Altitudo divini consilii (1 June 1537): the adaptation of canon law for indigenous converts
The day before the better-known declaration that the Indians were true men, Paul III wrote to all the bishops of the Indies to settle what missionaries should do: whether rite-less baptisms had been sins, which four ceremonies could not be dropped, which wife a polygamous convert kept, in what degrees of kinship converts might marry, and how many fasts and feast days bound them. The ordinary law of the Church, rewritten for the peoples of the Americas.
Why this wins its question: Coverage of Paul III and the Indies stops at the declaration that the Indians were true men; the bull issued the day before, which is the one that actually governed how millions of people were baptised, married and absolved for the next three centuries, is barely described in English at all. This object gives its operative clauses from the Latin, opened page by page: the absolution of the friars' rite-less baptisms, the four ceremonies that could not be dropped, the rule that a polygamous convert kept the first wife if he remembered her and chose freely if he did not, the third-degree kinship dispensation, the reduced fasts and the enumerated feast days, and the power given to American bishops to absolve cases reserved to Rome. It also does two things the popular accounts do not: it names the point where the collection's own Spanish summary contradicts the Latin it summarises, and it states the human cost of the marriage clause from the clause itself rather than from a commentator.
Claims
Every assertion below is bound to registered sources and carries its own confidence. Weight them; do not treat the page as uniformly authoritative.
The bull is read here from the Latin printed in the first volume of Francisco Javier Hernaez's Coleccion de Bulas, Breves y otros Documentos relativos a la Iglesia de America y Filipinas (Brussels, 1879), under the running head "Privilegios primitivos de los indigenas" and the section heading "Primeras letras apostolicas expedidas por Paulo Tercero en favor de los Indios". That is a nineteenth-century compilation rather than the chancery original, and the evidence tier follows the compilation; the volume refers the text to "Bullario Romano de Propag. Fide, App. 1, pag. 25" and adds "Extat etiam apud Torquemada, lib. 16, c. 9".
It is addressed to the whole American episcopate, and it opens on the theme its incipit names: "Paulus Episcopus servus servorum Dei. Venerabilibus Fratribus universis Episcopis occidentalis et meridionalis Indiae… Altitudo Divini Consilii, quod humana nequit ratio comprehendere". Its stated occasion is that many inhabitants of the western and southern Indies, though strangers to the divine law, have cast off their errors and ask to live according to the rite of the Roman Church, and that "nonnulla… suborta dubia" about their regeneration are to be removed. It is dated "Datis Romae apud Sanctum Petrum, anno Incarnationis Dominicae 1537, Kalendis Junii, Pontificatus Nostri, anno tertio" — 1 June 1537 — and signed "Blosius B. Motta".
Its first decision is retrospective and absolving. Those who baptised Indians coming to the faith of Christ "non adhibitis ceremoniis, et solemnitatibus ab Ecclesia observatis, in nomine tantum Sanctissimae Trinitatis" are declared not to have sinned, "cum consideratis tunc causis occurrentibus, sic illis bona ex causa putamus visum fuisse expedire" — the mass baptisms of the first friars, performed without the rites, are ratified rather than condemned.
For the future it sets a floor rather than the full rite, and the floor is itemised. Outside urgent necessity — which is left "oneratis super tali necessitate conscientiis eorum", on the consciences of the ministers — four things at least are to be observed: first, that the water be sanctified with the sacred actions; second, that catechism and exorcism be made to each individually; third, that salt, saliva, capillum and candle be applied to two or three on behalf of all of both sexes then to be baptised; fourth, that chrism be placed on the crown of the head, and the oil of catechumens on the breast of adult men, boys and girls, while for adult women it is to be placed "in illa parte, quam ratio pudicitiae demonstrabit".
The marriage clause is the one that reached furthest into people's lives, and it turns on a man's memory. Those who before conversion had several wives according to their custom "et non recordantur quam primo acceperint" are, on coming to the faith, to take one of them, whichever they wish, and contract marriage with her by words of present consent; those who do remember which they took first "aliis dimissis, eam retineant" — the first wife is kept and the others dismissed. The text says nothing about what became of the dismissed women or of their children, and nothing about any part the women had in the choice.
