Constituciones sinodales del Arzobispado de Lima (1613 and 1636)
The synodal code of the largest archdiocese in South America, given by Lobo Guerrero in 1613 and completed by Arias de Ugarte in 1636. It bars church visitors and their notaries from charging Indians anything at all, binds those who overcharge to restore double within a month, orders edicts published in the Indians' own language — and orders the same Indians to be catechised in Quechua rather than their mother tongues. Reprinted at Lima in 1864 because it was still in force.
Why this wins its question: English-language accounts of the colonial Andean church almost never quote its own legislation, and where they do it is the provincial councils of Lima, not the diocesan synods that actually bound the parish clergy. This object quotes the archdiocesan code from a full-view printing opened page by page: the flat prohibition on charging Indians anything, the restore-double-in-a-month penalty with absolution reserved to Rome, the ban on visitor and notary splitting fees, the edict published in the Indians' own language — and, two pages earlier, the order that they be catechised in Quechua and not in their mother tongues, with the corregidores told to help. It is tiered secondary rather than primary for a stated reason: the dating of the text and the fact that it was still in force rest on the 1864 editors' notice, not on the seventeenth-century text, and that notice is also where the phrase "atrasada clase indígena" comes from.
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 code is the work of two synods, twenty-three years apart: the constitutions were given by archbishop Bartolomé Lobo Guerrero at the diocesan synod of 1613 and complemented by archbishop Hernando Arias de Ugarte at that of 1636. The attribution and the dates here are the 1864 editors', not the text's own.
They were still the law of the archdiocese two and a half centuries later. The 1864 editors print them because later prelates "no les ha sido permitido renovarlas ó modificarlas", so that they "están aun en vigor y rigen en la circunscripcion eclesiástica de Lima y de las nuevas Diócesis que de ella se han formado" — a seventeenth-century colonial code still governing republican Peruvian dioceses in 1864.
The strongest provision is a fee exemption. Chapter XII of the title on the visitor's office forbids visitors and their notaries to take any fee for secret informations, for acts or for decrees of office; fees for culpable causes may be charged only after definitive sentence, and then "salvo en cuanto á los Indios, porque no se les ha de llevar cosa alguna" — except as regards the Indians, from whom nothing whatever is to be taken.
The exemption is not universal among indigenous people, and the text says which of them it excludes: from Indian caciques, gobernadores or curacas fees may be charged, and then only at the rates of the arancel of Castile. The indigenous authorities are treated as men of means; the tributary commoner is treated as exempt.
The sanction behind it is heavy and is aimed at the clergy. Those who take what they should not are bound in conscience "á restituir, lo que reciben con el doblo dentro de vn mes" — to restore double within a month — failing which they are suspended from every office and benefice; if they celebrate while suspended they become irregular, and absolution is reserved to the Pope alone.
Fees the officials may legitimately take are tied to a published schedule rather than to bargaining: the notary of a visitation is paid "conforme al Arancel General, que tiene la Provincia", and visitor and notary are each to take only what belongs to them, written into the record, "sin hacer concierto entre si, de partirlos por iguales partes" — no private splitting of fees between them.
On language the same code cuts two ways in three pages. In the pueblos de indios the edict is to be published "en su lengua en vn dia de fiesta, cuando estén juntos en la Iglesia, advirtiendoles de las cosas, que á ellos les tocan" — in their language, on a feast day, when they are gathered, telling them the things that concern them.
The next chapter is headed "Que se procure, que los Indios hablen en la lengua general, y en ella se les administren los Santos Sacramentos, y no en la materna". Its reasoning is administrative — "conviene que el lenguaje sea vniforme entre los Indios" so that preaching is understood and the sacraments easily administered — and it exhorts the corregidores and secular ministers to press the point. The instrument of inclusion is also an instrument of levelling: the general language is Quechua, and what it displaces is the smaller Andean mother tongues.
Confraternities are licensed and their money is fenced. None may be founded for any pious work without the archbishop's or the provisor's licence, none may use statutes without approval, those of the Indians are not to be held outside their own parish, and mayordomos are forbidden to dispose of any sum beyond ordinary expenditure without the licence of the provisor, the vicar of the district, or failing them the parish priest.
The synod's authority reached beyond Lima: the constitutions of the title on the visitor's office carry the subscriptions of the archbishop of Los Reyes with the bishops of Imperial and of Cuzco, and the neighbouring diocese of Huamanga was citing the Lima synods of 1613 and 1636 in the margins of its own constitutions of 1672.
The counterpoint is printed in the 1864 volume itself, and it belongs to the editors rather than to the synod. They commend the code as provision for "la civilizacion del pueblo, en especial de la numerosa y atrasada clase indígena" — the numerous and backward indigenous class. The verdict is a nineteenth-century republican one, and it is quoted here as evidence of how the text was being read in 1864, not of what it says.