THE CHURCH IN THE INDIES 103
survive the shock of Conquest, multiply, and live
better under the new religion than the old one. De-
spite the clandestine opposition of surviving pagan
priests and some native nobility, the friars con-
verted prodigious numbers of natives, who, will-
ingly or unwillingly, accepted the new and more
powerful divinities of the invaders. In Mexico, the
Franciscans claimed to have converted more than
a million people by 1531; the energetic Motolinía
asserted that he had converted more than fi fteen
hundred in one day! Where persuasion failed, pres-
sures of various kinds, including force, were used
to obtain conversions. Natives who had been bap-
tized and relapsed into idolatry were charged with
heresy and punished; some nobles were hanged or
burned at the stake. To facilitate the missionary
effort, the friars studied the native languages and
wrote grammars and vocabularies that are still of
value to scholars.
The religious, especially the Franciscans, also
assigned a special importance to the establish-
ment of schools in which indigenous upper-class
youth might receive instruction in the humanities,
including Latin, logic, and philosophy, as well as
Christian doctrine. The most notable of these cen-
ters was the Franciscan Colegio de Santa Cruz in
Mexico. Before it entered on a decline in the 1560s
as a result of lay hostility or lack of interest and the
waning fervor of the friars themselves, the school
had produced a harvest of graduates who often
combined enthusiasm for European culture with
admiration for their own pagan past. These men
were invaluable to the missionaries in their effort
to reconstruct the history, religion, and social in-
stitutions of the ancient civilizations.
Although some of the early friars undertook to
destroy all relics of the pagan past—idols, temples,
picture writings—the second generation of mis-
sionaries became convinced that paganism could
not be successfully combated without a thorough
study and understanding of the old pre-Conquest
way of life. In Mexico there arose a genuine school
of ethnography devoted to making an inventory of
the rich content of pre-Columbian cultures. If the
primary and avowed motive of this effort was to
arm the missionary with the knowledge he needed
to discover the concealed presence of pagan rites
and practices, intellectual curiosity and delight
in the discovery of the material, artistic, and so-
cial achievements of these vanished empires also
played a part.
The work of conversion, by the subsequent
admission of the missionaries themselves, was less
than wholly successful. In Mexico, concludes his-
torian Louise M. Burkhart, the Aztecs “were able
to become just Christian enough to get by in the
colonial social and political setting without com-
promising their basic ideological and moral orien-
tation.” Here the result of the missionary effort was
generally a fusion of old and new religious ideas,
in which the cult of the Virgin Mary sometimes
merged with the worship of pagan divinities. Writ-
ing half a century after the conquest of Mexico,
the Dominican Diego Durán saw a persistence of
paganism in every aspect of indigenous life: “in
their dances, in their markets, in their baths, in the
songs which mourn the loss of their ancient gods.”
In the same period, the great scholar-missionary
Sahagún complained that they continued to cel-
ebrate their ancient festivals, in which they sang
songs and danced dances with concealed pagan
meanings. In Peru the work of conversion was even
less successful. “If the Indians admitted the exis-
tence of a Christian god,” writes Nathan Wachtel,
“they considered his infl uence to be limited to the
Spanish world, and looked themselves for protec-
tion to their own gods.” To this day, native peoples
in lands like Guatemala and Peru perform ceremo-
nies from the Maya and Inca period.
The friars also had to battle divisions within
their own camp. Violent disputes arose among the
orders over the degree of prebaptismal instruction
required by indigenous converts, with the Domini-
cans and Augustinians demanding stiffer stan-
dards than the Franciscans. Other disputes arose
as to which order should have jurisdiction over a
particular area or pueblo. A more serious confl ict
arose between the secular and the regular clergy.
The pastoral and sacramental duties performed
by the regular clergy in America were normally
entrusted only to parish priests. Special papal leg-
islation (1522) had been required to grant these
functions to the regulars, a concession made nec-
essary by the small number of seculars who came