Maize bread, cabuya wine and small hosts (Quito, 1668): what a parish two hundred leagues from the port could lawfully put on the altar
In pueblos where no grain but maize grew and the nearest wine landed two hundred leagues away, mass was sometimes simply not said. The bishop of Quito's manual works the problem as canon law - and refuses maize bread and the wine drawn from cabuya, on a definition of grain taken from Pliny. What it allows instead is a tiny host rather than none, an interrupted sacrifice when a raid is coming, and a papal dispensation, argued for, to consecrate under bread alone where there is no wine.
Why this wins its question: The transfer of wheat and the vine to the Americas is usually told as agricultural history, and the Eucharist as devotional history; almost nothing in English connects them, and the canonical question that forced the connection - can an American parish consecrate what an American parish grows - is essentially untold outside specialist literature. This object answers it from the primary text, in the words of the bishop who had to rule on it: the question stated with its distances, fifty leagues to the port and often two hundred, and the admission that mass was sometimes not said; maize bread argued for from local custom and then refused, not on doctrine but on Pliny's definition of grain as the awned kind, with barley admitted in the same breath; the wine drawn from cabuya refused outright; a small host allowed against liturgical propriety because the parish's right to a mass is the heavier precept; a sacrifice broken off mid-mass when a raid is signalled; and a papal dispensation to consecrate under bread alone, argued for on the ground that a single anointing suffices in extreme unction. It is one page-run of a book almost never quoted in English, and it shows a legal system doing arithmetic on its own limits rather than either bending or ignoring 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 treatise states the material problem as a series of numbered questions about supply. Its first session asks "Si en las partes de las Indias adonde no ay otros granos, sino de maiz, ni del contorno en treinta leguas, se puede traer harina de trigo. Preguntase si en estas partes se podra consagrar con pan hecho de granos de maiz". Its third asks about pueblos "que distan de los puertos, adonde suele aportar el vino, 50. leguas, y muchos 200. por cuya causa suele aver del falta tanta, que algunas vezes no se dize Missa en dichos Pueblos". The cost is on the record in the author's own words before any argument begins: in some parishes mass was sometimes not said at all.
The prologue fixes the terms. The matter of the sacrament is bread and wine; bread "en la comun opinion ha de ser amasado de granos de trigo", although Cayetano held that any usual bread of any grain commonly eaten as bread suffices, and held further that it need not be baked with natural water - an opinion the bishop reports as not displeasing to some and then declines. The wine, on many councils and the common sense of the doctors, "ha de ser vino de vides de qualquiera calidad que sea", because the evangelists affirm that Christ consecrated in wine; must is sufficient matter but it is not fitting to consecrate in it. Unleavened bread is a precept of the Latin church, leavened the Greek usage.
The case for maize is stated at its strongest before it is refused. It is argued that on Cayetano's opinion the sacrament may be celebrated in any usual bread, and that in the places the question describes maize bread "es tan usual, y tan comun, que en estos no se come otro, ni aun se tiene noticia entre los Indios menos Politicos, y retirados, ni se sabe aya otro pan"; and second, that some doctors allow barley bread where nothing but barley is harvested, for no reason other than that it is the usual bread there. Both arguments are the argument from local custom, and the manual gives them their full weight before answering.
The answer is no, and it is absolute. "Hemos de dezir, que el pan hecho de harina de maiz, no es materia suficiente para consagrar el Cuerpo de Christo", so that a priest consecrating in maize bread "no consagra en materia suficiente, y assi no hara Sacramento" - not an illicit sacrament but no sacrament at all. The proof is that Christ consecrated in wheat bread, from the Council of Florence in the decree of union, from Trent session 13 chapters 11 and 12, and from apostolic tradition and the common use of the church.
