The “Conference on the History of Religion in the New World during Colonial Times,” which had been announced in The Americas (XIV, No. 2 (October, 1957), 191 f. & No. 3 (January, 1958), 313 f.), was held in the Woodrow Wilson room of the Library of Congress on December 17 and 18, 1957. Twenty-nine historians took part in the discussion of the formal studies which had been prepared in accordance with the published program. They had gathered from Brazil, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Mexico, Peru, Spain, and the United States. A number of students also attended from universities in this country and Canada.

The Great Seal of the United States, designed in the early days of the Republic, has on it symbolism whose significance is often overlooked. On one side is an eagle which grasps with one talon a branch and with the other a sheaf of arrows. Above its head are “E Pluribus Unum” and thirteen stars for the original states bound together in one nation. The other side has on it an unfinished pyramid. The foundation bears the number MDCCLXXVI. Above the pyramid is the eye of God flanked by the words “Annuit Coeptis,” namely, “He smiles on the undertakings.” Underneath is the phrase “Novus Ordo Seculorum,” meaning “New Order of the Ages.” Here succinctly is the vision which inspired the founding fathers of the new nation. The thirteen colonies had become one, prepared to face together the exigencies of the future, whether for preservation in self-defense or for cooperation in the arts of peace. Here was an attempt at building something novel in the history of mankind—a new and ordered structure. That structure, as yet incomplete, was based upon the Declaration of Independence, with its best-remembered phrases: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness—that to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.” Here is “the American dream.” As “four score and seven years” later Abraham Lincoln even more briefly described it, the new nation was “conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal” and its success or failure was a test whether “government of the people, by the people, for the people” could “long endure.” To that dream faith in God, in His creative activity, and in His sovereignty was basic.

I think it would be hard to overestimate the importance of such discussions as we are carrying on. From the beginning I was thrilled at the idea of being part of such a group. Historians are so commonly blamed, and I suppose rightly so in many cases, for encouraging and accentuating the differences between peoples and nations and groups that it is good for them to come together to discuss their common ground. Here I suppose, of all the possible topics, religion is most important. Every historian must begin with some conception of what is most important for human life, and this will condition all his work. And this suggests a form of exploration for each of us, at least privately. For with all our differences of background and understanding the fact that we are here suggests that we do believe it is important that such groups come together to discuss these matters. And this at least implies our conception of what really is “the last, best hope of earth.”

It is a constant theme of all writers on Canada that the feat of “extending the thin ribbon of population towards the Pacific and of holding all together demanded both the alert resourcefulness of the pioneer and the strategic daring and tactical caution of the true statesman.” It is also affirmed that “in the annals of political architecture the formation of the Dominion of Canada deserves a foremost place.” Both in the process of extension and in the formation of the federal constitution the leaders of the Canadian churches played a vital role. Also they helped to give substantial reality to an artificially contrived nation by fashioning their own church structures in accordance with the new national boundaries of 1867. But what was far more important, they actively cooperated, perhaps even against their own inner convictions, in bringing about a modus vivendi between the two warring cultures that found themselves compelled to live together in one house. Preceding the present “mutual agreement to forgive and forget” there is a long story of religious warfare and rivalry which ought to be of interest to church historians generally, if only to gain some insight into the character of a Christianity which has been so largely shaped under negative conditions.

For more than three centuries in the territories dependent upon the Spanish crown, the shields of bishops or of religious orders dominated the façade of the universities and of the institutions of learning; during that same period, the title pages of books of any scientific merit almost invariably carried the name of a tonsured author; architectural monuments of every class proclaimed the patronage of prelates or the protection of saints recognizing thereby their origin and purpose; schools, colleges and institutions of letters of every kind flourished in the shadow of the parishes and of the monasteries; music and theatrical functions confessed their origin in sacred ceremonies; the prirlting presses began their function under the auspices of ecclesiastics and their entire production during those centuries bears this seal. In short, the names of the university professors and of the teachers in the other educational institutions form an almost unending list of dignitaries, either of the secular clergy or of the regular, so that any summary of the outstanding figures of the intellectual life of that period shows a tremendous percentage of individuals who wore the clerical garb. It is an axiom, indeed, that the Church was in Spanish America the active patron of culture and the sponsor of knowledge almost from the day following that of the discovery. Today, fortunately, such a statement is again commonly accepted, although it was not an easy task to reach this agreement.

