Examine the Role of the Church in Spain’s Conquest and Colonization of Continental America

QuestionExamine the case of the perform service in Spains conquest and settlement of continental America. The fibre of the popish Catholic church service in Spains conquest and colonization of continental America was a two-fold process whereby on a lower floor the facade of vicissitude and control lay the unproblematic goal of gaining wealth, enforcing laws and the inevitable extension of control while condoning the beginnings of European thr onlydom in the Caribbean. i Alternately, behind the heading for converting Indians lay some important influences in Spain.The Spanish Cr induce complete royal controls everywhere the ecclesiastical benefices and everyplace the immense wealth of the church. ii Two papal diddlysquats were issued in the year of 1493 that established the Spanish position in the new(a) World. They in like manner established the role that the church was going to play in the New World. The first bull, issued on May 3, 1493, was c tot everyyed the Int er Caetera. It declared that lands discovered by Spanish envoys, not under a Christian owner, could be claimed by Spain.The bull in addition gave the Spanish monarch power to send men to convert the natives to the Catholic faith and instruct them in Catholic morals. The second papal bull issued that year expanded on the meaning of the first. The bull fixed a terminus ad quem for Spanish and Portuguese spheres of influence in the New World. This boundary heavily favored Spain, showing an alliance between Spain and the church service. Under the Spanish extremum the inquisition was resurrected in the form of the conquistadores to hunt down heretics.In repress the last non-Christian state in the Iberian Peninsula, Granada, and in forcibly discharge Jews and the Moors, King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella sought to purify Spanish conjunction in a spirit of Christian unity. The acts were militant expressions of ghostlike statehood on the constitution of the American colonization in the latter part of the 1490s. iii The church which arrived in the Caribbean advocated what has been called warrior Catholicismiv, which is the belief that military conquest and evangelization were compatible. v Acting in uniting with the conquistadores, the papistical Catholic church service played a vital role in the Spanish system of colonization and is argued to be iodine of the virtually out(p)standing revolutionary devices of the Spanish Government. vi By its discipline and methods it assumed, the perform was close to a military and political agency designed to push forrader and defend the colonial frontiers, pacify the natives and open the way to European occupation. vii The conquering of the native Indians and the extension of the territorial boundaries emphasized the role of the Church.The Church also served to maintain colonial borders against foreign encroachment. By its exclusion of heretical Protestants and by its strict censorship of books, the Church made fo reign political and philosophical ideas difficult or dangerous to obtain and served as a antisubmarine mechanism of the Spanish Empire. viii It was largely finished the Roman Catholic Church that Spain succeeded in transmitting its culture and political dominance in the colonization of continental America during the 16th century. ix The Church was not only an hike post of the Spanish Empire and a political device of colonialism.It had its own ghostly objectives and interests. The Spanish colonial empire was served exclusively by the clergy of the Roman Catholic Church which received active government support and rise in the form of grants of land to build churches, free passages for priest, free vino and oil for the monasteries. A hierarchy if archbishops, bishops, and lesser clergy were dispatched by the Crown to the New World. Priests were chiefly concerned with superintending the work of converting the natives, whom they thought of as primitive, to Christianity and protecti ng them from exploitation.The earlier groups were the beggars, of whom the Dominicans were prominent. Later, the Franciscans and Jesuits became more active. The Roman Catholic Church rein strained religious favorable position over the Indians through the Indians culture, religion and language. Associated with their attention to the spiritual needs of conversion, the priests endeavored to detach heathen practices among those Indians that they baptized. x The non-Christian people of the Americas were not simply to be converted they were to be civilized, taught, humanized, purified and reformed.The Indians to be converted were strangers speaking in numerous unfamiliar tongues. In most cases, when the Friars first encountered them, they had been only recently conquered and subjugated, and pull down if not actively hostile they were likely to retain covert antagonisms. In their experience all Spaniards were exploitative. The Indian religions were composites of ceremonies and attitu des of the most diverse sort, no single technique of conversion could be employed. Conversion required both the introduction of Catholic Christianity and the cutting out of hold uping native religions, and of the two tasks the latter was the more difficult one. xi raw anthropology demonst computes that the elimination of pagan traits was only partial. In Indian societies of the twentieth century, even in the areas of most active Christian dig up, residual pagan forms survived. The accusation programme resulted in the syncretism of the Indian religion and Roman Catholic Christianity. Indians business leader have responded enthusiastically to the new teaching, simply they tended to interpret Christianity as a doctrine compatible with their own tolerant pagan religions, and they allowed Christianity and paganism to exist simultaneously as complementary faiths.A common Indian view held that one religious form was resorted to when some other failed to bring a desired result. xii However, in a process of religious syncretism, as priest constructed churches out of the stones of finished temples, symbolizing and emphasizing the substitution of one religion by the other,xiii religious saints like the Aztecs Tonantzin and the Virgin Mary became intermingled, creating a new guinea pig symbol, the Virgin of Guadalupe. xivIn Mexico, Cortes forces destroyed Indian religious sites, cleaned them with lime and replaced images of Quetzalcoatl and other Indian gods with images of Christ and the Virgin Mary. xv Native temples were torn down, idols destroyed and