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Convent Reform, Catholic Reform, and Bourbon Reform in Eighteenth-Century New Spain: The View from the Nunnery

2005; Duke University Press; Volume: 85; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1215/00182168-85-1-1

1527-1900

Margaret Chowning,

Latin American history and culture

In the late 1750s and early 1760s, the foundress of the new convent of La Purísima Concepción (San Miguel el Grande) and her abbesses struggled to ensure that their vision of a rigorously communal way of life (the vida común) and a strict observance of the vow of poverty would become a reality. Less than a decade later, the bishop of Puebla and the archbishop of Mexico initiated a movement that eventually forced nuns throughout the viceroyalty to give up unseemly luxuries and adopt the vida común. Throughout New Spain, then, from midcentury to about 1775, reform efforts insisted that female convents adopt a more austere, disciplined, and community-centered lifestyle—a movement that one scholar described as "a veritable revolution" in the lifestyle of Mexican nuns.1But in the late 1780s and early 1790s, the bishop of Michoacán, Fray Antonio de San Miguel, and his closest adviser, Manuel Abad y Queipo, abruptly and startlingly reversed the direction of these earlier reforms. Rather than enforcing the vida común in the three main convents of their bishopric, they now demanded that the convents abandon it. In its place, nuns were to follow a "new method of life"—the vida particular—that amounted to an extreme version of the already highly individualized lifestyle that many Mexican convents had followed before the vida común reforms. Under the vida particular, each nun would be given a monthly allowance to support herself and her servants. Most community servants would be dismissed and their tasks taken over by the nuns' personal servants. This change not only embraced but (with the monthly allowance) exaggerated the much-lamented earlier tendency toward discrete, private households in many Mexican convents.Three convents in the bishopric of Michoacán were subjected to the vida particular reform. At Santa Catarina de Sena in Valladolid and Nuestra Señora de la Salud in Pátzcuaro, the "imposition" of the vida particular (in 1787 and 1793, respectively) returned the nuns to a lifestyle similar to what they had practiced before the vida común reforms. These convents catered to the elite of provincial society and had traditionally allowed girls from wealthy families to enjoy many of the amenities they had grown up with, including personal servants and a certain amount of material luxury. Thus, the reintroduction of the vida particular was taken more or less in stride and even welcomed (although even for these convents it was shocking that the principle of the life in common was officially set aside). But at La Purísima, the vida particular meant significant, wrenching changes that contradicted the convent's constitution and flew in the face of a tradition rooted in the vida común. Although the reformist principles advocated by the early abbesses had been challenged in the 1760s by a faction of rebellious nuns, who resisted the strictness and self-abnegation implicit in adherence to the common life, by the 1790s the convent's distinctive identity—as well as its customs, traditions, and modes of internal self-governance—were fully bound up with the idea of the vida común2. Thus, the imposition of the vida particular at La Purísima was disturbing and disruptive.As had been the case a generation earlier with the vida común, the imposition of the vida particular was labeled a "reform" and was carried out by ecclesiastical authorities with a reputation among both contemporaries and historians as "reformers." I take my cue from this seemingly indiscriminate use of the label "reform." I will explore the ways that changes and contradictions in the program of Catholic reform—including but not limited to the shift from the vida común to the vida particular—were experienced by Mexican nuns, especially those of La Purísima Concepción. I also place convent reform within the broader context of eighteenth-century Catholic reformism, using the nuns' experiences to illuminate the large, messy project of changes in church institutions and practices that were proposed and carried out by both church and state authorities.Historical research has paid far less attention to internal reforms within the American church than to external reform efforts sponsored by the crown3. Indeed, emphasis on the dominant role of the state in ecclesiastical reform has sometimes made the church itself appear defensive, resistant to change, and incapable of independent action informed by modern ideas. There are two recent exceptions in the literature, however, both of which focus on the final decades of the colonial period and, especially, on the early postindependence period. Brian Connaughton's Ideología y so í ciedad en Guadalajara considers, in its early chapters, the