The Origins of Mexican Catholicism: Nahua Rituals and Christian Sacraments in Sixteenth-Century Mexico (review)

Abstract

Mexican The Origins of Mexican Catholicism: Nahua Rituals and Christian Sacraments in Sixteenth-Century Mexico. By Osvaldo F. Pardo. (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. 2004. Pp. xiv, 250; 26 plates. $70.00.) This book represents a significant new treatment of the Spanish Catholic enterprise of religious instruction. Pardo joins several other contemporary scholars in seeing the process as being lengthy rather than swift, uneven, fraught with controversy, and shot through with agency. Even trying to assess the relative success or failure of conversion is, according to the present author, an exercise in reductionsim. Yet the title of this book is somewhat misleading. Sources from the Nahua side, such as Fray Bernardino de Sahagun's Florentine Codex, are given employed to some extent, but the friars and the works they authored (or at least heavily influenced) receive the lion's share of analytical attention. Beyond the title, Pardo (who specializes in the study of colonial literature and culture) actually makes no bones about this orientation. He seeks to understand how members of the mendicant clergy in sixteenth-century Mexico-primarily the Franciscans, Dominicans, and Augustinians-came to understand and interpret rituals, sacred ideology, and character, and how their interpretations colored the ways in which they presented the new Faith. He has chosen to emphasize four sacraments-Baptism, Confirmation, Confession, and the Eucharist- because they constitute what can be loosely called a model of Christian initiation . (p. 15). The author draws heavily from the thoughts and writings of Motolinia, Mendieta, Dura, the 1548 Dominican Doctrina, detailed reports from parish clergy collected in the Descripcion del Arzobispado de Mexico (1569), Fray Alonso de Molina's Confessionario Mayor en la lengua mexicana y castittana, Fray Juan Bautista's influential Nahuatl-language Advertencias para los confessores de los naturales (1600), and several other significant texts. It may be true, as the author asserts, that potentially enlightening early-postconquest Nahua-authored texts are almost nonexistent, but Pardo seems to miss the potential of the large numbers of alphabetic Nahuatl sources, not to mention pictorial codices, mural art, architectural decoration, and the like, dating from the more mature decades of the first colonial century. The author also overlooks the role of the aides in the creation of many of the Nahuatl-language instructional texts used here that are attributed to the friars, thus losing an opportunity to gauge the extent to which some kind of indigenous voice might coexist with a clerical one in such sources. These comments aside, Pardo has created a readable, detailed, and insightful analysis of the slowly evolving and highly variegated process of evangelization as it emerged from the minds of Mexican mendicant clergy. The author pays very careful attention to precontact Catholic thinking about the nature and celebration of each sacrament under study. …