, p.119-30). It often consists of an amalgam of traditions and beliefs from diverse origins with Catholic doctrine and liturgy, resulting in forms of worship, beliefs, and devotions similar to Catholic ones, but with meanings displaced by popular knowledge. Undoubtedly, the popular religious practices of Portugal and Spain, almost always passed down maternally, gave rise to Latin American popular Catholicism through their encounter with local Amerindian rites and those imported from Africa (DUSSEL, 1983, p.200).
For a better understanding of this symbiosis of religious forms and content, it is necessary to consider that, from the perspective of cultural anthropology, religiosity is the way societies deal with the unexpected and what is beyond their controlâsuch as harvest outcomes, rainfall patterns, health problems, and death. Christianity, as a revealed religion, transcends this primary aspect but ends up in dialogue with it as it spreads through the preaching of its truths. As it reached groups increasingly distant in cultural patterns, the content of the preaching passed through ever more varied filters and became associated with ways of believing and seeing the world that were increasingly distinct from the Judeo-European model from which the modern Catholic model emerged.
On the other hand, Catholic missionaries, concerned with ensuring the salvation of the less literate, undertook enormous catechetical efforts. However, in this context of religious confrontation with the reformers, the illiterate Catholic populace and non-literate peoples were, more often than not, underestimated in their capacity for learning and doctrinal understanding. In the 16th and 17th centuries, Christendom abounded with summarized catechisms for children, the rude, the brutish, and all those considered of limited intelligence (MUĂOZ, 2006, p.417). Each region of the globe had its specific “rude and brutish” people, but generally, they were the peasants, the poor, the Indigenous, and the Africansâin the latter case, both those living there and those brought to the Americas and their descendants. It is among these “rude and brutish” people that a very particular model of Catholicism developed in Latin America. It can be considered that in this process of evangelization under very specific conditionsâthat is, in a context of colonization and conquestâa mestizo Catholicism was built.
The fact is that popular culture and its religiosity found, in Catholic forms of worship or expression of its values, mechanisms to make their ancestral beliefs and immediate needs viable. Therefore, before the last decades of the 20th century, there was a great distance between the Catholic devotion to the saints and the request for their intercession, and the popular belief in the power attributed to the saints to perform miracles, with powers that were supposedly their ownâto cite just one example. Similarly, the Catholic doctrine on the sacraments as expressed at Trent differs greatly from the interpretation made of them in the most popular strataâthe “rude and brutish”âwho were less accustomed to complex theological concepts. Even the lay brotherhoods, the place of non-clerical Catholicism par excellence, were not infrequently used much more as places for social visibility and status than for effective worship and adoration (BOSCHI, 1986, p.14).
The popularization of doctrine and the lay movements spurred by the Second Vatican Council tended to reduce the distance between what the Church teaches and what the people most engaged in Catholicism believe. However, outside of strictly Catholic circles, beliefs permeated with Catholic figurations still remain.
 Carlos Engemann, Brazil.
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[1] This bull was written by Pope Paul III after he received a letter from the Dominican Juliån Garcés. In this letter, the bishop of Tlaxcala (now one of the states that make up Mexico), denounced the extreme cruelty with which the conquistadors treated the inhabitants of the Americas, under the pretext that they did not know the faith.
[2] It was common for a baptism to be considered invalid if it was not preceded by catechesis, acceptance of the faith, and a desire for baptism. At the beginning of the 17th century, the Archbishop of Seville, D. Pedro de Castro y Quiñones, issued an instruction that became a model for the catechesis of Africans, and in it, he recommended questioning whether the individual had heard the catechesis, understood it, accepted it, and desired to be baptized. Claver used this instruction in his work.