Volume 90, Number 1 - California Historical Society

after the re-conquest of Spain, Franciscan priests
from the Monastery of Saint Francis assembled
with weapons at the ready to fight Muslims who
rebelled against the Crown. (It is not clear if the
priests went to battle.) During the same episode,
four Franciscans and an equal number of Jesuits,
doubting the bravery of Spanish soldiers, offered
their services to one of the military commanders,
declaring that they “wished to die for Jesus
Christ.” 62 He denied their request.
In the Americas, some clergy found more opportunities
to take up the sword. The buildings missionaries
constructed, or at least asked others to
construct on their behalf, embodied the principle
that force and faith were compatible. As the
art historian George Kubler explains, when the
Franciscans and other missionary orders proselytized
Mexico’s Indians, they employed “the
extremely unusual habit of fortifying the church.”
The priests built churches surrounded by “a vast
courtyard” with “crenellated walls.” The Arabist
T. B. Irving adds that many Mexican churches
during the colonial era resembled the “open-air
congregational type of mosque which was built
by Muslims for army worship.” 63
Apart from churches, some seminaries in Mexico
that trained priests to establish missions recalled
the shape and function of the ribat as fortress.
Admittedly, any resemblance may be accidental.
But however inadvertent, the seminary’s purpose,
and the descriptions it prompted from observers,
brings to mind the Muslim effort to prepare the
mind and body for any challenge. Father Francisco
Palóu, Junípero Serra’s biographer, hinted
at the parallels when he repeated a colleague’s
description of how priests and novices in the
eighteenth century prepared for their calling.
“What praise and appreciation,” he recounted,
“may reach the merit of these men who, ordinarily
observing within the cloister walls of their
college [seminary] an austere religious life, busy
continually with their divine services, find their
recreation in going out . . . to sanctify with their
missions all of North America.” 64
The buildings missionaries
constructed, or at least
asked others to construct
on their behalf, embodied
the principle that force and
faith were compatible.
Through the years, other clergy consecrated
war in their own manner. Francisco López de
Gómara, a secular priest who became Cortés’s
chaplain and biographer, noted that war helped
spread the Gospel. He claimed that Cortés
told his men on the march to the Aztec capital
Tenochtitlán that “it is foreign to our Spanish
nation” to refuse the challenge of war and forsake
the chance “to exalt and increase Our Catholic
Faith.” 65 Juan Ginés Sepúlveda, a Dominican
priest, argued that the “Spaniards were especially
noted for warfare and government, and hence
best [suited] for the mission of bringing the gospel
and civility to the conquered peoples of the
Americas.” 66
In the late eighteenth century, Father Romualdo
Cartagena, rector of the College of Santa Cruz in
Querétaro, claimed that “soldiers” with “glistening”
swords were more effective than “the voice
of five missionaries.” 67 A century later, a commentator
praised Father Isidoro Felix de Espinosa
for writing about the conversion of Mexico’s
Indians with a soldier’s resolve: “He was the
Julius Caesar of New Spain [Mexico], for like that
ancient Roman, he fought by day . . . and wrote
by night.” 68
35