colonial origins of a nineteenth-century church that was fully capable of fashioning an ideology in response to the times and its own institutional needs, and not just in reaction to the development of liberal ideology. Pamela Voekel's Alone before God concerns the religious underpinnings of liberal thought and expressions of liberalism, or at least modernity, in Catholic thought4. This article joins this discussion but focuses on the varieties of, and contradictions within, Catholic reformism since midcentury. As early as 1760, we can begin to discern a complex and changeable movement to bring about rather dramatic changes in ecclesiastical institutions and devotional practices. The ways this movement played out in the real world of the convents helps us to see more clearly its nuances and paradoxes.While the literature on Catholic reform in New Spain is still weak, it is more developed for Spain itself. There, earlier generations of intellectual historians have periodized Catholic reform and given attention to the multiplicity of and contradictions within reform objectives5. This literature is helpful for an understanding of the Catholic reform movement in New Spain—not least because two of the most innovative Catholic reformers in New Spain were Spaniards who returned eventually to Spain to continue similar reform projects. In most of these works, however, the center of gravity remains the church-state relationship rather than the ways that Catholic intellectuals tried to fashion a reform project of their own. Indeed, many authors see Catholic reform as dependent on the actions and attitudes of the state, starting from the assumption of "the complete submission of the episcopate to royal absolutism."6 Another shared characteristic is the tendency to analyze the words of churchmen and other intellectuals, rather than the practical consequences and effectiveness of their ideas, and thus to focus on discursive, rather than lived, contradictions within the various reform projects. Finally, there is a subtle yet pervasive assumption in this literature that the American church was resistant to, uninterested in, or even unaffected by projects of Catholic reform. But as we will see, the lives of the nuns of La Purísima Concepción and other convents make it clear that this was not the case; one could even argue that the earliest clear and comprehensive expression of Catholic reformism occurred in Mexico, during the Fourth Provincial Council in 1771, rather than in Spain itself.The reforming abbesses of La Purísima, the bishop of Puebla, and the archbishop of Mexico who tried to force the vida común on convents in the 1750s, 1760s, and 1770s—all played a role within a long, if inconsistent, history of efforts to desecularize and respiritualize the female monasteries. Even before the Council of Trent (1545–63), critics both inside and outside the church had condemned convents as places where the nuns' solemn vows of poverty, obedience, and even chastity were regularly violated. At Trent, the harsh light of Protestant critiques of celibacy—and thus of the very idea of the convent—ratcheted up the pressure to reform. A number of administrative changes were put into place designed to control the convents more effectively and convert them into enclosed "gardens of virtue" where the vow of poverty was strictly enforced.7In New Spain, abbesses, bishops, archbishops, and Franciscan and Dominican provincials made periodic stabs at enforcing the Tridentine standards of austerity and strict observance. But the worldly ways of convent life proved difficult to eradicate, and reform projects repeatedly stalled8. Thus, in the second half of the eighteenth century—two hundred years after Trent—most Mexican convents very much mirrored the secular world outside their walls. Nuns headed large, separate, multiethnic households composed of servants, relatives, and schoolgirl-protégés. These households were connected to each other, as in a "miniature city," by a system of interior streets that led from the cloisters and the nuns' houses to plazas, gardens, chapels, hermitages, and cemeteries9. One census of Nuestra Señora de la Salud in Pátzcuaro in the late 1780s, for example, indicated that the convent housed not only some 30 nuns, but also 154 laywomen: 39 women and young girls who had sought refuge in the convent and because of their poverty were given tasks to perform in exchange for their upkeep; 12 schoolgirls; 79 servants (including one slave); and 24 agregadas (a mixed category, including women placed in the convent s by ecclesiastical authorities while their troubled marriages were sorted out, women hoping to be admitted to the convent, female relatives of the nuns, and what appear to be several mothers with young children)10. Some nuns' "cells" were extremely opulent, even designed by famous architects: for example, the elegant "palacecell" created by Manuel Tolsá for the Marquesa de Selva Nevada in the convent of Regina Coeli in Mexico City11. Many consisted of two or even three