The second argument is the one worth stopping on, because it decides an American question with a Mediterranean botany. Even for those who hold that any usual bread may be consecrated, "por este pan usual entiende, quodcumque frumentum, y por frumento, entienden pan hecho de grano, que produce la tierra en arista" - grain that the earth produces with an awn - on the authority of Pliny, Natural History book 8 chapter 17, and of Gabriel. Maize grains are not awned; "bien se sigue, que el pan de maiz, aunque sea usual, no se podra llamar frumento, y assi nunca sera materia suficiente de este Divino Sacramento". The same section grants that barley and rye are species of wheat and that bread of barley could probably be consecrated where only barley grows. The staple of the Americas is excluded by a definition of grain written before the Americas were known to the writer who supplied it.
Where the manual can accommodate, it does, and it subordinates decorum to the parish. Session II asks whether a doctrinero who visits remote places rarely and has no host of good size may celebrate with a small particle. The answer is that consecration in any host of wheat is valid, that the diminished form is against the use of the church and gravely so in itself, but that "todas las vezes que en el campo huviere falta de Hostia, se podra dezir Missa, consagrando en una Forma pequeña, y lo mismo se podra hazer en las Missas privadas, y secretas, y tambien se podra dezir en los Pueblos retirados, sino es que de ello se siga escandalo". The reasoning is a collision of two precepts: hearing mass on feast days binds everyone, celebrating with a proper host binds only the doctrinero, so the greater obligation wins and the cura "esta obligado... porque no queden los Feligreses sin Missa a dezirla con Forma pequeña".
On wine there is no accommodation. "El vino que se saca de la Cabuya, no puede ser materia del Sacramento Sanguinis, ni otro vino que no sea de vides." Nor may a priest, where grape wine is lacking, consecrate the body alone so that his parishioners may hear a mass: that conclusion is taken against John Major and rejected, because the unbloody sacrifice of the mass signifies the bloody one of the cross, where both flesh and blood were offered, so that consecrating under bread alone would not signify it and the priest "pecara gravemente".
One exception is allowed, and its example is a frontier alarm written into sacramental law. It happens, the manual says, that this sacrifice is halved - as when a priest begins mass thinking there is wine in the chalice and on reaching the communion finds it was water with no wine to be fetched in time; and more so "quando en tierra de montañas despues de aver consagrado la Hostia, tocan a rebato de que llegan los Indios Gentiles a assolar el Pueblo, entonces puede consumir el Cuerpo de Christo, y dexar de consagrar el Sanguis, porque los enemigos no traten irreverentemente el Sacramento". The manual is describing a parish where an unreduced raid is a foreseeable interruption, and legislating for it.
The remedy the bishop proposes is not a local improvisation but a petition to Rome. "El Sumo Pontifice puede muy bien dispensar, que en aquellas partes adonde no ay vino, ni facilmente se puede hallar, se consagre solo debaxo de las especies de pan el Cuerpo de Christo." The ground is that consecration under both species is not of divine law, on a list of doctors headed by Adrian and John Major; that scripture has Christ at Emmaus consecrating under the species of bread alone; and that as a single anointing suffices in extreme unction when the sick man is in danger, so a single species may suffice here. Nothing read here shows that such a dispensation was ever requested or granted.
What the ruling meant materially is this entry's inference and not the book's. If neither maize bread nor cabuya wine could serve, then every parish in the Indies was tied for its central rite to a supply of wheat and of grape wine - which is one of the reasons wheat fields and vineyards were planted across New Spain, Peru and Chile, and one of the standing cargoes of the fleets. The book states the doctrine and the distances and draws no such conclusion; it gives no volumes, no prices and no shipping figures, and neither does this entry.
The limits of this entry. All of it comes from pages 519 and 521 to 525 of a commercial Lyon reprint of 1678, written by a serving bishop of Quito for the clergy he governed. It is a manual of moral theology reasoning about American conditions from a cathedral city, and it is evidence of what the church told priests to hold, not of what any parish did. The fifty and two hundred leagues are the author's figures. No synodal act, parish visitation record or sacramental register was consulted here, and nothing read here says how often mass actually went unsaid, or whether any priest ever consecrated in maize bread.