Dr. Silvio Zavala is to be congratulated on his draft chapter dealing with the history and influence of religion in the New World. The topic covers the planting of Christianity on American soil and, under its influence, the birth of a new society that was to be Christian in its institutions, in its culture, and, for several centuries, in all outward manifestations of its thought. In summarizing so broad a subject in few pages, Dr. Zavala leads us to ponder many extremely important points. The pages that follow are the product of a good deal of thinking, with regard both to the provisional text and to the subject in general. What a pity that meditation does not always succeed in fully clarifying our ideas and in completely dispelling our doubts!

This is a very broad topic and its treatment is quite complex. The time necessary to complete a systematic search of the pertinent literature, which is very rich and very dispersed, was lacking to us. For these reasons, we do not hope to offer here more than some considerations based on certain cases which can be considered as symptomatic.

The area which we shall study extends in area from New Mexico to Chiapas and in time from the conquest of Tenochtitlan completed in 1521 to that of Tamaulipas, completed in 1755. Moreover, we shall make some reference in passing to the actual state of Christianity among certain groups of indigenes.

IBELIEVE that only because of this international aspect, which above all showed itself prominent in the activity of the Jesuits in America during the seventeenth century, can we be speaking in a special way of the Jesuits at this international meeting, which corresponds to the Pan American tone of the chapter written by Doctor Zavala.

This “internationality” of the Company of Jesus was not something exclusive to the Jesuits in America. It came from the very times of Saint Ignatius (1556), when not only in the European colleges but also in the missions of the Orient and of Brazil—the only ones founded before 1556—Jesuits of different nationalities were always living together.

An Order so essentially international of necessity had to have a greater unity of hierarchy and of thought to give it coherence and efficacy.

This paper is limited to the French-speaking Canadians; it does not include those who live in the United States, in the West Indies, in Latin America. In time it applies mainly to the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

The cultural foundation of the French Canadians is rooted in the sixteenth century. Most of the settlers who came from Old France to New France had been born in the last quarter of the sixteenth century, or were sons of these.

Their culture was made of a rich folklore still alive, of the laws then called the Coutume de Paris, which survive in the civil law still applied in the province of Quebec, of social attitudes which for a long time were characterized by the seignorial system, of ideas about education, of scientific curiosity then awakening in Europe, and of religious attitudes.

The author of these lines wishes, first of all, to ask your permission to study the theme presented in this program a trifle more extensively. That is to say, I will not limit myself in a spirit, perhaps, that is too narrow, to study only the evangelization of Brazil and Spanish America, but I will take a wider perspective of ecclesiastical or ecclesial matters, since the missions, as the great Belgian teacher Pierre Charles, S. J. taught me, do not represent anything more than the normal and natural growth of the Church. My comparison therefore will refer to the history of the Church in both dominions. However, I must amplify the theme in another way.

The African came to know Christianity, in this part of the New World, as a system of values (the Christian ideas), and as a normative structure (the Catholic Church). These two were interrelated, although frequently in conflict with other values and other structures emerging from the social system which was established as a consequence of Portuguese colonization. In his quality as slave he was integrated into an inter-relational combine which included new forms of ecologic adaptation, of economy, of inter-personal relationships and their regulation, on a rural basis, and of a slave-holding, latifundiarian and senhorial orientation.

This brief communication will try to show the attitude of the Dutch Calvinists towards the other religious groups in Portuguese America, during the period of the occupation by the Dutch West India Company of northeast Brazil, from 1630 to 1654. At the time of their greatest expansion, the Dutch controlled all the coastal region from Sergipe to Maranhão.

Liberty of conscience had been announced beforehand for all Christians and Jews of the captaincy of Pernambuco in Brazil, which that company proposed to conquer. De facto, in the “Secret Instructions to General Lonck,” commandant of the squadron which took possession of that captaincy, instructions dated Middelburg, August 18, 1629, this liberty of conscience was immediately promised, although, at the same time, it was determined that “all the Jesuits, fathers and friars and other religious must be embarked with all their baggage.” Liberty of conscience was again promised by the Dutch in a manifesto addressed in 1632 to the owners of the sugar-mills and the inhabitants of Pernambuco, and, in 1635, when at the capture of Paraíba not only was this liberty promised but also liberty of cult.

