Alonso de Montúfar

Alonso de Montúfar Born in Loja, Andalusia, Spain c. 1489, died in Mexico City, March 7, 1572. Archbishop of Mexico 1551-1572.

Following the chronicler Gil González Dávila some authors give the year 1498 as Montúfar's year of birth, however, González Dávila contradicts himself stating that the archbishop was eighty years old when he, erroneously, stated that Montúfar died in 1569. He was born in Loja in Spanish Andalusia just after the conquest of the town from the Muslims. Apart from this, there is another interesting note concerning Montúfar’s date of birth; when his good friend and assistant Bartolomé de Ledesma, in a eulogy to the Archbishop, writes that Montúfar had accepted the archbishopric in 1551, though he was over sixty years old. This note, together with the other evidence, indicates that Montúfar was born as early as 1489 or at least around that date

Dominican friar

Montúfar entered the Dominican Order and professed in the monastery of Santa Cruz la Real in Granada in 1512. By 1517 Montúfar was summoned to Seville. The reason for his transferral was that the Dominican Archbishop Diego de Deza wanted him as one of the first fellows ("colegiales") of the newly founded college of Santo Tomás de Aquino. In the college Montúfar was granted the degree of Master of Theology.

In 1524 he returned to his own college, Santa Cruz la Real in Granada after seven years in Seville. At Santa Cruz la Real, he continued his educational efforts. In 1530, the General Chapter of the Dominican Order installed him as Bachelor of Theology at the monastery for two years and then conferred to him the degree of Master of Theology. Following these years of teaching, Montúfar was elected prior of Santa Cruz la Real in 1536. At the end of his priory he went to Lyon, France to attend the General Chapter of the Order.

Coming back to Spain, in 1538 he was prior of Santo Domingo el Real in Almería and from 1541 he was prior for two years in Santo Domingo in Murcia. 1546, however, he was back in his old monastery in Granada, where he was elected prior for yet another term.

Apart from the appointments within the Dominican order, Montúfar served for a long time as a theological consultant of the Inquisition tribunals of Granada, Murcia, Toledo and Seville.

Archbishop of Mexico

After the death of the first archbishop of Mexico, Juan de Zumárraga, Montúfar was presented as new archbishop by Emperor Charles V. The recommendation of Montúfar as a candidate to the Mexican see seems to have come from the marquis of Mondejár, Luis Hurtado Mendoza, who at the time was president of the Council of the Indies. According to the chroniclers the marquis knewMontúfar personally, since he had been his confessor for some time.

Alonso de Montúfar was consecrated in 1553 and finally arrived as archbishop to his see in Mexico City in June 1554, six years after the death of his predecessor Zumárraga.

Provincial Councils

In 1546, the Holy See erected the archdioceses of Santo Domingo, Mexico City, and Lima. Consequently, the dioceses in the Indies ceased to be suffragan to the Archbishop of Seville and formed three new church provinces. This event marked the beginning of the golden age of theprovincial councils. As Archbishop of Mexico, Alonso de Montúfar summoned the bishops of the province to two such provincial council.

Having arrived in June 1554, Montúfar saw the celebration of a provincial council as his greatest immediate goal. Already complaining about his advanced age and general fragility, Archbishop Montúfar wrote to the King that he wanted to convoke this assembly before his death, which he thought would come very soon. As a newcomer, the Archbishop thought it indispensable to meet his episcopal colleagues and the clergy, who had first-hand experience of the country. As Montúfar also thought that the young church in Mexico lacked both order and discipline, he considered it very important to establish a body of clear legal norms worthy of the new church province.

The First Provincial Council of Mexico 1555

On June 29, 1555, on the feast day of St. Peter and St. Paul, the first provincial council of Mexico was inaugurated at a ceremony in the cathedral of Mexico City, in the presence of the Archbishop and four of his suffragan bishops. Two of these suffragans were friars. Martín Sarmiento de Hojacastro of Tlaxcala was an experienced Franciscan missionary, and Tomás de Casillas of Chiapas was a Dominican. The other two prelates were clerics. Vasco de Quiroga had been a judge of the Mexican audiencia before being promoted to the diocese of Michoacán, and Juan López de Zárate had been bishop of Oaxaca for twenty years. López de Zárate arrived at the council severely ill and died before it finished.

The final decrees of the first Mexican council consist of 93 chapters. Most of these chapters deal with the instruction in the Christian doctrine, the administering of sacraments, and the enforcement of episcopal jurisdiction in the new church. Another very important theme is the establishment of concrete and detailed norms for the education and life of the clergy.

"The Second Provincial Council of Mexico 1565"

The second Mexican council was inaugurated on August 15, 1565, when the bishops swore their oath of obedience to the decrees of the Council of Trent (1545-1563. Apart from Montúfar and Bishop Tomás de Casillas of Chiapas, all the remaining bishops from the first council were deceased. Since 1555, the Dominican Bernardo de Alburquerque had become bishop of Oaxaca and the Franciscan Francisco de Toral was installed as bishop of Yucatán. In addition, Pedro de Ayala and Fernando de Villagómez, both secular clerics, had become bishops of Guadalajara and Tlaxcala respectively. On November 11, a little less than two months after its inauguration, the second council finished.

