Silver, Sword, and Stone

by Marie Arana

  Such was the grim history that Xavier absorbed, alongside knottier conundrums of philosophy and science. But the real lesson came later, when he learned about the brotherhood’s resilience: almost fifty years after it was disbanded, the Jesuit order was restored to its former status in 1814. Like a dead plant that has left behind a strong seed, its new generation grew exuberantly, surpassing all former numbers and establishing prestigious universities throughout the Americas. By the time Xavier finished his studies in Ecuador in the late 1950s, it was a global enterprise. The black cassocks had proliferated, especially in the Southern Hemisphere, and the ranks of the Society of Jesus—the “pope’s black guard,” as they became known in Protestant Europe—peaked, reaching record numbers in missions around the world. In Latin America, where the political climate was growing increasingly volatile and the time bomb of oppression threatened to explode yet again, the missions took up the work for which they were renowned hundreds of years before: the welfare of the dispossessed. Xavier would become one of its leaders.

  PREACHING THE GOSPEL AMONG BARBARIANS

  Don’t you understand that all that these friars say is lies? Our fathers, our grandfathers—did they know these monks?

  —Andrés Mixcoatl to the people of Metepec, 1537

  It is generally accepted that Columbus had no priest with him on his first voyage—a surprising assumption, given his claims that he was embarking on a holy voyage and Queen Isabella’s understanding that he was attempting exactly that for Spain. Early scholars argued the question, refusing to believe that a devout Christian, as Columbus certainly was, would have set sail without a chaplain, even putting forth names—Fray Juan Pérez, Fray Pedro de Arenas, and others—as possibilities who must have accompanied him. But Columbus’s journal, which meticulously cites many of his companions on that inaugural expedition, makes no mention of a clergyman, and it is difficult to believe that he wouldn’t have memorialized his priest’s name in that singular, sprawling hand of his. To cast even more doubt on those early claims, the chronologies and logistics suffer stark inconsistencies. The more likely conclusion is that Columbus had no priest on that first expeditionary voyage. It may be because he didn’t suspect that his journey would take longer than six months—an important point, since Catholic navigators measured voyages according to Catholic obligations and, in the fifteenth century, it was the rule rather than the exception that believers take Holy Communion every six months or, at least, once a year. We have it on good authority that the entire expeditionary party went to confession and received communion before their ships skimmed away from the port of Palos on that windless August night in 1492. Entirely ignorant about the boundless unknown into which they were headed, they may have assumed that a priest was unnecessary on a voyage of a few months.

  The record is crystal clear, however, when it comes to Cortés’s first contact with Montezuma, or Pizarro’s confrontation with Atahualpa, or Gonzalo Jiménez de Quesada’s brash rout of the Muíscas in Bogotá. In every one of those cases—the most significant conquests of the New World—a priest was present at the creation, playing a critical role in the unfolding drama. Curiously enough, all three conquistadors were distant cousins, and all three lived by the binding principle of their time, in which war and religion—the sword and the stone—were part and parcel of a national identity. It was an era in which warriors and priests marched together, one in which popes themselves led armies against any and all who defied them. More urgently, perhaps, all three understood that the damning accusations of malfeasance levied against Columbus had been made by men of the cloth. Having a priest at one’s side to bless a victory was a convenient foil against any protests the Crown might make.

  Two priests were pivotal in Cortés’s legendary conquest. The first was Gerónimo de Aguilar, the hapless Franciscan who had been shipwrecked on the Yucatán coast, wandered the savannas of Quintana Roo, was captured by the Mayans and enslaved for eight years, and then was found, by sheer serendipity, as Cortés made his way to the Aztec capital. Aguilar, hardly recognizable as a Spaniard—skin burned brown, head shaven like a slave’s, beggared and filthy—made himself known to Cortés by mumbling a few words in Spanish and pulling an old Book of Hours from beneath his rotting blanket. Saved from the sacrificial slab to which he was surely bound had he stayed among the Mayans, Aguilar was immediately useful to Cortés by virtue of his familiarity with the local tongue. Eventually, along with Cortés’s winsome Nahua lover, La Malinche, Aguilar would play a crucial role in the conquistador’s negotiations with Montezuma.

