The Catholic church in colonial Spanish America

Abstract

This chapter discusses the establishment and organization of the Catholic Church in the Americas in the sixteenth century and considers the conditions in the Iberian Peninsula at the time. The church in the New World was thus the outcome of the merging of two currents. One was the transplantation of the characteristics of the church in the Iberian Peninsula in the era of the discoveries; the other was the ratification of these characteristics by the Council of Trent. The female religious orders were born on American soil and appear not as a transplantation from the metropolis but as an autonomous local product. Two of the American women who have achieved official canonization belong to Franciscan category, St Rose of Lima and St Mariana de Jesus. Both of them correspond to a peculiarly Iberian type of devotion which had in itself little connection with the specific problems of Christianity in colonial Spanish America.