The acts of the second council include 28 chapters, most of them clarifications on the decrees of the first council. In a concluding note, the bishops stated that they wished to reaffirm the decisions of the first council of Mexico in 1555 and that the new council should be seen as a complement and not as a substitute.

Mission and Church Policy

In letters written shortly after his arrival in Mexico Montúfar presented a very gloomy picture of the state of the church in New Spain. Despite three decades of missionary work, Montúfar argued that the greater part of the indigenous population was as pagan as it had been before the conquest and that the church lacked both order and discipline. According to Montúfar, the bishop should be the absolute leader and teaching authority in the diocese, whereas the clergy (both friars and secular clerics) should be their coadjutors.

Even if Montúfar sometimes admitted that the mendicant missionaries Franciscans, Dominicans and Augustinians had done much for the Christianisation of the Indians and that he as Archbishop could do very little without them, he felt that they had gained too much power and influence. On the other hand, Montúfar thought that he was entrusted with very little power and if the archdiocese could be described as a patchwork of missionary parishes (doctrinas), most of them were outside the control of the prelate as friars administered them. Thus, Montúfar thought that a major change was needed. He wanted to construct a hierarchical church following the Spanish model, with a strong and influential episcopacy which could define the goals for the ministry.

According to the Archbishop, the doctrinas, which were administered by the friars, should be placed under the jurisdiction of the bishop, establishing legally binding links between the bishop and the clerics. To administer sacraments in a given location, all priests involved in the Indian ministry would need a licence. In this way, Montúfar would be able to replace friars with secular clerics. According to Montúfar, the Indians learned the doctrine of the church as if they were parrots, without understanding its contents. With such a deficient knowledge of the basis of the Christian doctrine and infrequent contact with the sacraments of the church, Montúfar doubted whether many of the Indians souls would be saved.

Montúfar thought that the friars occupied areas of the archdiocese that were too vast without having the personnel necessary for the ministry. In Montúfar’s eyes, the greatest problem for the church in New Spain was the extreme lack of priests. Sometimes Montúfar asserted that ten times as many priests were needed in order to teach the Christian doctrine and administer the sacraments to the native population. Montúfar wanted to replace mendicants with secular priests, who unquestionably were under episcopal jurisdiction. The hope for the church in New Spain would be to educate a large number of priests, particularly among the young Spanish men who were born in New Spain (criollos), many of whom already knew the indigenous languages. To meet the needs of the Indian ministry, Montúfar wanted to build a priest seminary in Mexico City, where a large number of young criollos could be educated and later serve as priests.

According to Montúfar, this lack of priests could not be solved unless the Indians contributed to the economy of the diocesan church through the payment of general tithes. Overall, Montúfar had a negative view of the indigenous population and their abilities. Like many other churchmen, he thought that the Indians were pusillanimous and weak and that they were easily led astray. He also thought them to be particularly inclined to drunkenness and fornication. If there were no priests living in the village, he believed that the Indians would easily become victims of the native religious experts (hechiceros), who would lure them back to their old beliefs and ceremonies.

On their hand the friars also argued that they were entitled to build and remove churches and monasteries without licence from the Archbishop, as they were beyond his jurisdiction. They wanted straw-bishops with little more than honorary powers, who could ordain the priests necessary for the ministry and bless ornaments and churches. Thus, the friars did not accept the placement of secular clerics by the bishop in areas already ministered by them. In general, the friars doubted the zeal and aptitude of the secular clerics and thought that the clerics were either too greedy or too uneducated to be entrusted with the sensitive Indian ministry.

If the Archbishop did manage to introduce his ideal view of the church, the mendicants thought that there was no future for the church in New Spain. The friars particularly opposed the introduction of separate Indian tithes, as that would have devastating effects on the already poor and tax-burdened Indians. If the Indians were forced to pay tithes, the friars thought that they would despise the church and its ministers and think that they were driven by greed and not by love for their souls. In addition, the Indians were already contributing to the subsistence of the clergy through the payment of tribute to the Crown or an encomendero. The introduction of secular clerics would also be very expensive, since the clerics often had to support large numbers of relatives. Apart from this, the friars argued that the imposition of tithes would only contribute to the enrichment of the bishops and the cathedral chapter, as only a fraction of the tithe revenues were destined to the ordinary clergy. In short, the friars thought that the introduction of secular priests and the imposition of tithes would rapidly destroy all that they had built up since they had arrived in New Spain.