  Another priest, Gonzalo Guerrero, had survived the shipwreck with Aguilar. But Guerrero eventually went native, pledging loyalty to his Mayan captors and fighting fearlessly alongside them. Elevated to the status of chief—his ears and lower lip ceremonially slashed in two—he married a Mayan woman and fathered numerous children. Whereas Aguilar had obeyed his vows of celibacy and paid for that loyalty with his freedom, Guerrero had been rewarded by the Indians for abandoning his religion, his culture, his entire past. But now that the tables had turned, and six hundred Spanish soldiers were marching to Tenochtitlán with cannons, guns, and legions of allies, Guerrero was loath to reveal himself as a fallen Franciscan. He took to the forest, hiding his shame, only to emerge again to fight the Spaniards as they swept through Mexico, cementing their conquest.

  The other priest who stood with Cortés was Bartolomé de Olmedo, and it is to him that Cortés owes many of his early victories. Olmedo was at heart a temperate man, a deeply thoughtful theologian. Time and again, he curbed the conquistador’s more brutal instincts, urging him toward compassion. Cortés, a man of grand ambition and carnal inclinations—a politician of few scruples—was well aware that he needed someone like Olmedo to temper his wilder nature and shape his image at home. And yet Olmedo was no enlightened hero, inclined to see Indians as fellow men. He had lived much, seen much. A seasoned priest when he had arrived in Hispaniola, he had a mandate to Christianize what was left of the Taíno. Swept by chance into Cortés’s capricious and illicit campaign to conquer Mexico, he won the conquistador’s trust and was delegated to diplomatic tasks apart from his priestly obligations. He converted and baptized the slave La Malinche, enabling Cortés to consort freely with her. He baptized the first Christian women of Mexico so that soldiers might indulge in sex without fear that they were consorting with pagans. He was dispatched to mollify the shiploads of angry troops sent to castigate Cortés for flagrantly countermanding his orders. Olmedo was also responsible for teaching Montezuma the basic tenets of Christianity before the emperor was murdered and dispatched to his gods.

  Most important, when Cortés’s impulse was to hack the Tlaxcalans’ idols to rubble, Olmedo counseled a gentler approach, insisting that Christianizing by force would only reap the whirlwind. There were better ways to introduce innocents to the teachings of Jesus, he insisted. He proved right. At first, the Tlaxcalans balked at the Christian God; they had no use for another deity or prophet. But with Olmedo’s quiet persistence, they finally submitted to the cross. The significance of this cannot be overestimated. Without the support and military muscle of the Tlaxcalans—inveterate enemies of the Aztecs—the history of Spanish America would have come to an abrupt halt a few miles outside of Veracruz. Without the hordes of Christianized Indians who marched with Cortés against the Aztec capital, Spanish would not be spoken in Mexico today. And then, once Tenochtitlán was taken: without the easy conversion of the Nahuas, who were accustomed to adopting foreign gods, the conquest of more recalcitrant Chichimecas or Mayans would have proved impossible. By the time twelve weary, cadaverous, and scruffy Franciscans wandered into the heart of Montezuma’s empire to be greeted by kneeling Spaniards, the way was wide open for the spiritual conquest of Mexico.

  We have much evidence that Cortés, by nature pugilistic about imposing his religion, was hardly Christian in meting out his ambitions. He was strategic, cunning, inclined to breathtaking violence, as every triumphant conquistador pr
oved to be. For all the giddy claims that Cortés was a consummate hero, a devout Christian—“a man of unfeigned piety, of the stuff that martyrs are made of,” as a judge crowed to the king—there is equal documentation that he was a heartless tyrant. How does a legend that begins with the promise of salvation turn to rank killing for no apparent reason or provocation? The cowardice of Montezuma, the genius of Cortés, the predestined arrival of the fairer race—these are fantasies that have been conjured by generations of Spanish storytellers. The fact remains that there are pieces to this puzzle that continue to elude us—five centuries of carefully devised political narrative we will probably never deconstruct—and yet, no matter how we choose to interpret history, two indisputable facts stand witness at beginning and end: Cortés entered Tenochtitlán freely, welcomed in with his priest and his legions; and two years later, after much death and destruction, an empire was won.

