16 - The Catholic church

Summary

The historiography of the church in colonial Spanish America is in a far more primitive state than the historiography of colonial Spanish America in general. Only in recent years has it emerged from some of its accumulated backwardness, giving promise of a better future.

A number of general histories of the church world-wide include chapters, more or less generous in scope, devoted to Latin America: vols. 16 to 19 of the Histoire de l’Eglise depuis les origines jusqu’à nos jours (Paris, 1948–60), edited by Augustin Fliche and others; vols. 5 to 8 of Hubert Jedin’s Manual de historia de la Iglesia (Barcelona, 1974–8); vol. 3 of The Christian Centuries: A New History of the Catholic Church, edited by Louis-Jacques Rogier, R. Aubert and M. D. Knowles (London, 1964–); and vols. 3 and 4 of the Historia de la Iglesia católica (Madrid, 1954–63) by Bernardino Llorca, Ricardo García Villoslada and Francisco Javier Montalbán. See also vols. 2, 3 and 4 of Simon Delacroix’s Histoire universelle des missions catholiques (Paris, 1956–9). From the Protestant point of view there is K. S. Latourette’s A History of the Expansion of Christianity (New York and London, 1938–53).

There are also a number of works specifically Latin American in scope: Leandro Tormo Sanz, Historia de la Iglesia en América Latina, vols. 1 and 3 (Madrid, 1962–3), A. Ybot León, La Iglesia y los eclesiásticos en la empresa de Indias, 2 vols. (Barcelona, 1954–63), and León Lopétegui, Félix Zubillaga and Antonio de Egaña, Historia de la Iglesia en la América española desde el descubrimiento hasta comienzos del siglo XIX, 2 vols. (Madrid, 1965–6) confine themselves to the colonial period, though in some cases stretching it to cover the period of the Wars of Independence.