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Twelve Franciscan Apostles arrived in New Spain
Source: Situado and Sabana #82
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During the 16th century, four new branches budded from the Observant stock: Capuchins, Discalced, Recollects, and Reformed. Two of these are familiar names in American mission history: the Recollects of New France, and the Discalced (or Alcantarines, for one of their leaders, Pedro de Alcantara), found in the Philippines, in Brazil, and, after 1596, in one province of New Spain, St. Didacus, where its members worked among the Indians at the Pachuca mines [Note: The Discalced were also known as Alcantarines in honor of their leader Saint Peter of Alcantara, who forbade them to wear sandals, eat meat, or have libraries]. Other than these two subsets and a few unsung Capuchins in the South American jungles, all of the Franciscan provinces in colonial America were created and largely manned by Observants of the non-Reform kind. Franciscan spirituality was characterized by its emphasis on the man Christ and his bond with humanity in the person of the Virgin Mother. It emphasized fraternity and social mission above personal contemplation, mysticism as an intuitional union with God, asceticism as companionship with Christ, and reverence for all creation. Franciscans were reputed to be more practical and less dogmatic than members of other orders. In the 16th century they did not take university degrees, as registration and graduation fees discorded with their vow of poverty. In the 17th century most universities in Spanish America had a "Scotus Chair," an arrangement, gratis on both sides, which permitted them to exchange a number of doctoral degrees for a scholar qualified to lecture on the doctrines of the great Franciscan theologian John Duns Scotus. Profoundly critical of Church worldliness and wealth, Franciscans saw Church history as a declension from the Primitive and Apostolic Church of shared simplicity. In the Indian Church of the New World, they hoped that pre-Constantinian simplicity and holy poverty might be reborn. The Twelve Apostles who arrived in New Spain in 1524 went there as mendicant preachers, not priests. Their plan was to live together in one city, where they could keep the Rule, reading the responses by day and night, practicing mental prayer, discipline, and the other exercises of conventual life, lest in their concern for the souls of others they neglect their own. They would go out by twos and fours on missions of preaching, no farther than a two-week journey from the mother house. Only with some difficulty, first in Spain, then in Peru, were the freedom-loving Franciscans persuaded to take on the duties of doctrineros and be managers of "fixed" as opposed to "flying" missions. (Bushnell SS)
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