  * * *

  For all his illiteracy and lack of sophistication—for all the humiliations that an illegitimate son of a nobleman had to endure—Pizarro had done well for himself, even before he undertook the expedition that would win him the laurels of history. He was wealthy. He was respected. And, having been on expeditions to Cartagena, Panama, and the Pacific with Balboa, he had been well schooled in how the Church might be employed in the wild bonanza that was La Conquista. He understood the moral ballast that a few good priests would provide in a full-tilt offensive against the fabled land of “Pirú.” Even in the earliest days of that grand idea, as he sat in Panama and dreamed of a bold exploration south, he allied with the rich clergyman Hernando de Luque, whose guidance would become essential in Pizarro’s dealings with the Crown. When King Carlos finally approved the expedition, Pizarro decided on a priest from his own family ranks for the actual voyage. This was not unusual; a preference for family partners when engaging in potentially profitable ventures had become something of an instinct in the conquistadors. In the frenzied quest for riches and glory, only a brother or sworn comrade could be trusted—the temptations for mutiny or larceny were so great. Indeed, Pizarro would eventually fall out with his second associate, Diego de Almagro, over the jurisdiction of gold-rich Cuzco, and the Viejo Capitán (as Pizarro was called) would eventually order Almagro’s execution. The passions and acrimonies provoked by this rash act led Almagro’s followers to wreak revenge on Pizarro years later when they surprised the old governor in his palace and drove a sword through his throat.

  Pizarro thought he was avoiding such a fate by populating his expedition with kin: three half brothers—Juan, Gonzalo, Hernando—two of whom, like him, were illegitimate sons of his father; and a number of cousins. One of these was Vicente de Valverde, a nobleman turned Dominican priest who was distantly related to Pizarro and marched with him to Cajamarca for the fateful meeting with Atahualpa. The rest of the story is well known: it was Valverde who shook a cross at the royal Inca and read aloud to him from his breviary, insisting that his Christian God was superior to the Indian’s and that worshiping the sun was foolish. When Atahualpa took the priest’s book in his hands, turned it over, and threw it to the ground, Valverde called on his cousin to avenge the blasphemy. Pizarro had always had it in mind to attack and capture the Inca emperor, but there was nothing so effective as having a priest order it. It was, as the Church would largely become throughout the Spanish colonies, a felicitous cooperation between religion and power.

  That marriage of sword and stone had become part and parcel of a national character. Just as Castile’s or Aragon’s crusades against the infidels had forged a warrior race, trained and tested in crucibles of violence, the crusades had also implanted a blatantly militant religiosity. The Spaniards who undertook the feat of conquering the New World were endowed with keen capacities for courage, fatalism, stoicism, arrogance, and pundonor; they were also deeply convinced of their own Christian exceptionalism. They wielded the word of Jesus as a banner; as symbol and lodestar of Hispanicity. Conquest, colonization, missionary zeal—all three marched lockstep in the New World. Even as conquistadors cut bold paths of exploration, even as colonials surged in to make their fortunes, priests mobilized communities and civilized the conquered. As remarkable as it seems, Christian missions became the systematizing force, the vanguard of empire.