I SHOULD like to ask you gentlemen to allow me, in the very beginning, to set limits to my task. The most imposing of these limitations are my own. It would be unbecoming of me to make a tacit profession of authority on the Enlightenment in English America by discoursing on the subject. I have, moreover, never made a frontal assault on the broad field of theology in the Latin world, for I regard the subject as universal, well-known to historical theologists, and when known for Europe generally predictable for America. There is also a relation between the Enlightenment in Spain and the Enlightenment in America, but what happens in America cannot be absolutely foretold by what happens in Spain. I shall therefore treat Spain, when I treat it at all, as only a back-drop for the American scene.

Since the general framework of the Commission’s history of the Americas is unknown to me, it would be presumptuous to comment on the style and organization of any one chapter; therefore, a prudent silence shall be maintained on that aspect of Dr. Zavala’s work.

1. Has sufficient attention been paid to the possible effect of wilderness conditions upon the early development of institutional Christianity in'America? The chapter quite properly displays the Americas as a frontier in which European institutions met almost nothing in the way of a competing civilization to contest their plantation and expansion. On the other hand, it may have been that without such competition European institutions in some cases were modified to suit frontier circumstances more cheerfully and easily than if those institutions had been self-consciously propagated in the midst of a resilient alien culture.

I have given a careful and interested reading to the draft of the chapter on the influence of religion on the history of the New World for the PAIGH project. As it now stands, the draft ought to be discarded and redrafted in its entirety. This essay lacks a conceptual framework which would provide some unity of organization to the considerable amount of illustrative data that such a chapter must of necessity include. What first must be selected are those spheres in which religion has played a major role in the history of the Americas and then to compare and to contrast the various roles that these religious factors have played in the development of Spanish, Portuguese, French, English, and Dutch America. This type of organizational and conceptual framework will give a religious dimension to the central thesis of the whole project, i. e., that the Americas do have a common history, without distorting the often dissimilar impact that religious considerations have had on the historical development of the New World.

Since the aim here is not to bestow upon Dr. Zavala the praise due him for his customary stimulating analyses and insights, these remarks will be confined to listing succintly and without elaboration certain respects in which, in the writer’s opinion, the chapter on religion might be enriched or strengthened.

First, by way of general considerations, might be noted the extreme unbalance given the chapter by the loosely organized and often repetitious introductory section, with its 23 out of 52 pages for the chapter as a/whole. This is followed by a mere five pages on the Spanish church as against eight for the Portuguese and some ten for the British colonial churches. Perhaps more space for the Spanish section might be secured by omission of the several attempts to portray what happened to religious America after Independence; as belonging to the post-colonial period, this material seems irrelevant to the purpose in hand.

The general framework of the provisional chapter appears to rest upon discussion of the expansion of European Christianity in the New World, of factors which influenced the course of this religious expansion, and of the influence which, in its turn, the Christian religion exercised on the new society. The emphasis of the entire discussion falls, therefore, upon Christianity, and the religious heritages of the Indians and Negroes are noticed only as providing elements absorbed by a syncretism with Christianity.

Three main questions arise in studying the history of missions in Hispanic America.

1. To what extent did the Christian religion transform the structure of life among the American Indians? (Their religious, political, social, and cultural life?)

2. To what extent did the Christian religion influence the treatment of Negroes and the acculturation of the African element to the European and American-Indian environment?

3. To what extent did the Christian religion determine the attitude of the Spanish conquistadors and settlers, and condition the life of the new colonial society that arose on the basis of the conquest and Spanish expansion in America?

Dr. Malagon and I have put our heads together and have tried to bring some system out of the discussions of this Conference. Our summary is based not only upon the papers that were presented here but also upon the critiques and comments that were sent in by mail. It is also based upon conversations and informal suggestions made outside of the room or away from the table; so if you find something here that you had not heard about, you must just attribute it to one of these extraneous sources.