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Content Enable editor Use plain text Code entry CHAPTER 6. ROYAL SUPPORT OF THE DOCTRINAS THE DEMANDS OF DECENT WORSHIP For a proselytizing religion trying to take root on a far frontier, Roman Catholicism made remarkably few concessions to local circumstances. The "culto divino" was ancient. Over the centuries its performance had become properly complicated, calling for irreducible paraphernalia and irreplaceable supplies. Elsewhere I have argued that the ritual demands of Roman Catholicism restricted it to a sedentary population and thereby limited its range in the New World to those native groups who were or would become "people of polity," fixed in place. Streamlining the ritual or adapting it to an impoverished environment was tactically impossible. The Council of Trent had responded to the Protestant challenge by hardening on all fronts, defining disputed points of doctrine and demanding conformity to canon law, exact observance of ritual, and a universal, unvarying liturgy). It is ironic that the Franciscans, whose insistence on poverty and simplicity had made them a living reproach to the late medieval Church, should in the 16th century have been transformed into parish ministers, observing and causing others to observe the burdensome, material side of religion. Yet year after year in the Florida doctrinas, the friars and their disciples struggled with dedication and ingenuity to fulfill the demands of decent worship. According to the Abbe Durand's handbook of Catholic ceremonies (1896), a priest's travelling kit for giving the last rites or performing emergency baptisms included these items: pyx for the consecrated wafer burse for the pyx miniature vials for the Holy Oils container for the salt prayerbook manual container for the Holy Water aspergillum for the Holy Water crucifix stole Again according to the Abbe (Durand, 1896), the priest going to say Mass in a "chapel of ease" created a portable altar with an altar bell altar cards a missal a crucifix 2 candlesticks with wax candles oilstock and oil a breadbox and bread a wine flask and wine a pyx for the consecrated wafer 2 cruets for the water and wine a chalice a paten a cere-cloth an altar cloth the "fair linen": corporal, veil, purificator, pall, and burse white vestments: amice, alb, cincture liturgical vestments: maniple, stole, and chas- uble in red, green, purple, or black The "hermita" of San Marcos, which was the chapel in the Castillo, contained the following furnishings when it was inventoried in 1683: an altar a picture of Saint Mark a crucifix a frontal some altarcloths a chalice a paten of silver a chasuble a stole a maniple a burse some kind of "pailo," or cloth a missal a basin a small bell (Bushnell SS)

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