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Bartolomé de las Casas, Judge Alonso de Zorita, and the Franciscans: A Collaborative Effort for the Spiritual Conquest of the Borderlands

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 December 2015

Ralph H. Vigil
Ralph H. Vigil*
Affiliation:
University of Nebraska, Lincoln, Nebraska
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Extract

These brief remarks on the Dominican friar Bartolomé de Las Casas, Licenciate Alonso de Zorita, and the Franciscan Order in sixteenth-century Mexico should not be interpreted as characteristic of either the century or the colonial period as a whole. Church and state generally complemented each other, but the origins “of the longenduring conflict between clerical and anticlerical forces” in Mexico and the Borderlands “reach into earliest colonial times.” An example is the jurisdictional dispute between Archbishop Juan Pérez de la Serna and Viceroy Diego Carrillo de Mendoza y Pimental in the 1620s. Another is the long and bitter conflict between Franciscan missionaries and Spanish governors in seventeenth-century New Mexico. Nevertheless, cooperation between representatives of Church and State in New Spain is apparent even before the arrival of the saintly “Twelve Apostles” headed by Fray Martín de Valencia in 1524.

Type
Research Article
Information
The Americas , Volume 38 , Issue 1 , July 1981 , pp. 45 - 57
Copyright
Copyright © Academy of American Franciscan History 1981

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