The Quick and the Dead: Secularization Debates during the Hapsburg and Bourbon Eras

In 1545 Franciscan friars began to establish the first of what would be dozens of Christian communities in the Yucatan peninsula. Within a lifetime, however, the Friars Minor were already feeling the effects of competition for control of these and other newly-proposed communities by the secular Order of the church, that is, the local bishop and his diocesan priests. The ‘secularization' skirmished as they have come to be called, and the debates that underwrote those battles are not unique to the peninsula. Indeed, this same struggle occurred throughout Spanish America and involved all of the religious orders, especially in the eighteenth century after the empire came under Bourbon control. What is unique to the Yucatan, however, is the relative success of the Franciscans there in fending off the transfer of so many of their doctrinas to the care of the seculars until a very late date, the early nineteenth century. The effort put forth by the crown and its ecclesiastical officials to transfer the religious administration of Indian communities from regular order friars to secular priests constituted during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries a considerable challenge to the power and purpose of the religious and secular orders alike who operated within the empire, and these debates, when looked at closely, help us to understand better how the various branches of the church tried to adapt themselves to different political and social realities as a means to maintain their “legitimate right” to oversee indigenous religious instruction and worship. This paper compares the arguments and maneuvers that Franciscans in the Yucatan and their allies made to those put forth by ecclesiastical and crown officials during both the late-Hapsburg and early-Bourbon eras in order to demonstrate just how nimble, dynamic, different —and local— the various approaches were in these two different eras.