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New Spanish converts learned Catholic doctrine by recitation
Source: Situado and Sabana #82
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CHAPTER 8. LEARNING THE DOCTRINE INDOCTRINATION Up to this point we have reserved the term "doctrina" for the provincial Indian town under obedience to Spaniards spiritually and politically. Contemporaries were less discriminating, using the word "doctrina" in four different senses: for the accelerated program of adult indoctrination in the conversion, for the convent-operated day school at one of the older missions, for any native town under the care of a friar, and for the doctrine that was taught. "Doctrina" in this last sense was the sum of things a Catholic was expected to know, with an emphasis on the law of God and the duties of a baptized believer. The short-form "doctrina breve" was the basic corpus of sacred literature, from prayers to set responses to the catechism, expounded by the missionaries of every Order, from Peru to the Philippines. Informally, it was known as the "rezo," or recitation, because neophytes learned it by rote and recited it in unison in the age-old tradition of preliterate learning. No part of the rezo was in Spanish. The Latin Prayers (Pater Noster, Ave Maria, and Salve Regina), Sign of the Cross, and Credo were impressive incantations, far removed from the Indian's world. The rest of the rezo was in a native language, his own or the local lingua franca. Franciscan linguists prepared confessionaries and catechisms in the more widely spoken tongues and spread the use of Quechua or Aymara in Peru, Tupi-Guarani in Brazil and Paraguay, Cakchiquel in Guatemala, and, in Mexico, Nahuatl, which Rodrigo de la Cruz assured his emperor, Charles V, was "a most elegant language, the equal of any in the world." Polyglot Florida had no lingua franca, but the friars did privilege the Mocamo dialect of the Timucuan language. For easier memorization, the doctrina was subdivided and numbered. Laboriously, the neophytes learned a total of: 14 articles of faith, 10 commandments of God, 5 commandments of the Church, 7 sacraments (baptism, penance, the Eucharist, matrimony, confirmation, extreme unction, and ordination), 7 virtues (the theological ones being faith, hope, and love and the cardinal ones, justice, prudence, temperance, and fortitude), 7 capital sins or vices (pride, covetousness, lust, envy, sloth, gluttony, and anger), 7 corporal works of mercy (giving food to the hungry, drink to the thirsty, and clothing to the naked, harboring the stranger, visiting the sick, ministering to prisoners, and burying the dead), and a like number of spiritual works of mercy. He or she knew by heart the enemies of the soul, the beatitudes, the act of contrition, and the correct answers to a catechism of 33 questions. The Franciscans made many portions easier to remember by setting them to music, using both Gregorian chant, or plainsong, and familiar native tunes (Gomez Canedo 1977). Convent-trained male catechists drilled the students in the various portions of the rezo, conducting separate classes for male and female neophytes. They, not the friars, were the ones who trained the female catechists. This practice kept the women of the doctrina at a proper distance from the Franciscans and reinforced the patriarchal hierarchy that Europeans accepted as natural. (Bushnell SS)
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