7 - The Mestizo Priesthood

Summary

Chapter seven examines the political fallout that began in the 1570s, when the New Kingdom archbishop began to ordain dozens of mestizo priests in order to comply with the Crown’s mandate to place priests fluent in indigenous languages within native mission parishes (doctrinas), a change inspired by the Council of Trent’s encouragement for increased ministrations in the vernacular. Surprised to receive Crown instructions explicitly prohibiting the ordination of mestizos, in 1576 the archbishop emerged as a defender of the value and validity of the ordinations of individuals of mixed ethnicity. Yet the same archbishop resisted the promotion of a local mestizo to an elite position in the Santafé cathedral. This chapter examines how the complex motivations of the archbishop and elite ecclesiastics – as they sought to create a second-tier mestizo priesthood – were related to exclusivist discourses about “blood purity” (limpieza de sangre). The confrontation over the legal issue ultimately provoked the Crown into elaborating imperial law, which connected matters in the New Kingdom to concerns in Peru and elsewhere in the Indies.