Montúfar and the Cult of Our Lady of Guadalupe

One of the first sources to the cult of Our Lady of Guadalupe at Tepeyac in the outskirts of the city of Mexico was a collection of testimonies against the Franciscan provincial Francisco de Bustamante which was made up by Archbishop Montúfar in 1556. The document is often referred to as the Informacíon. [For an online Spanish version of this text see http://www.proyectoguadalupe.com/PDF/infor_1556.pdf]

According to this document a cult of the Virgin Mary under the name of Guadalupe had been initiated at Tepeyac not long before 1556. Several of the witnesses testify that the cult was “new” and that it was very popular among the inhabitants of the city. Many people, both Spaniards and Indians, and men and women from all social strata, travelled to Tepeyac to pay devotion to Our Lady and the picture of her that had been placed there, and gave great amounts of alms. Also, miracles had been reported. Nevertheless, the witnesses stress specifically the piety of upper class Spaniards who made pilgrimages to Tepeyac and entered the chapel on their bare knees. In the document, the church building at Tepeyac is referred to as an ermita, a word signifying a chapel of ease, often to be found in rural areas or in the outskirts of a town and without resident clergy.

The conflict between the Archbishop and the Franciscan provincial on the cult at Tepeyac began in early September 1556. On Sunday September 6, the octave of the Nativity of Our Lady, Archbishop Alonso de Montúfar preached in the cathedral about a text from the Gospel of St. Luke. The sermon centred on the devotion faithful Catholics should have for the Mother of God. According to witnesses, Montúfar expressed his contention that many people in various parts of the world held images of Virgin Mary in high esteem. Archbishop Montúfar was also pleased to note the devotion that the inhabitants of the City of Mexico showed for Our Lady of Guadalupe in her temple at Tepeyac and thought that the Spaniards’ devotion would surely have edifying effects on the Indians, whom he thought did not show such great affection for Our Lady.

The following Tuesday, September 8, on the feast day of the Nativity of Our Lady, the Franciscan provincial Francisco de Bustamante preached in the chapel of San José de los Naturales in Mexico City. By the end of his sermon on the Virgin, the provincial had dealt with the new cult of Our Lady of Guadalupe at Tepeyac and some of the witnesses noted that the provincial then had become very angry and that his face turned red. In opposition to the Archbishop, he affirmed that the Indians were very much devoted to the Virgin. In fact, their devotion was so great, that they thought that the Virgin was a goddess, instead of the mother of God. Bustamante said that Archbishop Montúfar was totally mistaken in approving the cult, which would have devastating effects on the indigenous population. The Franciscan provincial asserted that the position of the Archbishop threatened to uproot the fragile Christianity of the indigenous population.

Bustamante also thought that the alleged thaumaturgic effect of the picture was a hoax and questioned how a picture “painted yesterday by an Indian could perform miracles.” Only one of the witnesses, Alonso Sánchez de Cisneros, stated that he knew the name of this indigenous artist: Marcos. Though nothing more than his Christian name was rendered, it has often been assumed that this Marcos was an indigenous painter called Marcos de Aquino, who had been trained by the Franciscans in Tlatelolco. According to the testimony of Juan de Salazar, Bustamante continued stating that he:

“did not know what effect the said devotion had, because it would contradict what he and other members of religious orders with much sweat had been preaching to the natives of this country. Because it would be to convince them that this image of Our Lady of Guadalupe performed miracles and if some lame, blind or crippled Indians went there with the intention [to get cured] and they turned back without being cured, or getting even worse because of the walk, they would make jokes about it/her [the cult/the Virgin] and it would thus be better to take away this devotion, because of the scandal of the natives.” (Información 1891:12)

The Franciscan provincial urged that the purported miracles must be thoroughly investigated before they were made public. If the miracles were found to be groundless, Bustamante thought that the inventor ought to be severely punished. According to the Archbishop’s witnesses, Bustamante’s harsh criticism of the popular devotion had caused “scandal and muttering” among the listeners and other people. One of the witnesses even stated that he had become so indignant by the provincial’s words that he had left the church during the sermon.

At least from the mid-1550s onwards, the ermita of the Virgin of Guadalupe at Tepeyac became an important site for pilgrimages. Hispanics and Indians from the city of Mexico and its environs went there to pay devotion to Our Lady, to do penitence and to be cured from illnesses that afflicted them. Just as in the case of Our Lady of Guadalupe in Extremadura, the Virgin of Tepeyac was celebrated specifically on the feast of the Nativity of Our Lady in September. At that time, the Archbishop and the cathedral chapter took part in a solemn procession to Tepeyac. This procession is a clear testimony of the importance of the cult towards the end of Montúfar’s archiepiscopacy.

Montúfar's Last Years and Death

From the latter part of the year 1570, the now eighty-one-year-old Archbishop hardly left his bed, due to a severe illness. Being unable to fulfil any work, he appointed his longtime friend and assistant, Bartolomé de Ledesma, as the governor of the archdiocese. Alonso de Montúfar died on March 7, 1572.

ources

* Magnus Lundberg, "Unification and Conflict: The Church Politics of Alonso de Montúfar OP, Archbishop of Mexico, 1554-1572". Uppsala: Swedish Institute of Mission Research 2002. [See also fulltext version online http://www.teol.uu.se/images/stories/hemsidor/lundberg/dissertation.pdf]

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