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

Osvaldo Pardo examines how mendicant friars introduced Christian sacraments—baptism, confirmation, confession, and communion—to the sixteenth-century Nahuas. Though working exclusively with published materials, Pardo shows a broad command of the literature from and about Mexico (both sixteenth-century sources and recent ethnohistorical work), and the historical development of sacramental theology and ritual in the Old World. The book is a useful guide to what the friars thought they were doing. A major point of the study is that European theology and practice in Europe were not fully standardized, and the friars were able to exploit this flexibility as they sought out the opinions and options most applicable to their experiences. They often chose to simplify their tasks by pursuing those options that allowed the greatest degree of tolerance for native people's behavior. Pardo intends that his focus on the missionaries help correct the tendency to take European culture as a given and look at how native people "respond" to it; instead, he is looking for how the missionaries responded to the Mexican context.

Information on Nahua ritual is limited to occasional treatments of rites that resembled Catholic sacraments. Pardo states "knowledge of ancient rituals became instrumental for the friars' teaching of Christian doctrine" (p. 12). However, the friars' improvisations that he documents derive more from the exigencies of preaching new religious habits to large numbers of people in an alien tongue, turf battles among the orders and between them and other colonial agents, and other realities of the immediate colonial context than with their ethnographic investigation and evaluation of "ancient" Nahua ritual. He demonstrates little connection between the friars' knowledge of preconquest rites and the specific forms they gave to the sacraments. That some friars thought Nahuas accepted sacramental confession because they had had something similar does not mean that they widely or knowingly allowed indigenous elements without European counterparts into the rite. Nor does the author consider the likely possibility that the friars were fed descriptions of "ancient" rituals that invented or exaggerated similarities to the newly introduced rites. Pardo's most extended example of a friar's attempt to frame a sacrament in native terms is the Franciscan Alonso de Molina's application of military terminology, not native ritual practice, to the sacrament of confirmation

Chapters deal with individual sacraments. The one on baptism focuses on the debates over how much preparation and ceremony were necessary to legitimately baptize Indians, usefully updating earlier work such as that of Ricard. The chapter on confirmation documents debates about the spiritual maturity and capacity of the Indians. A chapter on confession discusses the controversy over whether contrition was necessary for proper administration of the sacrament or whether attrition (fear of punishment) sufficed; the latter view received much support. Here Pardo usefully critiques recent attempts to read the imposition of sacramental confession as a Foucauldian disciplinary regime. Because it was difficult for friars to decipher Indians' emotional states in order to determine contrition, and friars barely proficient even in Nahuatl often confessed Indians who spoke other languages, Pardo focuses another confession chapter on the reading of non-linguistic signs, such as gestures and weeping, as evidence of repentance. The chapter on the Eucharist examines disagreements between those who thought that, as permanent neophytes, Indians were unfit to receive communion and those who thought participation would help to nurture them toward spiritual adulthood.

Flexible the friars may have been, and optimistic at the outset, but somehow their responses to the Nahuas led ultimately to the Church's accepting scaled-down, simplified, less demanding forms of Catholicism, which in turn supported their representations of the Nahuas as less spiritually capable than themselves, fit for only a rudimentary form of Christianity. Thus the friars invented a mode of colonial discourse that would be replicated in many other places. I see here...