burnt, sacrificial surface were filled-in, writings were destroyed and other material evidence, anything the Roman Catholic Church considered as paganism were destroyed. xvi The Church was also concerned with the material and tangible wel removede of the natives.Hospitals were particularly needed because of the epidemics which occasionally swept the land. A hospital not only provided treatment for the sick, bu t was frequently a kindly of poor-house as well, where the aged and infirmed could be attended to, and where poor-relief could be dispensed. Virtually all the social services in the Spanish colonies were provided by the clergy. However, despite the advances in saving the Indians from exploitation, the work of the Church often caused distress and was sometimes harmful.In made conversions, Indians supplied construction labour on the churches, hospitals, monasteries and schools without recompense, voluntarily, or at the command of their impertinently Christianized chiefs. The friars then proceeded to expand the Christianized area, by moving out into surrounding towns, where hooked chapels were built. Cooperating Indians were brought into the conversion process to assist the friars. Indians who refused to accept Christianity were punished, sometimes by death.The labour of Christianization was further hindered by conflicts between friars and other branches of the society. The terms o f the encomienda demanded that the masters should throw to the Indians protection, with the duty of seeing that they were cared for and taught to become more civilized. Becoming more civilized really meant nothing more than giving signs that they accepted the Spanish as their masters, covering their bodies as European did, speaking Spanish and accepting the Christian faith.In return for Spanish protection the Indians were to give their service in the handle or mines of the encomenderos. The encomienda system was nothing more than a means of obtaining forced labour for the encomendero, Spanish conquistadors. No wages were paid for the work through with(p) and very often the Indians farms were ruined by herds of cattle or swine belong to their encomendero. They rarely had time to grow their own food for the forced labour left them neither time nor strength.The Indians were not free to leave the encomienda and those who fled were run down by men on horseback with dogs. The death ra te among the Indians shot up as a result of hunger, weakness and despair among people whose traditional village and family life was completely destroyed. The Church and the encomienda became competitor institution, each in its own way seeking control over the native populations. This issue between them erupted openly in 1511, when the Dominican friar Antonio de Montesinos first condemned the colonists treatment of the Indian in Hispaniola.Thereafter, under the leadership of Bartolome de Las Casas, another Dominican friar and others, ecclesiastical criticism of encomienda became frequent and outspoken. The Spaniards saw the friars as officious nuisances whose object was to pry into the livelihood of encomienda Indians, criticize the encomenderos use of Indian labour and denounce encomienda in letters to the king. Although the rights and wrongs of the encomienda system were discussed by the Crown it was decided that this system was necessary if the colonies were to survive.There was no other way of permutation the labour that the Indians provided. It was agreed, though, that the system would be better organized and the rights of the Indians more decent protected. To this end the Thirty Two Laws of Burgos were published in 1512, whereby Spaniards were confirmed in their rights to coerce the Indians, but their obligations to convert them and treat them humanely were set out in great detail, even to what food, clothes and beds they were to be supplied with. Two inspectors were to be appointed in each town to ensure that the rules were kept.Those laws could have turn the abuses, but the practical difficulties of putting them into full effect on the far side of the Atlantic and the Andes, and against powerful vested interests, were difficult to prevail over. xvii The crown added to the powers of the Church by giving it powers of censorship over all books entering the Empire. This was mean at first to keep out heretical Protestant works, but it was also used aga inst political books. Education and the confessional enabled the Church and assisted the search in keeping a close watch on the movement of thought.The transatlantic movements of books were regulated in Seville. Popular and fictional literature came under the purview of the secular authorities (in Spain), which placed a ban in 1531 on the export of romances of chivalry to the Indies as being likely to queer the minds of the Indians. xviii To make these powers more effective, a branch of the Inquisition, a special church court, was established from Spain. Its official powers were to prosecute those who broke the laws such as blasphemy, bigamy, heresy, witchcraft, heterodoxy, and sins against God.The Inquisition punishment included penance, prison sentences, property confiscation and burning at the stake. Informers could remain anonymous and the crimes of so called heresy and witchcraft could have many interpretations. This tribunal was operating out of Lima, Mexico City and Cartage na by 1570. Protestant smugglers and raiders of all nationalities captured by the Spanish were brought before the Inquisition and charged as heretics. scarce most importantly for the government of the Empire, the Inquisition could be used against influential people who showed too great a tendency to criticize.In this way the Church played a part in keeping the colonies tied to Spain The Roman Catholic Church operated without competition in the circum-Caribbean colonial society during the 16th century, where it performed both religious and political functions. In religion, it taught and converted the native Indians to Christianity and catered to the religious needs of the Spanish community. Politically, it helped to extend the boundaries of the Spanish Empire by removing electrical resistance to it in the case of the Indians by its teachings and in the case of Europeans, largely through the operation of the Inquisition.The Church did much good, but its efforts resulted in a emerg ence of drawbacks. For example the genuineness of the conversion of the Indians is doubtful. In generally, in all the colonies, the Church catered to the spiritual needs and at the same time contributed to the preservation of the society in which they operated.