The Catholic Church In Colonial Latin America

The Catholic Church played a large role in colonial Latin American society. The Church served as a unifying institution in a society made up of many different kinds of people - Europeans, Africans, Indigenous, and mixed-raced individuals - from a variety of economic backgrounds. Documents from the colonial period show that the Church was a maintainer of Iberian social order, and its officials and priests were expected to serve as exemplars of their religion. The Church maintained order and conveyed its message in a number of ways, from the content of sermons to institutions such as the Inquisition. Despite its power in colonial society, not all members of the population followed the teachings of the church.
The influence of the Church was throughout all of colonial society,
As a part of their colonization of the New World, the Spanish and Portuguese promised to convert the indigenous peoples to Catholicism. This involved not only priests and monks preaching to tem, but living among them and setting a proper example of what Christian life should be like. Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala speaks of the need fro priest to be good examples in his New Chronicle and [Treatise on] Good Government.

However, as he describes in his work, not all priests set a good example for the indigenous people. He talks of how priests abuse the natives and how they have strayed from the teachings of the Church. He argued that the priests' poor behavior and harsh treatment could often lead to natives rejecting Christianity (de Ayala 180). This could be problematic for the Spanish due to the fact that religion was one of the key factors which bound indigenous people to the colonial society. Unless the natives were totally Hispanicized, the Catholic religion was one of the few things connecting them to the European