North American Protestants and the Mexican Inquisition, 1765-1820

Abstract

To the Mexican Inquisitors of the late colonial period the dan ger of Protestant ideas was not as serious as it had been to their colleagues of previous centuries. The nature of the threat had diminished, and the challenge of Protestantism to Roman Cath olic orthodoxy was no longer acute. In the sixteenth and seven teenth centuries the Reformation doctrines were feared not be cause they were widespread in the Mexican colony, but because of their potentially erosive character when they came into con tact with the orthodox faithful, especially those Catholics whose knowledge of dogma was sparse and who relied entirely upon faith.1 By the beginning of the seventeenth century it was ap parent to the Church and the Inquisition that the new Protestant sects and the new Protestant states in Europe were permanent entities rather than ephemeral phenomena. Furthermore, the cleavage of religious unity had not resulted in the world cataclysm that had been feared by the Hapsburg monarchs of Spain and the Roman Catholic Church alike. By the time of the arrival of the Bourbons on the Spainsh throne at the opening of the eighteenth century, the issue of the Protestantism was all but dead; and the new kings and their religious counterparts paid scant attention to Protestants at home and in the empire. They were more con cerned with other challenges to religious and political orthodoxy —doctrines emerging from the scientific revolution of the seven teenth century and the dangerous ideas of the philosophes of the eighteenth century. After the middle of the seventeenth century it was most dif ficult for the Inquisition to brand second and third generation Protestants as heretics, particularly when they had been born and reared in Protestant countries. The Holy Office of the Inqui