194 UNIT 2 COLONIAL MESOAMERICA
Figure 5.5 The first page of a 1565
confession manual printed in both
Spanish and Nahuatl. The woodcut
depicts a Franciscan friar accompanied
by Indian children. From Alonso de
Molina, Confessionario mayor, en
lengua Mexicana y Castellana.Courtesy
of the John Carter Brown Library at
Brown University.orders. The translation thus had the effect of watering down the Christian notion of
personal moral responsibility and relating individual behavior to broader processes
that were not seen as necessarily evil (for more on this topic, see Chapters 6 and 14).
Also, native peoples had no concept of a “religion” or a “faith” as such, as a clearly
defined entity separable from the rest of culture, and thus they did not comprehend
what it was they were supposed to be giving up and taking on. Priests were too few
and too awkward in the native languages to explain to everyone the theological and
philosophical underpinnings of Christianity in terms they would understand; most
religious instruction occurred on a rudimentary level.
To the native people, Christianity appeared to be primarily a set of practices,
many of which resembled their traditional practices of prayer, offerings, processions,
dramas, fasting, and the use of sacred images. It was on these expressive and often
collective behaviors that the native people focused, sometimes with notable enthu-
siasm. Christianization proceeded as a process of addition and substitution within the
existing repertoire of devotional practices. Priests who lamented that instead of a
thousand gods the Indians now had a thousand and one, the Christian god having
simply been added to the native deities, had indeed perceived an aspect of this