Illegitimacy, dispensation and the parishes of the Indies (Pius V, 1571; Quito, 1668): a canonical bar to the priesthood, and the one qualification that could override it
Illegitimate birth barred a man from holy orders and from any benefice with cure of souls. The bishop of Quito's manual asks whether bishops in the Indies could dispense that bar, and answers that they probably could - more safely for a parish of Indians than for a parish of Spaniards. Solorzano is quoted giving the ground on which they did it: the title of language, and the better conversion of the Indians. The distance of the Americas from Rome is argued as a reason to read the faculty widely.
Why this wins its question: English-language accounts of the colonial Spanish American church say that indigenous and mestizo men were largely kept out of the priesthood, and stop there - the canonical machinery that did the keeping, and the machinery that occasionally opened, are almost never shown. This object opens one numbered session of the bishop of Quito's working manual and takes it whole: the hereditary theory of moral defect on which the bar rested, quoted without softening; the bull of Pius V of 14 August 1571; the friars given a wider faculty than the bishops and the bishops petitioning out of jealousy in their own words; the textual objection that they got less, with the archbishop who pressed it named; the bishop's own graded answer that dispensation is safer for a parish of Indians than for a parish of Spaniards; Solorzano quoted giving the operative ground, "a titulo de idioma"; the distance from Rome argued as a canon of construction; and an archbishop of Charcas who dispensed men who then failed to get the parishes anyway. It is one page-run of a book that is almost never quoted in English, and it puts the cost and the opening side by side rather than choosing between them.
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 question is put as the heading of a numbered session in a working manual for parish clergy - "SESSION XIX. Si los ilegitimos pueden tener Doctrinas, assi de Indios, como de Españoles" - and the received doctrine is stated first. Illegitimates "son por Derecho irregulares; y siendolo, claro esta, que estan inhabiles para recibir Ordenes sagrados, siendo incapaces de ser ordenados, tambien lo seran de tener qualquier Beneficio, quanto mas Curados, como son las Doctrinas". The bar is not merely irregularity but a positive deprivation - "sonlo porque el Derecho los tiene por tales, privandoles de recibir los Sacros Ordenes, y qualquiera Beneficio Eclesiastico" - and it is anchored on the Council of Trent, session 23, chapters 4 and 5.
The reason the manual gives for the bar is a theory of inherited character, and it should be read before anything else in this entry is admired. The foundation the Council and the law had "para inhabilitar los ilegitimos, assi para ordenes, como para Beneficios, fue tomar en los hijos la incontinencia de sus padres, que es muy ordinario heredarles las costumbres, como les heredan la sangre, y considerar en ellos el infame desdoro, y afrenta en que fueron engendrados, fuera de lo licito del santo Matrimonio, a quien el Derecho llama infamia facti". The proof runs through the ministers of the Old Law, who had to be "no de nacimiento manchado", and through Deuteronomy, quoted as "Non ingredietur mamzer Ecclesiam Domini, usque ad decimam generationem". The conclusion is that illegitimates are justly excluded from ordination and from the cure of souls "por no tener la pureza, y continencia que para tan alto ministerio se requiere".
Two questions are then separated, and only one of them is open. That archbishops and bishops of the Indies may dispense illegitimates so that they can receive all orders, "en virtud de la Bula de Pio Quinto, su data en catorze de Agosto, año de mil y quinientos y setenta y uno, no admite disputa". What is disputed, "y muy reñida", is whether the same bull also lets them dispense the disability as it bars a man from holding a benefice.
The sequence in which the faculty was granted is set out, and the bishops are shown asking for it out of institutional grievance. The pope had first despatched a bull in favour of the mendicant orders, giving them faculty in these parts to dispense with illegitimates "assi para que puedan ordenarse, como para que puedan tener Beneficios Curados". The bishops, seeing the grace done to the religious, petitioned for the same, "atento que mas inmediatamente les incumbia hazer semejantes dispensaciones, pues de su cuydado dependia el dispensar el pasto espiritual a los que habitavan en este Nuevo Mundo". A later paragraph is blunter about the motive: they wrote "como quexosos de que huviesse hecho este favor a los Religiosos, siendo estraños, y no a ellos siendo hermanos".
The textual objection against the bishops is printed at length rather than suppressed. The bull to the friars empowers them to dispense "cum personis, quae tam ex delicto, quam ex non delicto irregularitatem contraxissent"; the bull to the patriarchs, archbishops and bishops empowers them to absolve "quascumque personas a delictis, per quae irregularitas contrahitur", excepting only voluntary homicide committed outside war and the stain of simony. Illegitimacy is an irregularity ex non delicto, so on the words of the grant the bishops received less than the friars did. "Por lo qual graves, y doctissimos Autores son de parecer, que los Obispos no pueden dispensar con los ilegitimos, para que tengan Beneficios en virtud de dicha Bula" - and the manual names them, beginning with archbishop Feliciano de Vega, who treated the point professedly, and citing archbishop Gaspar de Villarroel of Charcas alongside him.
