Church and State in Bourbon Mexico: The Diocese of Michoacán 1749-1810 by D. A. Brading

Abstract

810BOOK REVIEWS forms in fact eroded the legitimacy of the state. Frequently parish priests could not remain loyal to a poUtical order which did not aUow them to exercise fully what they felt were their moral responsibiUties to their parishioners.While only a small fraction of parish clergy actuaUy became active in the insurgency, the neutrality of the vast majority of the clergy proved to be far more damaging to the Spanish rule in Mexico. In short,Taylor has written a thorough, well-researched, weU-reasoned analysis ofthe relationship of the parish clergy to their parishioners and to the larger state in eighteenth-century Mexico. It is a study which, in spite of its large scope, reads weU.The arguments and examples flow easUy, carrying the reader along. It is essential reading for anyone studying the history of Mexico on the eve of Independence. John F. Schwaller University ofMontana Church and State in Bourbon Mexico.The Diocese ofMichoacán 1 749-1810. By D.A. Brading. (NewYork: Cambridge University Press. 1994. Pp.xiii, 300.) Church and State in Bourbon Mexico is largely based on material which Brading coUected in Mexico in the late 1970's, before embarking on the reading and"hard writing" that resulted in The FirstAmerica.,This new book, the author explains in his preface,is the concluding volume ofhis trilogy on Bourbon Mexico (the first two studies being Miners andMerchants in Bourbon Mexico and Haciendas and Ranchos in the Mexican Bajío). But Church and State is in fact a dUferent kind of study. It is a coUection of essays on various aspects of church IUe in the Diocese ofMichoacán during the last haU-century of Bourbon rule, which includes much new material, and some which has been pubUshed previously (in Chapter 12, for example, on the last bishop ofMichoacán, Manuel Abad y Queipo, Brading returns to themes which he covered in The FirstAmerica , and indeed some of the text comes directly from there). Although Brading does not pursue a single thesis in Church and State (he rather modestly claims that this study has a more "introductory character" than the preceding volumes and calls for more research into some of the topics covered ), there is much useful information in this, his latest contribution.The book is divided into three sections.The first section, entitled "The ReUgious Orders," includes essays on the writings of mendicant chroniclers, on the Oratorians, and on the expansion of the female orders of nuns and beatas. EspeciaUy interesting , however, are the chapters dealing with the causes and consequences of the 1767 Jesuit expulsion and with the controversy surrounding the secularization of parishes, a measure which had a serious impact on the reUgious orders in Michoacán (as elsewhere in Spanish America) and led to considerable conflict between secular and regular clergy and between bishops and royal patrons —that is, between "the ecclesiastical and civil structures of the Spanish BOOK REVIEWS811 state in Mexico." From this section,we also learn much about the Uves of several prominent clerics, as weU as nuns and beatas, aU of whom Brading treats sympatheticaUy . Indeed, as the author reminds us early on, "one bad priest was apt to generate more episcopal paperwork than ten good priests quietly going about their business" (p. xu). The second and third sections—"Priests and Laity" and "Bishops and Chapter "—include essays on the secular clergy, on confraternities, brotherhoods, parochial income, on popular reUgion, bishops and chapters, tithes and chantries, and on the thinking of the three key clerical figures of the early nineteenth century—Manuel Abad y Queipo, Miguel Hidalgo, and José Maria Morelos . AU these chapters contain much that is informative and useful. In these chapters Brading uses case histories of young men denied entry to the priesthood because of non-white ancestry, shows the growing number of unbeneficed priests residing in the diocese in the decades preceding the outbreak of the 1810 Insurgency, demonstrates the serious inequaUty between the wealthy curas and the under-educated and often unemployed priests, many of whom lived in poverty and were reduced to begging for alms, and explains the ways in which the last generation of Spanish bureaucrats repeatedly sought to curtaU...