rooms, with a sunroof and a patio. It was not unusual for nuns to be allowed to keep birds and animals in the cloister, use jewels or other adornments to their habits (which might be sewn of fine fabrics), and play, sing, and dance to profane songs. Friends and family were received in the parlors of the convents and served refreshments from the nuns' excellent private kitchens12.Outside critics condemned these worldly convents as parasitical, decadent, and (in a new twist) socially useless institutions; just as the Protestant critique had focused the attention of Catholic reformers in the sixteenth century, so too did the enlightened critique in the eighteenth. Church intellectuals and officials responded by reinvigorating the ideals of Trent, including that of the reformed female convent. When royal and ecclesiastical officials approved the founding of La Purísima Concepción in 1754, it was in large part because the convent's constitution made it clear that the nuns would embrace the vida común and take the vows of poverty seriously: no private kitchens, no personal servants, no clothes of one's own, and no private cell. The implicit individualism of the eighteenthcentury philosophies was to be countered by the explicit communalism of the reformed convent.The vida común reforms of the 1760s are the most famous of the eighteenthcentury attempts to transform New Spain's convents. Although they have been treated as a particularly vivid example of conflict in the nunneries, as a window into the worldliness within the convents that reflected the values and lifestyles of Mexican elites, and as an example of the kinds of problems that viceregal administrators faced, research has not adequately placed them within a more general context of reformism. Associated with the same leading figures (the bishop of Puebla, Francisco Fabián y Fuero, and the archbishop of Mexico, Francisco de Lorenzana) and, institutionally, with the Fourth Provincial Council of 1771, the vida común reforms are a significant example of the broader Catholic reformist attitudes and policies of the period.13 Thus, we will begin our exploration of Catholic reformism and its relationship to the female convents with a summary of the literature on the vida común controversy.14In the late 1760s, Fabián y Fuero, as bishop of the important diocese of Puebla, undertook a series of convent reforms. The centerpiece of these was enforcement of the vida común in convents of calzadas ("those who wore shoes," referring to those convents that had a long-standing reputation of not enforcing the vida común). Fabián y Fuero began preparing the groundwork for this edict in 1765 by urging the nuns in unreformed convents to observe the vow of poverty more closely. Then, in 1768, he circulated a pastoral praising the virtues of the vida común, which would give the nuns "more time to devote to their religious duties without having to be personally engaged in all the daily details of their existence."15 This pastoral was followed by an edict in 1769 requiring strict adherence to the vida común in his bishopric."The common life," he wrote, "is not a harsh and difficult institution, it is not a frightening and terrible Monster, whose very name should strike terror in the souls of the Religiosas."16 But if it was not a monster, it nonetheless required a significant adjustment in the nuns' lifestyle. Fabián y Fuero indicated his seriousness of purpose when he observed that to create space for the common rooms required for the successful conversion to the vida común, most individual cells would have to be destroyed. He gave detailed instructions on how to construct the new common kitchens, refectories, storerooms, infirmaries, and dormitories.17 Nuns would cook and eat meals communally and sleep in dormitories. Clothing would be laundered and distributed centrally, and all personal items were to be removed from those cells that remained. All donations or gifts given to individual nuns were to be incorporated into the convent's treasury. Visits were to be restricted, and while visitors might be offered modest refreshments, the music and theatrical performances were definitely banned.18 Furthermore, only those servants necessary for the functioning of the convent would remain.Soon after, Archbishop Lorenzana—Fabián y Fuero's fellow reformer and compatriot from their shared days at the University of Valladolid and in the cathedral chapters of Siguenza and Toledo in Spain—took up the banner of convent reform in Mexico. "The female convents are full of servants and secular persons, to the extent that they resemble disorderly villages more than communities of nuns in peaceful retirement from the world," he wrote, justifying his request to Charles III for a provincial council—the first to be held in Mexico since the sixteenth century—to discuss the need for general monastic reform of both male and female orders.19 At the council, the discussion of the canons concerning the vida común was animated. The bishop of Yucatán remarked that of the many questions of doctrine and practice being considered, this was the most difficult. The bishop of Durango expressed fear that enforcement would not be easy. In the end, though, most of the nearly 40 churchmen present voted to impose the vida común throughout the viceroyalty.20Reaction to the reforms varied from region to region. In Puebla, where Bishop Fabián y Fuero acted in an "authoritarian and despotic" fashion to impose the vida común, the nuns responded in violent opposition.21 In the most notorious case, he sent in an army of workers to demolish the individual cells in the convent of Santa Inés of Puebla, thus causing a "rebellion."22 The Santa Inés nuns were deeply divided over whether to accept the reforms: about 30 had chosen to do so, while about 40 had refused. The two groups were "effectively divided into two separate institutions, each with their own patio."23 The rebellion began on February 11, 1772, when two nuns switched their allegiance to the pro–vida común camp. Two dissenters stood in the portería and started "screaming that they wanted to leave the cloisters," while others likewise "vehemently express[ed] their discontent." Although the unrest quieted when "the governor of the province promised them that he would personally look into their case," the following night "the Vicar entered the convent . . . and took the protesting nuns as prisoners . . . one of the nuns was slapped by the Vicar and two others were hurt by the men."24Apart from Fabián y Fuero in Puebla, the other bishops of the viceroyalty enforced the decree more tactfully. Nonetheless, resistance to reform generated a flurry of petitions, letters, and lawsuits encouraging Charles III to overturn the canons of the provincial council. Resistance took a variety of forms. For example, although the nuns of Nuestra Señora de la Salud of Pátzcuaro, in the bishopric of Michoacán, agreed to accept the reforms, their prioress sent the bishop a long plea for special consideration, pointing out that these religiosas were not housed in a convent proper but rather in a collection of small preexisting houses; because of this, they lived quite dispersed and had no dormitories, infirmaries, or other common rooms. For architectural reasons, then, this convent had to maintain separate kitchens and cells, and the nuns could not easily engage in common labors and activities. Furthermore, she argued, the city of minimum of one servant per religiosa. On top of this, they needed 14 community- service nuns to care for the many sick and demented, 5 more for the bakery, 3 for the kitchen, 1 in the sacristy, 1 to help monitor the front door, 1 for the prioress's cell, and 6 to sweep the choir and ring the bells. Finally, they had a shortage of singing voices, which they were trying to relieve by training two niñas in this office, so they could not very well expel them.25 Other than the fact that they wanted to sleep separately, eat separately, cook separately, and keep their personal servants and their niñas, they were willing to obey and would adopt the common life. Here, then, is a case in which resistance took the form of seeking so many exemptions as to render the reform meaningless.In the archbishopric, resistance revolved around a letter-writing campaign to Charles III that began even before the council met on the subject. Surviving petitions argue that the vida común reform, in effect, required the nuns to live a different life from the one to which they had professed. The nuns of Santa Inés in Puebla, for example, complained to the high court that "the Bishop [of Puebla] sought to transform their Rule, converting them into recoletas like the Carmelites and Capuchins."26 This pressure led the cautious and somewhat ambivalent Charles III to delay implementation of the decree; when he did implement it in 1774, he moderated the Puebla reforms such that only entering novices were forced to conform, and not nuns who had professed under the previous system.27Most scholars seem to accept that this compromise more or less ended the controversy and assume that the vida común reforms remained in effect to the end of the colonial period, even if enforcement eventually relaxed.28 The decree was officially overturned in the diocese of Michoacán, however, and accompanying documentation refers to at least one convent in Mexico City, La Encarnación, that by 1781 had also gone to a system of weekly allowances for the religiosas.29 Thus, although the historiography has not recognized the fact, the vida común reforms seem to have come to either a de facto or de jure end in much of the viceroyalty by the early 1790s, and in some places as early as 1780.How did the vida común reforms fit into the larger program of Catholic reform? We will begin by looking at the history of one convent that was founded during this period, the convent of La Purísima Concepción, founded in 1754 in San Miguel el Grande. The vida común reforms did not directly affect La Purísima, which—along with the Capuchin and Carmelite convents of the