Abstract
From the outset, Cornelius Conover clarifies or amends a somewhat misleading title: this book does not cover all the political uses of the worship of saints in viceregal New Spain and independent Mexico but rather is an important scholarly monograph devoted to Saint Philip of Jesus, the first creole beatified in the New World (then canonized much later, in 1862). In this respect, this book fills a gap, even if the political approach to worship is already well established.The book, entirely structured around the figure of Saint Philip of Jesus, begins by recalling the paradoxical nature of this first beatified person of the Americas. The son of a merchant engaged in trade with the Philippines, Felipe de las Casas (or Felipe de Jesus, the name he adopted when he became a Franciscan) excelled neither in virtues nor in miracles. In a word, there is no indication that his life was exemplary; besides, his martyrdom in Japan was the result of an unfortunate combination of circumstances, not the logical end to a missionary commitment. In Manila, he boarded a ship to New Spain that a storm threw onto the coast of Japan at a time (1596–97) when Toyotomi Hideyoshi was engaging in the first large-scale persecutions of Christians. It was almost by accident that Philip found himself mixed up with the first group of martyred missionaries and Japanese neophytes. The worship of him, which his beatification in 1627 allowed, did not bring about the hoped-for popular support in New Spain for Philip as a blessed man; in fact, as the author rightly reminds us, his beatification was closely followed by the disaster in Matanzas Bay (1628) and the great flood of Mexico City (1629), two events that, to say the least, do not testify to either the divine favor or the interceding power of the newly beatified person.Chapters 2 and 3 are devoted to the missionary deeds of discalced Franciscans in Japan, to the 1597 martyrs, and to the campaign that, 30 years later, led to their beatification. The author sees in the failed proselytizing of these discalced Franciscans, who did not have the same success as the Jesuits had in Japan, an example of the expansionistic, orthodox, and uncompromising character of Philip II's Catholic monarchy. The commitment of the Hispanic world to the martyred Franciscans' beatification could be viewed as proof of their support of the crown's imperial project.The rest of the book's argument develops in chronological order. Conover distinguishes four phases in Saint Philip of Jesus's posthumous legacy: first the rise in worship of him (1625–ca. 1680, covered in chapter 4), followed by this worship's relative decline in the face of the irresistible rise of the Virgin of Guadalupe (ca. 1680–ca. 1740, covered in chapter 5). The phase from the late eighteenth century and the early nineteenth century until independence was marked by emerging new policies on the part of the crown, which distanced itself from the church and sought to reduce the number of liturgical celebrations (treated in chapters 6 and 7). Before concluding, the author devotes a short chapter to the last phase, the dismantling of the system of colonial devotions during the early years of the republic (discussed in chapter 8).The concept of pious imperialism rests on the classic idea that promoting Catholicism would be at the heart of what the author calls the “Spanish imperial project” and that, in return, “Catholicism [would have] forged a common purpose among subjects and preached loyalty to a devout king” (pp. 1, 3). Without being wrong, this vision, which is presented at length in chapter 1, seems simplistic since it leads the author to overvalue the role of the crown. In my opinion, this is a fundamental issue, as it also indicates a misunderstanding of the profound nature of ancien régime societies in general and particularly in the Hispanic world. The crown was far from having all the powers that the author attributes to it. It had to constantly negotiate with the bodies that made up society, which had their own jurisdictions; so politically, the Hispanic world was not an empire over which the king ruled alone but rather, to use J. H. Elliott's felicitous expression, a “composite monarchy”—in other words, a collection of heterogeneous kingdoms, each with their own laws that limited the sovereign's authority.Due to his theory of pious imperialism, Conover is led to underestimate all the other dimensions in the making of holiness, dimensions that he nevertheless encounters at every step: among others, the role of local corporations, the role of monastic orders that seek to promote their own religious sensitivities by canonizing the best among them, and the role of the Holy See, which patiently built a model of holiness true to the ideal of the Catholic Reformation. This may have led Conover to miss certain nuances.This book will nevertheless be read with interest.