The first Mexican provincial council (Mexico City, 1555)
The first church council of the Americas, held at Mexico City in 1555 under archbishop Montufar. Its chapters fix what a parish priest among Indians may and may not do: no charging for the sacraments, no lodging Spaniards at the town's expense, a weekly visit to the jail, a hospital in every town, a rotating market day so that no town loses more than another. The same code forbids the Indians to keep sermons in their own language. Read in the Mexico 1769 edition.
Why this wins its question: The first Mexican provincial council is usually a date in a list, and what English-language coverage exists reports it as an instrument of control over indigenous religion. Its chapters are rarely quoted, and they cut both ways on the same opening: the priest who charges an Indian for a Mass is punished with the full rigour of the law and the Indian who keeps a written sermon in his own language has it taken away, four pages apart in one code. This object quotes eight chapters from the sheets — the jail visits, the market rotation, the hospital in every town, the ban on lodging gamblers at the town's cost, and the translation ban alongside them — so that the protections and the restrictions can be read as what they were, a single body of law.
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 text used here is the edition of the first two Mexican provincial councils published at Mexico City in 1769 by archbishop Francisco Antonio Lorenzana, printed "En Mexico, en la Imprenta de el Superior Gobierno, de el Br. D. Joseph Antonio de Hogal, en la Calle de Tiburcio", whose title page gives the councils as celebrated under archbishop Alonso de Montufar in the years 1555 and 1565. The title page ink is badly faded in this scan and is quoted here only where legible; every page of the chapters used below carries the running head "Concilio primero", which is what assigns them to the council of 1555.
The council forbids the clergy to charge Indians for the sacraments, in terms that anticipate the evasions. It establishes and commands "que ningun Clerigo pida a los Indios alguna cosa por la administracion de los Santos Sacramentos, ni haga ofrecer por fuerza, ni con otra cautela, directe, ni indirecte, a los Indios, ni hacer Obsequias, ni decir Misas por sus difuntos, mas de lo que ellos por su voluntad libremente quisieren ofrecer", the contravening cleric to be punished "con todo rigor de Derecho".
The same chapter closes a subtler drain on Indian towns: no cleric residing among Indians may take into his house Spaniards, vagabonds "y especialmente jugadores, porque no coman a costa de los Indios, ni les causen otras vexaciones, y malos exemplos". Offenders are to be punished at the discretion of the judge or visitor, expelled from the town and deprived of the office they held — with the qualification that this is not meant to impede hospitality or charitable reception of travellers passing through, so long as it is without notable prejudice to the naturales.
The obligation of feast days and fasts is cut down for Indians on an explicitly economic argument. After enumerating the feasts and the fasts they are bound to keep, the council leaves the remaining days that the Church obliges to fast "a libertad de los Indios, para que conforme a su pobreza, y oficio, y trabajo, cada uno haga, sin escrupulo de pecado, lo que mejor le pareciere". It then closes the loophole this opened on the other side: because Indians hired to work on Spaniards' estates often meet feasts the Spaniards must keep and the Indians need not, and the Spaniard then takes the occasion not to keep them either, it commands that Spaniards not make Indians work on their estates on those days without licence of the diocesan in permitted cases.
Chapter LXVIII orders priests and religious resident in Indian towns to visit the jails one day a week as a work of piety, and says why. "Somos informados, que muchos Indios con pequeñas causas son encarcelados, y tenidos en las carceles por las Justicias Indios por muchos dias, sin haber causa legitima para los encarcelar, o detener mucho tiempo en ellas, y por falta de no haber quien buelva por la justicia de los miserables, padecen los tales grandes trabajos, y crueldades." The clergy are to learn the needs of the imprisoned Indians and press their case with the king's justice so that the prisoners be dispatched and not suffer unjustly — and are forbidden to release anyone on their own authority, "porque la Justicia Real no tenga ocasion de se quexar de ellos". The abuse being corrected is thus by indigenous magistrates, and the remedy is clerical advocacy inside the royal courts rather than a clerical jurisdiction of its own.
Chapter LXX regulates the market and the hospital in the same breath. Markets are not to be held on Sundays and solemn feasts; and because Indians of the town where the market falls by rotation are aggravated by losing that day, it orders that all the towns in general lose the day, "sin que ninguno sea preferido a otro, sino que pierda aquel dia, que le cupiere, de manera, que todos sean iguales". It then exhorts all ministers, religious and clergy to procure by the best means they can "que en todos los Pueblos haya un Hospital cerca de las Iglesias, y Monasterios, donde puedan ser socorridos los pobres, y enfermos", stating that this is very necessary both for the poor Indians of the towns and for strangers who come to them.
The cost is printed on the facing pages. Chapter LXIX establishes "que de aqui adelante no se den Sermones a los Indios para trasladar, ni tener en su poder, y los que tienen se les tomen, y recojan"; what may be given them must be within their capacity and signed by the religious or minister who gives it, so that they cannot falsify or corrupt it. No doctrine whatever is to be translated into the language of the Indians without passing censure and examination by religious and ecclesiastical persons who understand the language into which it is translated, "y no se confie la tal traducion de solos los Indios, o Españoles Interpretes". The council that obliged its clergy to work in indigenous languages therefore also denied indigenous translators the right to be trusted with the text alone.
Chapter LXIII restricts the movement of the Indian nobility for the same protective reasons it gives elsewhere for restricting the clergy. Noting that many Indians, "especialmente Principales, y Señores se van a confesar con otros Sacerdotes fuera de sus Pueblos, porque temen, que el proprio Ministro, que tienen, no los querra confesar, si primero no se disponen", and comparing them to a patient who flees the physician who knows his illness, it commands that no minister confess such principales outside cases of extreme necessity without a written licence from their own curate, and that principales who do not confess once a year be expelled from the churches. The council's own diagnosis of the behaviour it is punishing is that the men in question do not wish to leave their customs.
The council also legislates the weight of its own establishments. New houses of religious are to be founded with the number moderated by what is fitting and by "la posibilidad de los Indios, y numero de Religiosos, porque en todo los Indios sean reservados de toda vexacion, y molestia" — while it is expressly not the council's intention to impede or hinder the particular alms that each of the Indians may voluntarily wish to give to the religious and the monasteries. The burden on Indian towns is thus named by the body imposing it, and capped rather than removed.
Chapter LX requires that clerics who are to hear the confessions of Spaniards or Indians be examined first, on the ground stated in the sacred canons that no priest confess anyone without the prelate's licence and without the knowledge and prudence to discern between one leprosy and another; the same chapter forbids them to punish their own servants on their own authority.