  The religious who rushed in to remake these newly won lands wielded power they had nowhere else in the world. Catholic imperialism was a fact of life in the early Americas—an organizing principle—and it grew alongside the formidable bureaucracy Spain would build there. The bond between throne and altar was mutually reinforcing, unquestioned, and it resulted in a church whose rule would thrive, outlasting institutions long after conquistador and colonizer were gone. Catholicism would become a steadfast reality in that turbid world and the bedrock on which much would be built: the education of the Latin American elite, the permanence of white rule, the social safety net for the poor, the ordinary masses’ ever ardent hope for progress. It was an orthodox church, conservative, but it was imbued nevertheless with a crusading spirit. In the thick of exploration’s wildest improvisations, it proved more nimble and imaginative than the Crown. Ultimately, it would be far more resourceful than any frontiersman in the Americas. Priests went where the Crown’s emissaries dared not go, and they pushed far beyond the boundaries that conquistadors had set for themselves. Much would be asked of the Church; much would be met. But at the heart of things was a struggle for control as fierce and enduring as the conquest itself.

  The mendicant friars—the Dominicans, Franciscans, Augustinians—who made the first inroads into the New World were soon fighting to establish exclusive authority over their “pagan” charges. Convinced that they alone could transform the godless multitudes into a Christian ideal—a society that would embody the opposite of the corrupt, mercenary machine that the Church had become in Europe—they plunged into the business of moving populations into their reducciones, putting them to work, and indoctrinating them in the word of the Lord. Oblivious to the profound shock that this mass deracination and displacement created, they focused on what was uppermost in conquistadors’ minds: the appropriation of large tracts of land, the soldiering that a large-scale reeducation would require. As the forced corralling of Indians continued, the sheer magnitude of the effort required more and more territory. An intense rivalry emerged between orders to ally with governors, gain larger footprints, and increase their ownership of the enterprise. Dominicans accused Franciscans of invading their territory and hijacking their operations; Augustinians complained that Dominicans preaching in Spanish instead of indigenous languages would render Catholicism an alien cult. Adding fuel to this intramural friction, the newly crowned king, Philip II, in his capacity as Vicar of Christ, decided to take the entire business of New World evangelization out of the hands of the monastic orders and place it under royal control. The Crown now assumed ultimate authority by handpicking bishops and assigning them to the colonies, dropping them into the troubled mix and expecting them to command discipline.

  When the bishops arrived, they found a fully functioning ecclesiastical system that left little room for them. They were forced to insert themselves, impose, try to win the upper hand they had been promised. So it was that an abiding rift between bishops and religious orders—the secular church and the monks—entered the Americas and never left it. As one historian put it, a deep fissure ran down the very heart of the colonial church as bishop and monk tried to wrest control in a fervid struggle to win souls. The Church seldom spoke with one voice, leaving native populations to wonder how they might play off sides and profit from the divisions. On one hand, there was the secular institution, led by bishops, championed by governors, decreed by a king, and ready to ordain American-born priests in order to boost its power. On the other was a scattering of mendicant orders, pioneers in the hemisphere’s evangelization yet rivals among themselves, squabbling over dominion, unwilling to pass the baton to anyone born in and of the New World.

  In both camps, as wa
s clearly evident, priests were Spanish or descendants of Spaniards, white, firmly tied to the hierarchy of power. But their antagonisms were striking, often spilling over into society itself, where everyone seemed to have a son or brother committed to religious life. Passions would grow so heated, brawls so common, that during one canonical election in Mexico, a meeting between two opposing factions prompted knives to be drawn and mutiny declared, until the viceroy himself was forced to intervene and sit with the holy men until tempers cooled.

  Mendicants versus bishops, Creoles against Spanish-born, order against order, the contest for religious ascendancy shot like an electric charge through Spanish America. Yet for all the discord within the Church, its influence—in whatever guise—only grew stronger. The obligatory tithes, the tributes imposed on rich and poor, the demand that Indians labor to win God’s blessing: all these conspired to make the Church an affluent enterprise. Peru and Mexico, leviathans of gold and silver, began to generate such unimagined wealth that viceroys rushed to build church after church to celebrate their dominion, each more magnificently gilded than the last. Religious orders became consumed by the appropriation of real estate, buying up urban plots in a frenzy to install convents, monasteries, schools, and universities. By 1620, a mere century after Cortés thrust a cross into the heart of Montezuma’s temple, the glories of God were such a sight to behold in Latin America that the English priest Thomas Gage was moved to write: