Hadrian VI, with the bull Onmimoda , had renewed the privileges of the mendicant orders to evangelize the pagans, reinforcing their role against the traditional monastic orders, such as the contemplative and the military orders, protagonists of the Spanish reconquest. The first mendicant orders in America were the Franciscan and the Dominican, accompanied by La Merced, a non-mendicant order that, through one of the friars, had accompanied Columbus on his second voyage. Later the Augustinians arrived and in the middle of the 16th century the Jesuits, the fourth mendicant order to make an appearance, followed by other minor orders, such as the Barefoot Carmelites, Capuchins, etc. We also find an important presence of female orders:Augustinian, Brigid, Capuchin, Carmelite, Poor Clare, Conceptionist, Dominican, the Incarnation, the Teaching and Hieronymites . The nuns, especially the Franciscans and Dominicans, had an important role in the education of indigenous girls and young women. Already in 1524 Hernán Cortés had requested the sending of nuns to Mexico. In addition, some hospital orders were present in the American colonies, such as that of San Juan de Dios.
Since the beginning of the spiritual conquest and before the growing role of religious orders, the Vatican wanted to be present and in 1568 created the Congregation for the Conversion of the Infidels , looking for a certain leadership in the process. In 1622 Propaganda Fide began to function, with a missionary objective related to America. However, Spain and Portugal were totally opposed to the Vatican claims, preventing papal interference. The evangelization of the Indians was modified after the Council of Trent , since the pre-eminence of the religious orders was relegated to the background to the benefit of the secular clergy and the bishops, to the point that the new monasteries of the religious orders had to be erected in peripheral territories.
The Mercedarian order had a discreet missionary work in the colonies. Very early, in 1514, he founded his first convent in Hispaniola. The Mercedarians had been the chaplains of the Castilian army during the reconquest and extended their role in the conquest expeditions, forming part of the hosts of Hernán Cortés, Francisco Pizarro, Pedrarias Dávila and Diego de Almagro . In 1528 they had 30 members in the Indies. Their evangelizing work with the Indians focused on Guatemala, Peru, Tucumán, Bolivia and Chile, although they did not know how to take advantage of their privileged position and except for the establishment of Guatemala, the others ended up failing. In their apostolic work they followed the example of other orders and created schools where the children of the indigenous people who were trained as catechists attended.
The Order of the Franciscans
The Franciscans were among the first to evangelize in the New World and had a clear link with the Antillean discoveries. In 1505 they had established the province of Santa Cruz de las Indias Occidentales on Hispaniola. The expansion of the conquest required new missionaries who, like the conquerors, left Hispaniola to go to Tierra Firme and later to New Spain. Pedro de Gante and two other Flemish Franciscans constituted the evangelized nucleus of the conquest of Mexico and in 1524, the "twelve apostles" landed, led by fray Martín de Valencia . The Franciscan order was the largest of those that went to America and in 1527 it had several provinces in the Indies:the Antilles, Mexico, Guatemala and Peru . It was the only order to organize a general commissariat based in the court, according to the recommendations of Felipe II and in everything related to the propagation of the faith they ended up adapting to the norms of the Congregation of Propaganda. The Capuchins, a Franciscan branch of strict observance, settled in Mexico and later spread to Guatemala and Lima. The Poor Clares, the primitive female Franciscan branch, landed in Querétaro in 1607 and later founded convents in Peru and New Spain. The Poor Clares, like all the female orders established in America, developed a basically contemplative and monastic work, without educational or evangelizing content, and it was common to see their cloistered convents populated by daughters of the local oligarchies. In 1789 the Franciscans had in America and the Philippines 241 convents, 163 missionary reductions and 139 parishes and vicariates of Indians, with almost 4,200 religious .
The Dominican order
Although the Dominicans were the second mendicant order to cross into the New World, their influence was relatively greater than their numbers:30% of the bishops appointed in America up to the second decade of the 16th century had been Dominicans. In 1509, fifteen years after the Franciscans, the first 15 Dominicans arrived in Hispaniola led by Fray Pedro de Córdoba. All members of the order in America had to respect the strictest observance, according to the reform imposed on the Dominican convents in the Peninsula, however, the ethical rigor of the Dominicans collided with the lax customs of the settlers. In the incident involving Fray Antonio de Montesinos and his Advent sermon in Santo Domingo in 1511 The resistance of the encomenderos to the denunciations of the especially sensitive friars in some matters such as those related to cohabitation with the indigenous was seen. Like the Franciscans, the Dominicans followed in the footsteps of the conquerors, although their first landing in Mexico was not accompanied by success. In 1530 they created the first autonomous American province, based in Santo Domingo, and two years later New Spain became a separate province. The Dominicans participated almost exclusively in the conquest of New Granada and had a great missionary work in Peru and Quito.
The order of jeronimos
The arrival of the Jerónimos was due to the will of Cardinal Cisneros to propose a compromise solution in the struggle between the Dominicans and Franciscans for the encomiendas in Hispaniola. In 1514, Cisneros had promoted a very ambitious plan based on the ideas of Las Casas to eliminate the encomiendas on the island that led the indigenous people to concentrate in their towns. The Hieronymites had to develop the idea, to the point that between 1516 and 1519 three priors of the order occupied the governorship of Hispaniola and although they did not put into practice the most ambitious proposals of Las Casas, they did promote important reforms to weaken the power of the encomenderos. With Carlos I on the throne, the encomenderos regained ground and the rule of the friars came to an end, after which they returned to Spain. Although their pastoral work is not comparable to other orders, during the 16th and 17th centuries 17 Hieronymite friars were appointed bishops in the Indies.
The order of Augustinians
The Augustinians, another mendicant order, arrived in America after the Franciscans and the Dominicans. His work was marked by the construction of splendid temples that expressed the miscegenation between European and indigenous culture. In 1533, a group of seven Augustinian monks arrived in Mexico and carried out their missionary work in areas not occupied by other orders. From that date the Augustinians developed an important missionary work in the New World and in the Philippines. Viceroy Mendoza took them from New Spain and to Peru and it was then that the order reached its maximum splendor. We also find some Augustinian convents, such as those in Chuquisaca and Santiago de Chile.
The order of the Jesuits
The date of the foundation of the Jesuits and the fact that in Spain only the mendicant orders had been authorized to go to the Indies explains their late presence in America. In fact, the Jesuits arrived in Brazil 20 years before Spanish America, when the Portuguese Crown entrusted them with the evangelization of its American colonies. For a time, both the Vatican and the Spanish Crown refused to allow the Jesuits to go to the Spanish colonies. A request to this effect in 1538 was denied by the Pope, and the Council of the Indies rejected in 1555 and 1558 the request of two Viceroys of Peru to include Jesuits in their retinues. In 1565, under the reign of Felipe II, the attitude of the Spanish monarchy towards the order began to change and in 1566, the Council of the Indies included them in the list of orders authorized to carry out their pastoral work in the Indies, although limited to South America. From Lima, the Jesuits expanded and also to Chile, Tucumán and Paraguay. Finally, in 1571 Felipe II agreed to settle in Mexico where they arrived the following year. Their preparation, especially in the study of indigenous languages, facilitated the development of their missionary work throughout the continent. It reached its maximum splendor in its famous reductions, also known as missions. However, his work did not focus on the evangelization of the indigenous, since the education of both Indians and Creoles was an important element of his mission. Hence colleges and universities were linked to their convents in major cities. In the Jesuit school of Lima, for example, the first Peruvian printing press operated.
The reductions
Reductions were concentrations of Indians from a given region in one or more towns administered according to Western guidelines, which were to remain isolated from the Spanish population. Its origin lies in the hospital-towns created by Vasco de Quiroga in Michoacán from 1537 , the first of which was that of Santa Fe. In them the social organization and the distribution of land was communal, following the model of Tomás Moro. Quiroga believed that the naive and kind nature of the Indians, which contrasted with the corrupt soul of the Europeans, facilitated the development of Moro's utopia in the New World. In Mexico, these reductions were called congregations. One of its main objectives was the Christianization of the indigenous people, since the proximity to priests and Spanish authorities favored their acculturation. The best known reductions are those of the Jesuits, especially important in Paraguay and neighboring areas, which affected the Guarani Indians. The first missions, controlled by just under 5 Jesuits, were founded at the beginning of the 17th century and came to gather in 32 towns nearly 300,000 Indians of Guarani origin. In the north of Mexico, the missions brought together 100,000 indigenous people. Although the utopian aspect of the missions is often insisted on, they operated under a very harsh labor regime and with extremely strict and regulated schedules that made a dent in the spirit of the reduced indigenous people, whose daily life was governed by communitarianism. The missions enjoyed a wide autonomy with respect to political power, which was the cause of frequent friction with the landowners of the region, as evidenced in the confrontation waged by the landowners between 1721 and 1735, but also with the local authorities — governors or corregidores. Precisely for this reason the Bourbon reformers, anxious to reinforce the power of the monarchy, did not see them favorably either and were staunch supporters of their expulsion from the Indies. The attacks of the bandeirantes, hunters of indigenous people from the São Paulo region, whose purpose was to sell the Indians as slaves in Brazil, began to erode the life of the missions. These received a mortal blow with the expulsion of the Jesuits in 1767, which prompted their definitive decline. From their European exile, the Jesuits expelled from America by order of Carlos III, idealized the role of the Paraguayan reductions in the promotion of the indigenous people and especially their utopian character.