This is an earnest but on the whole unsuccessful attempt at the badly needed Juridico-historical survey of the Patronato Real de las Indias. It devotes considerable space to the medieval and early modern precedents for Julius II’s decisive grant of 1508 that gave the Spanish crown what developed into sweeping quasi-papal supremacy over the new American church, and then treats the evolution of caesaropapistic ecclesiastical control down through the three colonial centuries to independence. The running narrative is interspersed with numerous translations of key papal bulls and certain pertinent Spanish texts, the Latin and Castilian originals of which occupy 112 pages at the back. The overall plan is commendable but its execution is so inadequate in many respects and so handicapped by errors of fact and interpretation as to limit sharply the book’s value.
The book’s weaknesses commence with the translations, which are often not properly presented in their context and hardly ever given the needed analysis of content and significance. More serious, the English renderings of the papal bulls, wherever tested, reveal so many errors in meanings of words and whole passages that constant consultation of the Latin is indispensable; and of course mistakes here inevitably carry over into the general narrative.
Eight chapters carry the story to 1508. These deal with papal crusading grants and royal patronage rights to churches in the Middle Ages; papal concessions of broad spiritual powers to Portugal in her African discoveries, and to the Reyes Católicos by the so-called Bula de Granada of 1486; the patronal implications of Alexander VI’s famous bulls of 1493; and the immediate circumstances surrounding the actual establishment by Julius II of the Indian Patronato. None of these chapters is without serious fault. Statements regarding the Reconquista are inaccurate and those on medieval papal crusading policy cite Weckmann’s unreliable work not Erdmann, Villey, Fliche, or other standard authorities; on royal-papal negotiations over patronage in medieval Castile, the one critical study, by Mansilla Reoyo, is not used; discussion of the Portuguese bulls, feeble as such, is further vitiated by failure to consult de Witte’s revolutionary investigations of the papal role in Luso-African expansion; on the Alexandrine bulls superseded traditional views appear, to the neglect of recent revisionism by Leturia, Giménez Fernández, and García Gallo; and handling both of the Bula de Granada, which commits various mistakes and ignores its Canarian aspects, and of the immediate political setting of the Julian concession of 1508, can only be described as weak.
It is in the colonial period from 1508 on that the work’s merits chiefly lie. Five of seven chapters here concentrate largely upon the sixteenth-century evolution of the Patronato, beginning with Ferdinand’s steps to initiate episcopal organization and gain control over tithes in Española, and Charles V’s establishment of the dioceses of Tlaxcala and Mexico under Bishops Garcés and Zumárraga, respectively. This focus on New Spain involves passing over similar test eases in the Antilles, Castilla del Oro, Tierra Firme and Peru. Considerable space is given to Philip II’s reign. Here the author broaches the whole problem of church-state relations in Spain as well as in the New World under the pase regio, with its tight grip over all communication between the papacy and the Hispanic churches on both sides of the Ocean Sea. Here, too, he deals (but too vaguely) with the actual operation of the Patronato by king and Council of the Indies, and reviews the Patronato titles of the Recopilación of 1680, although in topical rather than more meaningful chronological order. An illuminating discussion follows of the special problems raised for the crown by the organizational ties in Rome of the religious orders (mainly, here, the Franciscans) active in the American missions. But the great crisis of the Patronato de las Indias in 1566-73, when Franciscan denunciation of abuses committed against the Indians by the audiencia officials of New Spain brought Pius V to the verge of abrogating the privilege of 1508, is confusedly spread along with other matters over several chapters, so that it never becomes quite clear why at the crucial moment the Jesuit general Borgia threw his decisive weight in favor of continuing state control over the American church. Two final, somewhat hurried, chapters on papal extension of the Patronato in 1753 to cover all Spain and the empire, and on Bourbon intensification of crown ecclesiastical supremacy, stress this period as one of Jansenist perversion of the institution rather than what might seem the logical outcome of Hapsburg statism; and here the author’s sympathetic attitude towards the Patronato shifts to an anti-regalist line.
As a general introductory account of a highly important subject, and one upon which the literature in English is especially poor, Fr. Shiels’s book possesses a certain undeniable utility, principally in its colonial chapters. It is regrettable that on many of the topics presented it cannot be regarded as an adequate summary of the present state of knowledge, and that its organizational weaknesses, factual and interpretive errors, and bibliographical limitations, make it disappointing at many points and plain misleading at not a few others.
