Franciscan Spirituality and Mission in New Spain, 1524–1599: Conflict Beneath the Sycamore Tree (Luke 19:1–10) by Steven E. Turley (review)

In considering the early Franciscan missions to New Spain, most scholars have focused on the externalities of the missionaries’ calling: how they adapted to the new environment, how they learned the native languages; how they confronted seemingly insurmountable obstacles. Yet very few scholars have focused on the internal and spiritual aspects of the mission. In this work Steven E. Turley gives us an unflinching look at the early Franciscan missionaries and how their training and their sense of vocation was, in reality, inimical to the missionary endeavor in which they found themselves.

Turley begins his closely reasoned and thoroughly researched study by considering what Pierre Bordieu designates as habitus, “the embodied history, internalized as second nature and so forgotten as history” (2). This is the whole body of experiences and training that is taken as normative and thus passes without comment. For the sixteenth-century Franciscans, according to Turley, the crucial habitus was the eremitic life of contemplation, prayer, and what the friars called recollection. For the Franciscans, it was this meditation and contemplation that gave them the power to go out into the world preaching the Gospel. But clearly this lifestyle was difficult if not impossible in the face of the manifold demands placed on them by the pressure to convert millions of natives to the faith.

At the time of the conquest, the Franciscans had just gone through a process whereby the strict asceticism of the Observant faction was renewed and the more lax Conventual interpretation was essentially outlawed. All of the first missionaries came from the Observant faction, and all struggled mightily with maintaining their own spiritual health. Many wrote of their discouragement and frustration. The second wave of missionaries had a more diverse background. As the colony matured and the secular clergy began to take over parochial duties, conflicts erupted between the seculars and regulars, the Franciscans in particular. In this context, one would assume that the friars would gladly give up their parishes to retreat into a more contemplative life. Instead, the friars fought efforts to remove them.

Each side accused the other of mistreating the natives. Further divisions emerged over the issue of receiving funds from the crown for the missionary effort, potentially a violation of the Franciscan vow of poverty. As morale among the friars declined, they also faced increasing difficulty in recruiting missionaries. Of those they did recruit, many did not come from the same ascetic tradition as the early friars. The order also began to look to creoles. The new groups placed less emphasis on recollection, instead embracing a less ermetic spirituality that was different from that of the founding cohort.

Popes had granted full papal authority to the orders early in the evangelization. Yet in 1574, the Spanish crown, using the canons of the Council of Trent, began a process of bringing the orders more directly under their local bishops. These efforts met with outspoken opposition from the Franciscans. While they had no wish to become curates, they were not willing to give up the authority they already enjoyed. The bishops, and some among the friars themselves, noted that there were many friars who simply did not wish to live under authority and pursue a more monastic existence. It seems that a significant number of these friars no longer saw the identity of the order in its ascetic traditions. Some of the older friars called for a general reform of the order in New Spain to correct what they saw as a wrong direction, but what succeeded was that yet another austere and eremitic group came from Spain to found an even more ascetic province in western Mexico, the Discalced Province of San Diego. Their arrival renewed the cycle of reform and the embrace of the eremitic tradition in...