viceroyalty and a small number of others—already observed the common life. But the convent's experience does help to put the story of these reforms in a new light, in two ways.First, the literature usually presents the reforms as an attempt by male, peninsular-born ecclesiastical reformers (in cahoots with the reform-minded royal government) to impose unwelcome changes from above. There are three roles in this story for the nuns themselves: rebellion, delay (via use of the petition), or acquiescence. These are not insignificant roles, and a combination of the first two did result in successful modification of the decree. But all three roles are reactions to the actions of male authorities. The case of La Purísima, however, allows us to see that vida común activism was not confined to or dependent upon male authorities. Almost 20 years before Fabián y Fuero initiated the Puebla controversy, María Josepha Lina de la Canal (a 15-year-old girl from San Miguel el Grande) and Antonia del Santísimo Sacramento (an aging, disgruntled nun living in an unreformed convent in Mexico City) fully anticipated the vida común reforms. Indeed, since the world of the Mexican church was a relatively small one, it seems likely that the proponents of the later vida común reforms, Fabián y Fuero and Lorenzana, knew of or were perhaps even inspired by this reform experiment within a convent whose order, the Conceptionists, was not known for strict observance. Although we cannot demonstrate it conclusively, it is conceivable that the successes and failures of the experiment at La Purísima shaped Fabian y Fuero and Lorenzana's own program. Several canons of the Fourth Provincial Council concerning the discipline of nuns and the need for more effective enforcement of cloister could be read as inspired by specific events at La Purísima. For example, an injunction against confessors entering and lingering in the cells of sick nuns because "the Common Enemy often converts into sensual love that which began as spiritual love" applies quite clearly to a notorious event at La Purísima. A canon that specifically prohibited nuns from "politicking" for office might have been prompted by the accusations leveled against the leader of the rebellion at La Purísima by her fellow nuns and the bishop, and a comment in the justifications for another canon that "one of the principle causes of a lack of fervor and relaxation of the rule is that they enter into the convent without true vocation" and at too early an age could also have been inspired by the fact that the rebellious nuns at La Purísima were much younger than their nonrebellious counterparts and had mainly entered the convent under circumstances that suggested a lack of vocation.30 Obviously, these problems occurred at other convents as well, but the fact that they had surfaced at La Purísima more or less on the eve of the council suggests some connection. It may also be significant that one of the delegates to the council was Dr. Ricardo Gutiérrez Coronel, the private secretary (secretaría de cámara) of bishop Pedro Anselmo Sánchez de Tagle, who just a year earlier, in 1770, had been commissioned to study the rebellion at La Purísima and to recommend solutions to the problem of extreme lack of discipline there.31Briefly, the reformist origins of La Purísima are as follows. The parents of María Josepha Lina de la Canal, foundress of La Purísima, died tragically within days of each other when the girl was about 12 years old. Always an exceedingly pious child, María Josepha Lina was determined to use her vast inheritance to found a new convent. Apparently against the advice of some of her elders, including her confessor, the girl insisted that hers was to be a reformed convent, in which there would be no servants, no frills, much prayer, and where nuns would live in full community.32 The first abbess, Mother Antonia, was persuaded to come to San Miguel only because she believed in this vision and wished to get away from the excessively worldly Mexico City convent of Regina Coeli to which she had professed:As would happen in the convents in Puebla a decade later, many of the nuns did not share this vision and rebelled against it. One of the leading rebellious nuns, Cayetana de las Llagas, made it very clear that the founding nuns brought from Mexico City were understood to be the reformers, not the male authorities, and that it was they, not the bishop or the vicar, who were the targets of the rebellion. In a 1769 letter to Bishop Sánchez de Tagle, Cayetana wrote that the convent's problems stemmed from the fact that most of the founding nuns who came to San Miguel "were near the end of their years, very old," and having lived most of their lives in the convent of Regina Coeli, they had seen a chance to come to San Miguel as reformers, with "disastrous" results for the newly professed nuns.34 The rebellious nuns eventually drove the strong-willed first abbess, Antonia del Santísimo Sacramento, from office; they also forced the resignation of her weaker