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spanish america  Sin  Stuart B. Schwartz I n a sense, there had been no sin in the Indies before 1492. Native peoples of the Americas often had a strong sense of moral order and proper behavior, but Christian concepts of original sin, and personal culpability and guilt for thoughts and actions, or the necessity to eliminate and repent to gain personal salvation in the afterlife, were largelyabsent.Thus, as part of the conversion process, theexplanation of the nature of sin, the distinction between venial and mortal sins, and the inculcation of sin as a personal concern became a principal objective of the missionaries. It sometimes also became a focal point for cultural resistance or adaptation by the indigenous peoples. America had almost immediately brought forth utopian and millenarian hopes from Spanish theologians, but it also elicited fears of tremendous potential danger from sin. The nature of its heathen peoples (both indigenous peoples and the Africans later brought there), their practices and rites, led many Spanish moralists and theologians to view the NewWorld as the devil’s realm.The theological position that idolatry was the most heinous sin, and, as the Jesuit José Acosta wrote, “the beginning and end of all evil” made the Americas inherently threatening.1 Added to that danger were the opportunities to sin available to the Spanish immigrants and conquerors. Sin was, after all, the product of free will. For theologians and many missionaries, America with its pagan peoples, its limitless size, and the diminished control of the Hispanic population presented myriad opportunities for sin or even for freedom of conscience , a concept that struck at the foundations of political and religious order. This was an attitude also shared by many royal officials. Because secularauthorityand religious authority were closely united in the Indies, it was often difficult to separate sin (pecado) from crime (delito) in terms of definitions or jurisdictions. For every crime implied a sinful breakdown of the Catholic moral order. From the outset, religious and civil authority sought to control the sins of the newly converted native peoples, African slaves, and the gente de razón (rational people, the Hispanic population). A debate rapidly developed over the most effective way to carry this out, with the Dominican Bartolomé de Las Casas (1484–1565) arguing that the less contact native peoples had with Spanish society the fewer sins they would commit and the sooner they would live a Christian life. Others argued that contact would speed the “civilizing” of indigenous peoples. While to some extent the emphasis in policy depended on local conditions or particular bishops, over time acculturation through contact predominated, accompanied by a growing belief that native peoples were incapable of achieving the same religious understanding or practice as Europeans. This was made clear in the 1570s by the exclusion of native peoples, Africans, and their descendants from the jurisdiction of the Inquisition. Instead, their errors and sins were punished by episcopal courts or special tribunals to extirpate “idolatry,” a term usually defined to include the persistence of former religious ideas or practices. Over time “superstition ,” along with sins against the moral order such as drunkenness, adultery, and blasphemy, became the principal offenses for which native peoples and those of African origin were charged. But by the eighteenth century the stubborn persistence of “superstitious” practices no longer signaled a threatening return to idolatry.The clergy in New Spain were inclined to see such sins rather as the product of the Indians’ lethargy and ignorance.The clergy accepted a kind of deviation from European practice, but the purported lack of contrition and irregularity of indigenous confessions confirmed a failure to inculcate the traditional conceptualization of sin. The concept of sin and its elimination by God’s grace as a requisite for salvation lay at the heart of Christian theology . As human beings, the native inhabitants bore the burden oforiginal sin; the Church’s responsewas the sacrament of baptism, the focus of early missionary efforts to bring the populations of the Indies into the Church. Considerable debates emerged between the missionary orders over the extent of instruction in the faith needed before native peoples were ready to receive this sacrament. But conversion legitimized Castile’s possession of the Indies according to papal concessions, so there were imperatives to proceed rapidly to baptism. This rite elicited the support of the principal Spanish military and civil authorities who acted as godparents of indigenous leaders, and overall this system (padrinazgo) promoted the integration of the converted population into the...

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