Against that reading the bishop of Quito gives his own, and it is graded. "Sin embargo juzgo por probable, que en dicho privilegio se les da dicha facultad para dispensar, que puedan tener Beneficios Curados por lo menos de Indios." The session's answer states the two tiers explicitly: dispensed illegitimates "pueden muy bien tener Beneficios Curados, assi de Españoles, como de Indios; pero mas segura sera la dispensacion para Beneficios de Indios, que para de Españoles". This is the centre of the session and it cuts both ways. A canonical door shut in Europe is held open in the Indies - and it is held open widest onto the parishes of the Indians, which are thereby marked out as the places where a man the law had disqualified could be placed.
The ground on which the dispensation was actually given is named, and it is competence in an indigenous language. The manual quotes Solorzano, Politica libro 4 capitulo 7, on the faculties the bishops of the Indies hold by privilege, among them dispensing "con los ilegitimos para ordenarse, y aun para poder tener Beneficios Curados de Indios, a titulo de idioma, y de la mejor conversion de ellos", and reports that Solorzano holds the faculty probable for parishes of Spaniards and clear for parishes of Indians. A list of authors who hold the same opinion probable follows - Coninck, Layman, Diana, Barbosa, Machado, Avila, Enriquez.
Read against the same book's rule on language, the two make a mechanism, and the inference is this entry's own rather than the book's. Elsewhere in this volume a cleric who does not learn his parishioners' language is in mortal sin and holds a null title; here a cleric the law has disqualified by birth may be dispensed into a parish of Indians "a titulo de idioma". Taken together, fluency was the one qualification that could outweigh a canonical disability, and the disability in question - illegitimate birth - was the one that fell most often on men of mixed descent. The book does not say that. It names no mestizo in this session, gives no numbers, and says nothing about how many such dispensations were issued; this entry asserts none of those things and offers the reading as a reading.
Distance is argued as a canon of construction. The concession, being the favour of the supreme prince of the Church, "admite extension, y se deve interpretar benignamente, y estenderse a todo aquello, en que se puedan verificar las palabras de la concession; y mas quando no es en daño de tercero, sino en favor, y alivio de los que habitan este Nuevo Mundo, tan apartado de la Sede Apostolica, a quien moralmente es imposible el recurso". The argument is that a jurisdiction which cannot practicably reach Rome must be read as having been given more, not less.
Custom is offered as proof, and the one worked instance in the session is a failure. Fray Pedro de Oviedo, then archbishop, formerly of Charcas, whose learning "ha sido de suma veneracion en la Universidad de Alcala", "lo ha usado, y practicado muchas vezes", after consulting learned men and following his predecessors, and "dispenso algunos para Beneficios de Indios, pero por su poca fuerte no los alcançaron" - he dispensed several men for parishes of Indians and they did not obtain them. The copy read here prints "poca fuerte" where the sense requires "poca suerte"; both are recorded and neither is chosen, and nothing read here says why the dispensed candidates failed.
Below the level of a benefice the bar did not operate at all. Illegitimates "y aun hijos de Clerigo" may hold chaplaincies removable at will and temporary vicariates "sin dispensacion alguna", on Solorzano's authority; and in a vacant see the cathedral chapter may itself make the dispensations described in the session. The practical shape is a ladder whose lowest rungs were always open, whose middle rung needed a bishop's dispensation, and whose top was closed.
The next session's heading shows the problem was not hypothetical. Session XX asks "Si los hijos de los Doctrineros estan privados de todo genero de Doctrinas, y en particular de las que tienen, o tuvieron sus padres; y si en este Nuevo Mundo padecen el mismo defecto los Religiosos expulsos", and opens with the rule that priests must be chaste and pure. A manual does not legislate for a category that does not exist: the sons of serving parish priests in the Indies were numerous enough to need a rule of their own, and the same book that demands purity is quietly organised around the fact that it was not kept.
The same book says why the quality of the clergy was the question. Quoting Father Arriaga's treatise on the extirpation of idolatry in Peru, chapter 17, it holds that "el medio mas eficaz para mejorarse en la Religion Christiana, esta en tener buenos Curas, santos, y diligentes, doctos, y especialmente en Teologia", and that it is "engaño muy grave" to think an Indian parish needs less learning, since the deepest mysteries have to be made intelligible to minds formed on material and everyday things. The corollary is a rebuke: if little fruit has been had among the Indians, "es por defecto de los Curas", and the patron who presents such men shares the guilt and "ha de dar estrecha cuenta de ellos".
The limits of this entry. Everything above is read from pages 55 and 58 to 62 of a commercial Lyon reprint of 1678 of a manual written by a serving bishop of Quito. It is direct evidence of what a bishop told the clergy of the Indies the law was, and of what he thought bishops could do; it is not evidence of what was done. No papal register was consulted, so the bull of 14 August 1571 and the bull to the bishops are known here only as this book quotes them; no episcopal dispensation, no collation of a benefice and no diocesan ordination list was seen. Nothing read here gives a number for dispensed clergy, names a dispensed man, or shows whether the two-tier rule of claim c6 was applied as stated.