successor, María Anna del Santísimo Sacramento. Seven years later they elected one of their own number, Phelipa de San Antonio, as abbess, and she presided over a loosening of the Rule that scandalized the "obedient" faction of nuns but was warranted, she said repeatedly, as the only way that the convent could heal its wounds and function as a community. Phelipa's actions ultimately brought the intervention of the bishop in the internal affairs of the convent, which he justified on the grounds that Phelipa was trying to transform the convent into "something of her own creation" instead of the reformed convent called for in its constitution.35Thus, while the literature on the vida común reforms in Puebla and Mexico City gives the impression that nuns resisted so that they could preserve their privileged lifestyle in the face of attempts by male authorities to enforce strict standards of observance, the experience of the convent of La Purísima offers a telling variation on this story. In it, female reformers such as the foundress and the first abbess were as adamant as male reformers about the need to reinvigorate the ideals of the Council of Trent and were willing to take the lead in this reformist effort. It also demonstrates that the rebellion against the reforms was not just an effort on the part of elite women to subvert patriarchal attempts to enforce enclosure and a too-rigorous lifestyle; it could and did, at La Purísima, involve struggles among the nuns themselves over how best to serve God and preserve their community.By enlarging the scope of our inquiry, we can explore the second way that La Purísima sheds light on the vida común controversy. Scholarship on the reforms does not make a special effort to fit the subject into the larger context of eighteenth-century Catholic reformism. However, the major ecclesiastical actors in the controversy, Fabián y Fuero and Lorenzana, were also leaders of a broad program of spiritual and institutional regeneration that reached beyond convent reform. While the Fourth Provincial Council they called for and dominated may have been inspired by the "decadence" of the convents, it also took up many other issues of broad consequence. It is appropriate, therefore, to ask how convent reform fit into the mix of reformist measures that were proposed, debated, and implemented by the Mexican church in the 1760s and 1770s.Fabián y Fuero and Lorenzana were members of the first generation of Spanish-born clerics to agitate vigorously for the application of modern, enlightened ideas to church institutions and practices and to call for an activist clergy that would spearhead necessary changes.36 Like many others of their generation, both within the church and outside of it, they were regalists; in other words, they believed that the church would best serve its interests by removing itself from secular affairs and subordinating itself to the authority of the king. As royal appointees, they saw themselves as the king's allies in the effort to reform flawed institutions, with their own particular role being the reform of the church. They were not at odds with the king but rather were "confident in the power and patronage of the crown."37Why, one may ask, would churchmen acquiesce in the Bourbon project to make the state the dominant political power and, by clear implication, diminish the temporal power and privileges of the church? Historians have offered several reasons. In part, clerical regalism was pragmatic—unable and unwilling to take on a firmly absolutist monarchy, the church chose "to participate fully in the making of regalist policy" rather than risk being marginalized entirely.38 In part, alliance with the crown gained the bishops independence from Rome, a trade-off that seemed desirable to many.But the most compelling explanation for the regalism of bishops such as Fabián y Fuero and Lorenzana is that they sincerely believed in many of the reforms to which the state was also committed. Writing on church-state relations has sometimes portrayed bishops like Fabián y Fuero and Lorenzana as servile to the Bourbon state, "dutifully follow[ing] the agenda dictated by the crown."39 This view of the church reformers as toadies underestimates the extent to which regalist bishops and state officials agreed on many of the reforms concerning the church, and it also underestimates the extent to which (especially at the Fourth Provincial Council) the church may have led the way on issues of ecclesiastical reform. John Lynch, focusing on the effectiveness (or lack thereof) of Charles III's American ministers, calls the 1766–76 period a time when imperial reform had "gone cold." But in New Spain, this was a period of great ferment and activism on the part of ecclesiastical reformers.40This activism is particularly apparent in the case of the vida común reforms. While a few authors see Charles III as the driving force behind them, and while the king certainly helped generate a climate conducive to reform of the regular orders, nonetheless