Kinship impediments were relaxed, and here the compilation contradicts itself in a way worth recording. The Latin grants that converts "conjuncti etiam in tertio gradu, tam consanguinitatis, quam affinitatis, non excludantur a matrimoniis contrahendis, donec huic Sanctae Sedi super hoc aliud visum fuerit statuendum" — the third degree, until the Holy See rules otherwise. The editor's Spanish resumen on the following page says instead that "El 3o y 4o grado de consanguinidad y afinidad quedan extinguidos para los matrimonios". The Latin text is what is cited here; the discrepancy is noted because it shows how far a summary in this collection can drift from the document it summarises.
The calendar of obligation was cut. Converts are bound to fast on the vigil of the Nativity, the vigil of the Resurrection and every Friday of Lent; the remaining fast days are left "eorum beneplacito propter novam ad Fidem eorum conversionem, et ipsius gentis infirmitatem", and a fast that would harm health or not square with someone's office or work "non censeatur illi ab Ecclesia praeceptum". They may eat dairy foods, eggs and meat in Lent and other prohibited seasons whenever other Christians have the indult. The days on which they are to rest from servile work are enumerated: all Sundays, and the Nativity, Circumcision, Epiphany, Resurrection, Ascension, Corpus Christi and Pentecost, with the Nativity, Annunciation, Purification and Assumption of the Virgin and the feast of Saints Peter and Paul; "caeteros vero dies festos, ex causis supradictis, illis indulgemus".
Distance is again the reason given for devolving power. Considering "maximam ipsius Indiae occidentalis, et meridionalis, a Sede Apostolica distantiam", the bishops and those to whom they specially commit their office may absolve the newly converted in all cases reserved to the Apostolic See, "etiam in Litteris in die Coenae Domini legi consuetis", the pope reserving nothing to himself in their absolutions.
The same document disciplines Europeans, not only converts. So that "isti in Christo parvuli malis exemplis" not be corrupted, no apostate is to presume to settle in those parts, under pain of excommunication latae sententiae from which he cannot be absolved until he has left; and the bishops are charged to expel such men entirely from their dioceses, "ne teneras in fide animas corrumpere, et seducere possint". A practical clause follows: because it would be hard to carry the letters to every place where they are needed, transcripts subscribed by a public notary and sealed by a bishop are to have the same faith in and out of court as the originals.
The register of the whole document is paternal in a way that its beneficiaries did not choose, and it says so itself. The converts are "novellae plantationes ipsius Ecclesiae", to be treated "tamquam parvulis in Christo", nourished as the infancy of the early Church was nourished with milk and its maturity with solid food, so that not everything the Church already keeps elsewhere is imposed on them at once. Read forward, that is the charter of a distinct legal status for indigenous Christians; read plainly, it is also the reason the same status could be used to hold them permanently in tutelage. Both readings rest on the same sentence, and the text supports neither more than the other.
Immediately before the bull the compilation prints an undated letter which its editor assigns to 1535, the first year of Paul III's pontificate, judging that it may have moved him to issue "la Bula siguiente, donde se encuentran los primeros privilegios de los Indios". Its closing pages beg the pope to send workers to the vineyard and put the case in two registers at once: that spiritual men should fix their eyes "en estas minas de oro para la vida eterna", gold that "puede servir tambien de subsidio para las expediciones contra los Turcos", and that Fr. Bernardino de Minaya, a Dominican, had gone three hundred leagues to Nicaragua and been met by Indians who had never seen a missionary, crowned with roses, asking for baptism. The author is not named on the pages read here and no attribution is made; the letter is cited only for what it shows about how the case for these privileges was argued at Rome.
What the source does not establish is the effect. These pages carry the text, its date and its signature; they carry no evidence of how many households were separated under the marriage rule, how bishops applied the four ceremonies, or whether the reduced calendar was observed. The bull's own reason for the reductions is the recent conversion and weakness of the people, and nothing on these pages connects them to the working year, to tribute or to encomienda labour; this object therefore makes no such connection either.